Adapting to Climate Change: EU Agriculture and Forestry (EUC Report)

Lord Framlingham Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Framlingham]

My Lords, I am deeply honoured to become a Member of your Lordships’ House, and I am immensely gratefu1 for the warm welcome I have been given by everyone, not least the staff of the House who have been unfailingly helpful and kind throughout. I am deeply indebted to my sponsors for escorting me safely through my introduction: the noble Lord, Lord Geddes, who is an old friend from Suffolk, and the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, under whom I had the great pleasure of serving as a Deputy Speaker. I am particularly grateful to them as a recent illness has left me temporarily unsteady on my legs. I suspect that they were as anxious as I was throughout the entire ceremony.

As Michael Lord, I was for 27 years the only Lord in the Commons. On my appointment to your Lordships’ House, I would have been a Lord in the Lords. I was advised by the powers that be that this really would be most confusing in so many ways, not least in debates in your Lordships’ House, where I would have been referred to as the noble Lord, Lord Lord. To choose another title was no hardship. On the contrary, taking the name of Framlingham, a delightful ancient and historic market town in my old constituency, where I was originally adopted as a parliamentary candidate in 1983, gave me, and will always give me, enormous pleasure.

For my last 13 years in the Commons, I was a Deputy Speaker. That has inevitably made me, among other things, a good listener. How often in the Speaker's Chair I yearned to intervene in a debate, only to realise later how glad I was that I had not.

Fairness and firmness are required of the occupant of the Speaker's Chair. To the extent that I have any of these qualities, I got them in due part from all the sport that I played over the years—particularly, in my younger years, Rugby football. I played for Cambridge against Oxford in the 1960 Varsity match. Our fair and firm, top international referee was a highly respected Welshman called Mr Gwynne Walters. Impeccably dressed, he always refereed in a blazer; he refereed impeccably too. Although the match was ferocious, as all such matches are, not one player spoke a word to him throughout the entire match. How things have changed. Modesty forbids me mentioning the outcome of the match, save to say that further details could be gleaned from the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, who played on the opposite side.

A Deputy Speaker in the Commons must have a good memory. He or she must be able to name immediately what was, in my day, any one of 650 honourable Members at the moment that they rise to speak, however unexpectedly. It was not always so. In earlier times, the occupant of the chair simply pointed to whomever he wished to speak next. Then, on 19 May 1685, the House of Commons, in its wisdom, elected as Speaker Sir John Trevor, who appears to have been cross-eyed. The result was that every time he pointed, two people stood up. Ever since then, names have had to be remembered and called.

Before entering the House of Commons, I started and ran my own forestry company. I became increasingly involved in what is sometimes called urban forestry and, finally, in arboriculture. I was privileged for several years to be the president of the Arboricultural Association. Having listened to the debate so far, I am sure that your Lordships will be well aware that arboriculture is about trees for their looks; as opposed to silviculture, which is about trees for their timber.

I worked through the dreadful ravages of Dutch elm disease and on the subsidence problems caused by trees near buildings on shrinkable clay subsoils. When, some years ago, the Clore extension was added to the Tate Gallery, I was retained to ensure the survival of the adjacent London plane trees. Strangely enough, my experience proved useful soon after I arrived in the House of Commons. Someone had advised the felling of the Catalpa trees in New Palace Yard. I was asked what I thought, and I am delighted to say that, 25 years later, they are still there. I have a great interest in our ancient and historic trees as well. Before politics took over entirely, I lectured both in this country and in the United States.

One of the most pleasurable duties of a Deputy Speaker in the House of Commons, when the Speaker is not available, is to greet and entertain visiting Speakers or their deputies. Without exception, they were full of admiration and respect for our Parliament, its systems and traditions, and anxious to learn from us wherever possible. They still truly believe that we are the mother of Parliaments. I trust that we do too.

My great pleasure in being appointed to your Lordships' House was heightened by the fact that I have a huge affection for and belief in our Parliament, the way it works and all it stands for. We take it for granted, in this rapidly changing world, at our peril. I have always believed that one of the principal duties of any generation is to hand on to the next generation that which has been entrusted to its care. In this context, I say that I was deeply saddened that we have agreed to experiment with allowing the use of electronic devices in this Chamber. I believe that that will prove to be harmful and disruptive, and I sincerely hope that it will not become a permanent feature.

Politics is often said to be the art of the possible, but sometimes I think it is the art of having the courage to do the obvious. I also suspect that many great issues are essentially very simple and that we make them complicated when we do not want to face them. In this, the role played by your Lordships’ House in the great issues of the day, free from simplistic party politics, is so very important.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, for her comprehensive introduction of her report. The term forestry—one of the topics of this debate—means different things in different countries and to different people and organisations. In this country, it originally referred to the hunting domains of kings, thus we have Hatfield Chase and Cannock Chase, and it came to mean, until relatively recently, planting and harvesting trees, principally softwoods, for timber. Currently the word covers everything from the great Kielder Forest to copses on our farms, and from ancient woodlands to urban forestry in Milton Keynes. It includes large tracts of conifer-planted uplands as well as the New Forest, the Forest of Dean and, in my part of the world, Thetford Forest.

In many of these areas now, the amenity value of woodland is considered to be as important as its timber value. In this increasingly hectic world, it seems more and more people are turning to and appreciating the enjoyment provided by trees and the habitat that they create and preserve. Whatever the terminology, however, it is all about trees. Trees really are one of the world’s blessings. They take in our carbon dioxide and give us back their oxygen. They give us their timber and their fruits. They help to stabilise mountainous regions, are crucial in the battle against desertification and, on top of all this, they are a joy to behold. So whether they grow in our country, in tropical rainforests or in the developing world, we must do all we can to increase tree cover. Regardless of the pros and cons of climate change, let us do the obvious and plant trees, protect rainforests and generally treat trees with the respect that they deserve, not for their sake, but for our own.

I thank noble Lords for listening to me so patiently. I look forward to making further contributions to debates in your Lordships’ House in due course and to playing my part in the affairs of this noble House.