Environment Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments and support in detail all that has been said by noble Lords, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas. I want to ask a rather fundamental question. The environmental review can be taken on only where the OEP considers that, on the balance of probability,

“the authority has failed to comply with environmental law, and … it considers that the failure”

is “serious.” That is the start: a failure

“to comply with environmental law.”

Subsection (6) states:

“If the court finds that the authority has failed to comply with environmental law, it must make a statement to that effect (a ‘statement of non-compliance’).”


That is to say that the court has held that the authority in question

“has failed to comply with environmental law”.

It goes on to state:

“A statement of non-compliance does not affect the validity of the conduct in respect of which it is given.”


What does that mean? That means that the conduct in question cannot be a breach of the law. It is a failure of environmental law, yet it is not a breach of the law. Is that another way of saying that environmental law is not a law at all, and that planning law must prevail? Is that really what this is saying, or can my noble friend explain to me how you can have a law which has been breached yet the conduct is not regarded as improper?

It is a simple question that supports all these amendments, if answered properly. There is an underlying feeling that environmental law is to be a grade below some other laws so that, although you fail to comply with it, you can still be all right. That does not accord with our understanding of law—certainly not mine for a considerable period. I do not see how it can work that you can have a piece of legislation that describes something as law—environmental law—yet it is not law that, where you breach it, renders your conduct wrong.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who is in many ways the embodiment of wisdom in your Lordships’ House. How good it is to have him back with us and speaking as vigorously and to the point as he always does.

I cannot begin to rival the expertise or knowledge of the noble and learned Lords who have spoken, but shall give my noble friend the Minister a secular analogy. When we enter this Chamber from the Prince’s Chamber, we have in front of us that great classical sculpture by John Gibson of Queen Victoria. It is flanked on either side by the figures of Justice and Mercy. The figure of Justice holds in her hands, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, reminded us earlier, the sword and the scales.

Would my noble friend Lord Goldsmith seriously think, as he entered the Chamber, of removing that sword and those scales? Because that, metaphorically, is what he is proposing to do this afternoon if he does not accept the spirit of these amendments. It is palpably absurd—I refer to the interesting contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—to have an Environment Bill that has as one of its slogans, “The polluter need not pay”. It is absurd. Can my noble friend not recognise that absurdity?

I have said before in these debates that it is essential that an environmental Bill should command the support of Members in all parts of your Lordships’ House, particularly one that is meant to stand the test of not just some time but generations. We cannot have a Bill enacted that, in effect, does what my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay has just said and contradicts one of the fundamentals of English law.

I hope that my noble friend Lord Goldsmith will do what I urged him to do when speaking to an amendment on Monday. I said that because it was so important that the Bill should command the support of your Lordships in all parts of the House, he should convene some sort of round table and talk to us all. There is an answer to all these conundrums and problems that we are highlighting, because we all support the basic premise of the Bill. However, if we support that premise and intention, we cannot allow the Bill to go on to the statute book so fundamentally flawed as it is at the moment. So I say to him again, “Please talk to those of us who wish you well, who wish the Bill well, but who can never lend support on Report to a Bill that is so riddled with absurdity”.

[Lord Duncan of Springbank (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by drawing attention to my interests in the register, notably the chairmanship of the National Forest.

I was pleased to put my name to Amendments 105 to 108, because they are necessary and they make the Bill better. We have heard echoed by a number of noble Lords how that can be achieved and I hope that the Government hear that. In many ways, this clause is like a Monet painting. It looks fine from a distance, but the closer you get the more the detail seems to disappear. What we need now is clarity and for that detail to be recognisable. Non-compliance must affect validity. That is a simple statement of fact. The beneficiary of an environmental deterrent or damage cannot escape sanction because he is materially affected by the sanction. That cannot be a useful way of moving forward. The remedies available must be a deterrent. If they are not, the system will be gamed. Individuals will find ways through, between and under, and they will be able to make a mockery of what should be a very important institution.

The OEP is a successor to a body that was able by its threats to bring about fundamental change in how environmental laws were enforced—and it made the environment better, safer and healthier by doing that. The successor body must be able to do the same and have available to it each of the elements that can allow it to achieve that outcome. That is why I was very pleased to put my name to these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I support the amendments in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, as well as that in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, about soil, that in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about ecosystems, and that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, about the oceans.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is absolutely right: I did interview the Secretary of State last week, who talked extensively about how the Government saw soil as a key part of future strategy and as being at the heart of both the Agriculture Act and the Environment Bill.

The thing about soil is that it is very small in our eyes, but in the soil’s eyes it is of course a factory and it has been described as a factory. In a tea-spoon of soil, you will probably get some thousands of species, some millions of individuals and about 100 metres of fungal thread. This is a world of major complexity and, every second that we are alive, this factory is performing a function that none of us could do. No scientist could take sunlight, air and all the nutrients in the soil and produce leaves, which produce trees. Look around this Chamber: everything in here, apart from the quarried stone, has come from a plant, has come from the soil. This leather has come from an animal that has fed on a plant; the carpet, probably from Axminster, and some sheep; my clothes; everything. Yet we call it “the dirt beneath our feet” and we stomp on it.

Once I got the image of a factory into my head, and the notion that there are all these people pulling levers and rushing up and down hills, it struck me that it was like being in a city, but a city on a completely different scale to how we live, so of course we ignore it. What has gone so tragically wrong with the soil in recent years is not so much the tinkering around but the deep ploughing and then the addition of heavy chemicals. It strikes me that you could think about it as like living in Homs or somewhere like that. Your buildings get bombed every other day or, in the case of the soil, two or three times a year. We have decided, since the green revolution of the 1950s, that deep ploughing was a really good idea because it let in the air. It was extremely fallacious science that is now completely accepted not to be right.

Look at agroecology. Where I was with the Secretary of State last week, we saw new devices that slice through the soil like pizza cutters, dropping in individual seeds, making minimal disruption and, as a consequence, needing minimal fertilisers and producing strong, healthy plants that also support biodiversity. We have done so many things wrong it is quite impossible to start to count them: the monocrops that kill the culture; the deep ploughing; the addition of chemicals—it is really astonishing—but the soil is truly phenomenal. It is the most amazing stuff. Give it a break, and it will come charging back with great health. I have to say to whichever noble Lord it was who said how long it takes to regrow, it really does not; it is really amazing. It will knit itself together, start co-operating and start not only giving us back the goods and services we want, but at the same time taking down the carbon.

As the noble Lord, Lord Curry, said, it seems quite astonishing that soil is not in the Bill, along with air and water; it should be. History is littered with examples. I do not know whether any noble Lord has been to Leptis Magna. It is a desert, but it is not that long ago, in the big history of things, that the Romans used to get three harvests a year from Leptis Magna. That is why they wanted north Africa. They had the most sophisticated systems for bringing water from the mountains; they had an amazing market with marble and they kept the water in tanks underneath to keep the vegetables cool and then they overfarmed it. But it was fine then, because they just packed their trunks—I do not know whether they had trunks then—and got on their oxen and went somewhere else, because there was always somewhere else. There is not anywhere else now. It is the same as when the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, says, “There is no such place as away.” You throw it away: where is that away? As Greenpeace says, we throw away our plastic and it ends up in Turkey. We throw away something and it ends up in that awful albatross. That makes my heart break too. We have to respect and adore these particular things.

The thing about the soil is that there are a lot of “don’ts”. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, says, “Don’t deep plough”, “Don’t put fertiliser on it”, “Keep cover crops on it.” Soil wants that; soil wants to work. We have to find intelligent ways to pay for this; we cannot just expect people to do it and not get anything back. They will get it back in advanced crops without having to pay for chemicals, but that will take a bit of time. Yes, indeed, people are using earthworms as a measure, but it is still a bit clumsy and a bit inexact. It is kind of fun, but there are some more sophisticated things that we can do.

I want to quickly address the necessity of understanding things as ecosystems. I do not know how many noble Lords know of Dr Suzanne Simard, but she is a Canadian forestry professor at British Columbia University. She grew up in the forest, became a logger and a forestry expert and at the age of 20 she was put to work by a forestry company in the north-west and her job was to clear-fell and then plant pine. After a bit, she looked at it and thought, “Why are these things dying over huge acres?” That was when we thought, “Survival of the fittest: get rid of everything else and everything will grow”, but in fact they died. They did not do well, they sort of struggled and some of them just fell apart. What she realised, and what she has now written about and become the world expert on, is that there is an extraordinary interconnection that goes on underground. We are only just beginning to learn about it. A tree will help out another tree if it is in trouble. It will send extra nutrients. It is quite magical. In the same way that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was moved about the albatross, I am extremely moved about the power of the soil. I feel very strongly that it has to be at the heart of the Bill.

Finally, on the question of the oceans, not only did I see the Secretary of State last week, but the week before I saw the Minister for Food and Farming. We were in the West Country at an event and she was on her way to Brixham. She said to me, “This is going to be tricky, but 80% of the fish that comes in comes from bottom trawling.” Bottom trawling is just like ploughing: it is smashing through someone else’s home with absolutely no regard for those who live there. We would not smash through a field of cattle, just wipe them out and throw them all over the place; that is what we do every day. Some in this Chamber will have seen “Seaspiracy”. It is not a pleasant watch. You get the sense of how many fish get sacrificed in the by-catch. Please, Minister, find a way to put the sense of ecosystems and soil absolutely at the heart of how we assess our environment and take care of it, because we will fail otherwise.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

It is a very real privilege, and I mean it, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. Hers was a splendid speech—one of many we have heard this afternoon—and she was so right in her references to bottom trawling. I may be the only Member of your Lordships’ House who sailed, in the old days, in a deep-sea trawler. I was the candidate for Grimsby at the time, in 1965, and I went up to the north coast of Norway in a trawler. That was proper fishing. It was fascinating, and the men who were there were among the bravest I have ever known. I represented a mining constituency later. That is another tough and appalling job, but at least the miner went home to his bed each night. The trawler-man was out for 18, 21 or 24 days, and it was extraordinary. That was what convinced me, and I have always been convinced, that we must look after our marine environment.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, who has put his name to my noble friend’s amendment and who will be winding up on it for his party, is bound to be sympathetic and enthusiastic. Of course, he chaired that session of the EU Environment Sub-Committee to which my noble friend Lady McIntosh referred in her speech. We heard some fairly disturbing things that day. Anybody who has watched “Blue Planet” knows that the isolated, moving incident of the albatross, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, referred, is just one of a million examples. It was a very graphic and good example, but there are so many—all of them caused by the careless distribution of our detritus across the world.

I am sure many noble Lords will know about Operation Neptune, where the National Trust sought to buy many miles of our coastline. It has been an operation that has lasted for some half a century now and has been extraordinarily successful. It has succeeded in preserving some of the most beautiful of our coastal areas—many of which, incidentally, were rather badly despoiled during the pandemic by careless visitors and worse than careless visitors. If we want to preserve our coastline, we must also preserve our marine environment, so I very much hope that my noble friend Lord Goldsmith will accept this amendment with enthusiastic alacrity or, if not, call a meeting to devise an amendment that he can accept with enthusiastic alacrity, because this, again, will come back on Report and we need to get it right.