Flood Defences

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, perhaps I should say to the noble Baroness that, in fact, Flood Re does include leaseholders for up to three flats and contents insurance, but above three flats it becomes a commercial policy. So in point of fact there are permutations to the scheme. I want to emphasise that Flood Re is an industry-owned and managed not-for-profit reinsurer; it pools the risk of flood claims and is targeted, with a subsidy, to lower-income households.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

My Lords, it is the turn of the Liberal Democrat Benches.

[Lord Greaves]

I am grateful. Last February, £450,000 was allocated to a vital scheme to improve a culvert, called Victoria Clough, in the small town of Earby on the boundaries of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but nothing has yet happened. Is there a problem of capacity or resource constraints in getting the schemes going in Defra, the Environment Agency or anywhere else? If there is, would it not be sensible to let a competent local authority take it over?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I think that I had better look into the individual case that the noble Lord has referred to and come back to him. Generally speaking, we are confident that this £2.5 billion allocated to Defra over six years is going to make a very substantial difference, but we need continually to review the situation.

Rural Bus Services

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the right reverend Prelate for introducing this debate. The first point I want to make is one I often make: rural areas do not exist in isolation; they exist as part of an area that includes their local market and small towns, and the two are very often closely interlinked. We hear an increasingly large amount about big cities and city regions, and people talk about the more sparsely populated rural areas. The area I live in, in east Lancashire, is typical of a great deal of England: it consists of a mixture of small and medium-sized towns and the villages and rural areas that surround them. The two are closely interlinked, not least in the case of bus services.

Very often, the bus services that serve the villages are actually town-to-town bus services, which would not exist if there was not the trade from the towns. One of those, which we fought hard to maintain in the spring of this year when Lancashire County Council was discussing proposals to stop all subsidies to bus services, which I think were about £8 million in total, is the 65 bus. It runs from Burnley through the small town of Padiham, through the Pendle villages of Higham and Fence, and then through to Barrowford and Nelson, which is another small or medium-sized town. It provides services round the back streets and estates of Burnley, and then goes into the countryside and provides essential services for these villages. I have to report that the county council—the Labour county council, I regret to say—for Burnley Central West, which covers part of that area in Burnley, wrote on Facebook, when we were campaigning to save this service:

“Yes, our Liberal Democrat partners did betray us in saving our most vulnerable elderly for the sake of a few bus routes. May they rot in hell forever”.

I think he was referring to the Liberal Democrats rather than the vulnerable elderly. I am pleased to say that we did save the service. Whether we will rot in hell for ever afterwards, I do not know. Perhaps I will need to take advice from the right reverend Prelate on rather more than bus services after this debate.

The right reverend Prelate and other speakers, including my noble friend Lady Scott, are right that the heart of this issue is not the question of rural services but of all services and the funding of local authorities. Most of the cuts in bus services, according to the Government’s statistics, have been in subsidised services. It will happen again in the budgets for Lancashire this year and next year. It is not possible for local authorities to continue to fund everything they do if their budgets are being cut by millions and millions of pounds. In Lancashire it is something like one-third of a billion over three or four years. If those cuts have to be imposed it will be impossible to maintain those services.

The basic message for the Government from this and many other debates is that local authorities have come to the end of the road of what they can subsidise and pay for that are not statutory services. There is no hope for subsidised services, whether or not the new Bus Services Bill comes through, unless the Government are prepared to fund local authorities in a more reasonable and practical way than they are proposing to do.

Footpaths

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the results of the survey published by the Ramblers on 14 November, what steps they are taking to ensure that the footpath network is well kept and available for public use.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and I remind the House of my interests as set out in the register.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)]

My Lords, responsibility for the management and maintenance of the 118,000 miles of public rights of way in England lies with local authorities. The Government have allocated central funds for the establishment of the 2,700-mile England Coast Path. We have also provided funding for the maintenance of national trails and national parks where the Ramblers’ survey recognises that rights of way are in a better condition than elsewhere in the country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, we undoubtedly have the best network of footpaths in the countryside of any country in the world. Does the Minister agree that the work of all the volunteers for the Ramblers on the Big Pathwatch campaign and survey has been extremely valuable? However, the survey showed that one-third of the network was in need of improvement and that 10% of the footpaths surveyed were impossible to use because of barbed wire, obstructions, locked gates—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

Japanese knotweed.

[Lord Greaves]

I am not sure about Japanese knotweed on public footpaths, although no doubt Ramblers will report it if it is there. I am not sure that I am supposed to take interventions on Questions, either.

Also, there are issues with signposts that either do not exist or point in the wrong direction, as well as paths that become quagmires. The footpath network is resilient but there are increasing signs of problems in many areas. What are the Government doing about it?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, first I acknowledge the tenacity of the noble Lord on this matter and on the matter of Japanese knotweed; I very much enjoy our exchanges. I acknowledge the work of Ramblers and all its volunteers. This excellent report says that nowhere is the network broken and that problems are highly localised. In fact, 91% of paths are “adequately”—some requiring improvement—or “well” kept. I will be in touch with the chief executive of Ramblers, Vanessa Griffiths, because I want to explore with her where the 9% of paths are that are poorly kept, and why.

Japanese Knotweed

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, first, I acknowledge my noble friend’s tenacity in seeking to deal with this brute of a plant. On mortgages, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors published an information paper only last year that aims to help valuers and mortgage lenders better understand the implications of this plant for residential properties. We anticipate that this will lead to a more pragmatic approach between all parties in dealing with it. On what my noble friend said about the tragedy, this invasive species of plant is of great concern and we need to deal with it where we can.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, while the Minister’s work with the psyllid, the jumping plant louse, gets going, will he encourage local action groups around the country to tackle this dreadful plant in the ways it can already be tackled—though that needs a lot of work? Is he aware of the good work being done in my own borough of Pendle by an organisation called the Environmental Action Group? It employs young people who might otherwise have difficulty getting jobs, trains them and does good local environmental work. Along with the Ribble Rivers Trust, it has set about the task of eliminating Japanese knotweed from our borough.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I certainly acknowledge what is happening in the noble Lord’s part of the world and I am well aware of the group in Pendle. Many local action groups are working to treat this problem and there is very good national coverage. As examples of where, with tenacity, we can deal with this, the Norfolk local action group eradicated all Japanese knotweed on the River Wensum special area of conservation, while in Bristol Japanese knotweed on all publicly owned land is now 95% under management. There are a number of good stories to tell. My view is that wherever people are determined to deal with this, it can be dealt with.

Air Quality

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

Obviously, we will have to look at diesel. As I mentioned earlier, the updates we received on emissions at the end of September mean that we are going to be looking at this area very carefully indeed. The most important thing is that we wish to target our work at the oldest and most polluting vehicles. We have been working on that with the five cities, but many other cities will be working on it and we need to work together because we need to get it right this time. I assure your Lordships that the department and its officials want to make this a lasting settlement on this issue.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, local authorities throughout the country have a duty to test pollution levels—for example, on main roads passing through their towns—and they can declare zones where the air quality is not high enough, yet they have no real powers to do anything about it. What is the purpose of this exercise?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, my understanding of the Transport Act 2000 is that local authorities do have the powers. Referring to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—which I should have answered more fully—we believe that there are existing powers for local authorities to set up clean air zones. The ability of charging authorities to introduce a clean air zone was clearly set out in the Transport Act 2000.