Land Use in England Committee Report

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I am tail-end Charlie and also an interloper, so I need to begin by drawing the House’s attention to my entry on the register. I congratulate the committee, as others have, on producing such a clear and informative report and on having done so without losing itself in impenetrable jargon and the alphabet soup referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, on his magisterial introduction.

If I had been a member of the committee, I would have been pretty disappointed with the Government’s response to the central recommendation to create a land use commission. I found the case pretty strongly made. For me, the coup de grâce was given in paragraph 225, which lists the five separate government departments that will have responsibility in this area.

Governments, constrained by the demands of the five-year electoral cycle, find it awfully hard to enter into the long-term commitments that provide the bedrock on which so much of our long-term planning depends. In a previous life, I chaired another committee of your Lordships’ House on citizenship and civic engagement. The House will understand from its title that it was cross-departmental and dealt with a very long tail. We learned some lessons from that, because the then Government were also reluctant to consider a co-ordinating body. We discovered two particular problems, which I offer now to my noble friend the Minister on the Front Bench and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, as chairman of the committee. The first is what we call “initiativitis”. Ministers would arrive keen to do a job and to show that they were doing something quickly, so they would set a hare running. Then, because it takes time for that hare to prove that it is worth having or not, by the time it was so proved or not proved, the Minister was gone—up or down the greasy ministerial pole—and, as a result, the initiative then mouldered in decent obscurity.

Linked to this was the absence that we found of any institutional memory—some body, somewhere, responsible for learning from and sharing success and failure, for co-ordinating different policies in different departments and along the way ensuring value for money for the taxpayer. I hope that the Minister can find a way to think further about that issue.

I have two points to make about the report itself. On the first, my fox was largely shot by my noble friend Lord Lucas, because he talked about the issue of water. I was disappointed that chapter 2 did not refer to water security but dealt only with food security, as water security is, in my view, an even more important point. The Environment Agency will tell us that by 2075 we will have run out of water in London and the south-east. We may be able to move water around the country, using our canal network, as has been talked about, but if we are going to build reservoirs, there will be a very substantial use of space, and it would have been helpful if the committee had spent a moment or two on that issue.

My second and absolutely fundamental issue—the elephant in the room for me—is people. It is our population, the likely rate of growth and the consequent impact, good or bad, including particularly on the many areas that are the subject of this report. I shall give noble Lords a couple of numbers. In the past 25 years, since 1997, our population has increased every year by 365,000 people, of which 100,000 is the natural increase and about 250,000 or 275,000 are arrivals from overseas. That means that our population has, over the period, increased by 9.2 million people. What do 9.2 million people look like? They look like three cities the size of Greater Manchester, which has a population of about 2.8 million or 2.9 million.

Since we are talking about a committee report on land use, I should mention that Greater Manchester has an area of about 1,276 square kilometres—so we have three of those, which is going to be about 3,800 square kilometres, which in turn is 1.5 times the size of Berkshire, which has an area of about 2,400 or 2,500 square kilometres. So over the past 25 years, we are likely to have built over an area 1.5 times the size of Berkshire.

Many believed that Brexit would bring that all to an end, but in fact the reverse has been the case. In 2021, we gave rights to remain here permanently to 500,000 people; in 2022, that number went up to 606,000 people. Allowing for some natural increases, we have probably given rights to remain here to between 1.25 million and 1.5 million people in the past two years. The Migration Observatory at Oxford University, a well-regarded think tank, thinks that the UK population is likely to increase by between 8 million and 9 million people by 2045. That means having to build over yet another 1.5 Berkshires to house them and look after them.

How is this happening? It is happening because the discussion about this has become strangely unbalanced. There are two views, both in favour of higher levels of population growth, dominating the discussion. The first is what I call the moral case—that we owe it to people less fortunate than ourselves to welcome them here—and the second is the business case—that we need people to do jobs that Brits cannot or will not do. Both those have their points of view. It is not so much about the fact that we should not have any new arrivals, as we need the economic and cultural dynamic that some new arrivals give. But it is an issue about scale, particularly in relation to the business case, because British industry and commerce are now treating migration as the default option, with consequent very serious long-term consequences for our settled population. But along the way, away from those two cases, there remain the 67.3 million people who live in this country, the settled population, whose views are rarely heard.

Their worries and concerns range widely. They do not ignore the moral or the economic case but they are about overcrowding, about damage to our environment and ecology, about our ability to meet our climate change goals and about threats to our social cohesion. In short, they are the people who would agree with Robert Kennedy when he said that GDP

“measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile”.

What can we do about this? There is an answer, and it could be to have some sort of overarching body, perhaps called the office for democratic change, or the office for population sustainability if you prefer, perhaps created along the lines of the Office for Budget Responsibility, to provide authoritative, transparent and evidenced-based reports on the inevitable trade-offs as our population grows fast. Importantly, it would report to Parliament, thus ensuring that the concerns of the unheard, the 67.3 million unheard, including committees such as the one whose report we are discussing today, have been registered at a supra-departmental level.

What will my noble friend say? He will say nothing, if he can possibly get away with it. If he is pressed, he will say, “Nothing to do with me, guv”, and that of course means that this issue, like so many of the issues referred to in this report, will fall between the cracks of various government departments.

Let me conclude. Some Members of your Lordships’ House may read Caitlin Moran in the Times. She is a Wolverhampton born and bred journalist, and therefore an urban soul. She wrote in the Times a couple of weeks ago

“For, really, what victory has been gained if our country is one of the wealthiest in the world but our rivers are too sewage-riddled to swim in, our dawns stripped of the dawn chorus, and our children can reach university age without having heard a spring cuckoo, seen a swallow in flight or a hedgehog trundle across the lawn?”


That seems to be the challenge that this committee sought to address, a challenge that in my view will be much more difficult to meet if we continue to increase our population as we have over the recent past, but it is surely a challenge we have to continue to address, because at root it is about the sort of country we want to leave to future generations, and what could be more important than that?

Environmental Principles Policy Statement

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, made clear, I am not a member of her committee, so I shall not say much about the purpose of this regulation other than that, as she explained in her very interesting and wide-ranging speech, it is very significant. It has very significant consequences for the environment, about which so many people feel very strongly.

In my few minutes, I want to concentrate on process. Let me use the hackneyed phrase “You have the hand of history on your shoulder”. This afternoon, noble Lords are creating a precedent. This is the first time we have discussed a statement such as this. The way that it is being scrutinised will be used by the Government as a precedent for why future such arrangements should follow the same routine. It is a precedent which, I regret to have to say to my noble friend the Minister, represents another power grab by the Government and will contribute to the growing imbalance in power between the Executive and the two Houses of Parliament. It is not Lords versus Commons; it is Lords and Commons versus the Government.

As the noble Baroness said, I chair the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. It is a cross-party committee—the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, whom we shall hear from in a few minutes, is one of our number. We have a terrific staff, and we meet weekly to scrutinise the 600 to 700 regulations made every year, each one of which imposes the law on every citizen of this country. We produce reports every Thursday following our meetings on Tuesdays—one has been published today—drawing the attention of the House to issues in the current crop of regulations for the week that we think might be of particular interest to your Lordships.

I emphasise that we are not concerned about actual policy. That is for the electorate to decide when the general election comes. However, we are concerned inter alia about whether the implications of the policy have been thought through, whether it has been adequately consulted on and whether it is likely to fulfil its primary policy objectives. Your Lordships will have seen from our report, which the noble Baroness quoted, that we felt that the regulation fell short of those and other objectives in several significant aspects. In its way, this is another example of the Government’s increasingly cavalier attitude towards Parliament and its duties of scrutiny.

Some noble Lords will recall a childhood game called “Grandmother’s Footsteps”. The child who was it had to face the wall and the other children playing the game would try to creep up behind. The child who was it could turn round at any moment, and if it caught the other children moving, they had to go back to the beginning. I am sure that several members of the Committee will have played that. That is what is happening here. While Parliament is looking the other way, the Government are creeping up on it, and we need to consider what we are going to do about it.

The seriousness of what Parliament faces varies. First, some of the problems could be solved by Ministers taking a better and tougher administrative grip by ensuring, for example, that impact assessments are available every time a regulation comes before your Lordships’ House. Your Lordships will not be aware of this, but last October we gave permission to a Department for Transport SI for which the impact assessment was published six months later, in April. What use is that? Secondly, departments could do a great deal better planning so that fewer instruments arrive in a rush, with the almost inevitable consequence that there has been inadequate consultation.

Some of the problems could be solved by greater clarity in policy, by, for example, distinguishing between regulation—the law—and guidance. I ask noble Lords to cast their minds back to the first month of the Covid outbreak. Do your Lordships remember being told that you could exercise only once a day? That was not true. Exercising once a day was in the guidance. The regulation—the law—put no limit on the number of times you should exercise. There was this wash-over between regulation and guidance, determinations, protocols and all sorts of other semi-legal pieces of government policy.

The Government could also improve things by not increasing the use of tertiary legislation, in which powers are passed down outside Parliament to bodies over which there is no democratic observance or control. The College of Policing, which is extremely important to the way our police service operates, has no statutory role at all but has a great deal of influence in the policy followed in that area.

All the really fundamental challenges come from the Government’s increasing use of what we have come to call framework Bills, in which the statute has only the broadest sense of policy travel and all the detail, which is what really matters to us all, is left to secondary legislation. In essence, the regulation before us is an example of what happens when you have a framework Bill. The parent Act, the Environment Act 2021, will have gone through the careful, helpful, thorough scrutiny afforded to primary legislation, both here in your Lordships’ House and in the House of Commons. But no one then knew the way in which the Act would be brought into force and the detail that would follow.

I take one example from the noble Baroness’s speech a few minutes ago. She talked about the definition of “proportionate”. I ask members of the Committee to hold that word in their mind for a second. The challenge we face with secondary legislation scrutiny is that, while we can discuss it—as we are doing this afternoon—say what is wrong with it and question my noble friend about what he is going to do about it, no matter how unsatisfactory his answer is, we cannot amend it. We can only accept or reject it. Since the latter is a pretty nuclear option, not surprisingly your Lordships’ House has been reluctant to finger the reject button.

I go back to the word that I asked the Committee to hold in their mind a minute ago. If “proportionate” had been in the primary legislation, think of the discussion there would have been about it and what would have gone on in the House. There would almost certainly have been some amendments about it, some definitions sought and clarity requested. The Government’s thinking would have been teased out in all sorts of ways. This afternoon, an hour from now, it will be through—done and dusted. The House will have no further say about it except and until a Minister—I do not mean my noble friend—says, “Well, I think we’ll change this a bit and put through another regulation”, which we will also be able to discuss and debate but not change. I hope my noble friend’s officials will not pass him a note saying, “Minister, when you come to wind up, just remind the Committee that all the regulations have to be approved”. They do, but the way they have to be approved is a sophistry. There is no reality to it at all.

Why are these draft framework Bills being brought forward? First, the world is moving faster and the rather stately pace of primary legislation is finding it hard to keep up. I recognise that. Secondly—and perhaps less attractively—the Government have brought forward legislation on which they have not been able or willing to undertake the intellectual heavy lifting to think through the policy before the parent Bill is brought before your Lordships’ House. It is a policy you might describe as making it up as you go along. Thirdly—and worst of all—Ministers are seduced by their civil servants, who say, “Minister, don’t let’s write this into the primary legislation. It is awfully inflexible if we do. Let’s just take some powers and then if we don’t like it, we can change it. We know neither House can amend those regulations, whereas if the primary Act gets stuck, goodness me, there’s going to be trouble. We’d need a new Act and the Prime Minister will ask why we’re stuck on this silly thing and who got it wrong in the first place.” Therefore, the tendency is to let this all pass by and appear at a lower level, as we are seeing this afternoon.

I said I have some sympathy with the view that the world is moving faster and primary legislation cannot keep up. But if the Government want to grab a little, as they are doing this afternoon, they need to give a little. They must help establish a new procedure for scrutinising framework Bills. In fact, I do not mean framework Bills but Bills in which there are framework clauses. Most of what we do with secondary legislation is fine, but there are an increasing number of areas—we have seen some this afternoon, as set out in the speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter—where we need the ability to dig in and, where necessary, amend.

I said at the beginning of my remarks—I must end them shortly—that this regulation represents a precedent. Well, we are going to see a lot of precedents in the next few months. We have the Schools Bill, the Online Safety Bill and the Brexit freedoms Bill. If that is as I am told, I do not think that those who voted for Brexit, saying that it would mean we were taking back control, thought that meant taking control from Brussels and handing it to Whitehall without Parliament even seeing it on the way through, but that is what that Bill sounds as though it will do.

My noble friend the Minister may be tempted to respond by saying to me, “Look, guv, it is nothing to do with me. I am a junior Minister in Defra and this is all above my pay grade. This is the wrong speech to be making here; go to the Cabinet Office and try it again.” With great respect to my noble friend, I am afraid he is wrong. The bedrock of our democratic system is trust and confidence, leading to the key ingredient of informed consent. Every government Minister has a duty and role to make sure that principle of informed consent is adhered to and strengthened. These regulations, the Schools Bill, the Online Safety Bill and the Brexit freedoms Bill are stretching that principle of informed consent to breaking point, and so risk undermining public confidence in the way our governmental system operates. I am sure the Committee and, I hope, my noble friend accept that that would be a disastrous outcome.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness and her eloquent, thoughtful contribution. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, on giving us this opportunity to debate the first statement on environmental principles.

I start by following some of the points my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts contributed. In particular, I look forward to hearing my noble friend’s response to the call of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s report. It says in paragraph 40 that, as

“this is the first policy statement under the Act, it is essential that the practical implementation and effectiveness of the policy statement … be properly monitored and evaluated by all government departments”.

That was touched on by most of the contributions this afternoon.

When I was in the other place chairing the EFRA committee, I was at my wits’ end because so many of the regulations that came through were from Europe, and we could only—as my noble friend has explained—rubber-stamp them. They contained all the policy provisions. As we know, we often gold-plated them. One of the benefits of leaving the European Union is that we can no longer gold-plate policy from that particular quarter. It is very important, as my noble friend Lord Hodgson explained, that we have the opportunity to think through—this is the role of that committee—not only whether the policy has been adequately consulted on but whether it fits in with the primary policy objective. So often we find that not to be the case.

We have taken an awful lot on trust in the last two years. We have adopted very important Acts of Parliament with huge powers under Henry VIII clauses. Possibly—I say this as a very brave Back-Bencher—we ought to take the nuclear option more often, because we are imposing real obligations on businesses. I am thinking in particular of farmers and landowners. Perhaps we will leave it to the main opposition parties to do that on more occasions and we can cower behind them.

My noble friend came out with this idea of having a new procedure to scrutinise these framework Bills in the first place, but surely we could just make more use of the procedure we have of considering draft Bills. It is incumbent on the Government to explain why we are not using that procedure. We are running into enormous problems in this Session as well, where we have passed down the opportunity to consider things at the stage of a draft Bill. Perhaps ask a scrutiny committee or a Select Committee in each House to do this as part of their regular work. I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and her committee would do that.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I absolutely accept what my noble friend says. I was not suggesting that this was the only way to skin the cat; I was just trying to say that this was one way it could be skinned. The important thing is to get a discussion going about the fact that the cat needs skinning. We have not got to that but we need to get to it. The procedure is of secondary importance; the first thing is to persuade the Government and the Opposition Front Bench that this issue needs addressing.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I put on the record that I do not wish to skin any cat, for obvious reasons. I am just trying to support my noble friend’s proposal and the noble Baroness. Peace has broken out on the Committee.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, on the ground she covered in her opening remarks. I do not wish to comment where I agree, but I take issue with one thing—my noble friend the Duke of Wellington is very aware of this. I believe it is unacceptable to continue to have the possibility of raw sewage entering the river or bathing waters at an earlier stage. I know this is a different department; this is one of the problems we have identified this afternoon. If you are to have a commitment, which I think all parties agree to, of building 300,000 houses a year on land that is prone to flooding, in inappropriate places and connected to pipes that are not fit for purpose—the Government and the department accept that they are Victorian pipes—we need to allow a massive investment in the next AMP round, the price review in 2024, for the water companies to do this. I challenge my noble friend to bring forward Section 23 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 to enable us to do so. In 2007 Michael Pitt called for an end to the automatic right to connect. It is inappropriate that someone living in an existing development should face the possibility of raw sewage coming into their home because the wastewater does not fit into the existing pipes. We have to end this disgusting practice, and now.

I am a big supporter of Surfers Against Sewage but it is missing the point. We are dealing with this at the wrong stage, and much as I welcomed my noble friend the Duke of Wellington’s amendment, that is too late. If we have this housing commitment—I do not disagree with it; I just do not know where all these people are coming from—we need the investment in wastewater. Bring forward Schedule 3, give us a date and ensure that we end the automatic right to connect with no provisos, ifs or buts—just completely end it—allow water companies to disconnect until the investment has been made and recognise water companies as statutory consultees. Then we will no longer be pumping raw sewage into rivers and bathing waters in the first place. I shall calm down now.

I invite my noble friend and the department—as my noble friend Lord Hodgson asked us—to make sure that there is joined-up thinking between the different policies coming out of one department. I make a plea that food production, as the NFU president asked for today, be recognised as a top priority of the department. I have heard my noble friend either respond to Questions or make Statements in this regard on a number of occasions and I wholeheartedly support him in that, but we are currently only on 60% self-sufficiency in food. The NFU pointed out today in the publication of its survey that farmers’ confidence to invest has been severely dented by all the reasons the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, rehearsed before us this afternoon. It has been dented by the spiralling costs of energy and fuel in this country, which are not within our control; they are the result of the war in Ukraine. That is a challenge to the Government; we have to have more storage of gas. We cannot have just 30 days —or was it 60 days?—of storage. It is clearly insufficient before we go into another autumn.

How does my noble friend respond? I invite him to support the call from the NFU for the Government to introduce a duty on Ministers to assess the impact of any new policy—I take the environmental statement of principles to be a new policy—on food production.

The survey results from the NFU show that a third of arable farmers have made changes to their cropping plans in the last quarter or four months, which 90% of growers attributed to rocketing fertiliser costs. Growers are now switching from growing milling wheat for bread to growing feed wheat for animals, because it has a lower fertiliser requirement. Also, over the next two years dairy farmers were most concerned about prices of feed, with a 93% increase; fuel, with a 91% increase; energy, with an 89% increase; and, as my noble friend the Minister knows, fertiliser, with an 88% increase.

Why is this important? As we consider the environmental principles policy statement today, the Government are putting the finishing touches—I hope—to the environmental land management schemes. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has spoken eloquently on this on a number of occasions. There are simply too many competing uses for land. Will my noble friend confirm that farming and food production are public goods for the purposes of environmental land management schemes, and that the five environmental principles before us—the integration, prevention, rectification, polluter pays and precautionary principles—will have a crossover to ELMS, with the sustainable farming incentive, local nature recovery and landscape recovery uses? Without that, it will be totally confusing for our farmers and growers to know what they have to do.

I welcome the opportunity to debate these issues today. I hope we will be able to give confidence to farmers, growers and consumers and have greater clarity, not just on what the environmental principles will be but on how these will impact on ELMS and other aspects of Defra work.

Agriculture Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 162 and 171. I am delighted to thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, and my noble friend Lord Caithness for their support.

I believe that it is essential to have a report on progress on food security more frequently—I would suggest every year. Amendment 162 therefore seeks to increase the frequency of publication by the Government of their proposed reports on food security. While I welcome the fact that the Government have indicated their willingness to produce an early report, a five-year interval between reports is much too long for such an important and sensitive issue. Every 10 years we have an issue of food security or animal health—pest, pestilence and, currently, pandemic. We had BSE; we had foot and mouth disease; and we had the horsegate scandal, which could have been much worse, rather than just a fraud.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has, if anything, highlighted even more the strains and stresses within the food supply system. There is no doubt that some of these issues will continue to be a problem for a long time to come. This is the first time in my living memory that we have experienced empty supermarket shelves and people having to queue to shop for food and having restricted choice within food retail outlets. The loss of the food service sector through the government lockdown measures was also a major shock that caused many consumers to consider issues around food security for perhaps the very first time.

We have become complacent over time about our ability, as a relatively rich nation, to secure our necessary food both domestically and internationally, but this could become a much more difficult proposition in the future. One of the most important objectives of a Government is to ensure that their people are well fed and it is therefore imperative that issues around food security are given much greater pre-eminence than envisaged by the Bill, which provides only for five-yearly reports.

Currently, the UK is only around 60% self-sufficient in food and we are reliant upon imports for our remaining food need. If anything, it has become apparent that more and more nations around the world are becoming increasingly nationalistic in terms of their trading policy. There is a risk that a tightening of supplies globally could cause issues for food supply. However, food supply is not just about quantity but quality. The issues of food security go the heart of ensuring that we are not offshoring our environmental and animal welfare problems by the food that we are importing into the UK. We want, surely, to promote, protect and enhance these high standards both at home and internationally and, therefore, our trading policies must reflect that. An annual report from government is a good basis on which to start and a good discipline to ensure that matters are kept in sharp focus.

Turning to Amendment 171, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for their support. Again, while I welcome the Government’s commitment to produce a regular report on food security, it is vital that this is a means through which the Government express their policy targets and mechanisms to address issues around food security.

Currently, the provisions in the Bill envisage a fairly static output that merely reports on the current food security situation. I would prefer to see a more dynamic report that seeks to set out an agenda for change, where change is required. There seems little point in the Government merely producing a report of which Parliament is required to take note rather than for it to be a platform for evaluation, repurposing and informing future actions. At the very least, it will be essential to ensure that food security targets are both met and monitored. Where the report indicates that there are issues with aspects of our food and environmental security, the Government must come forward with their plans and policy for addressing these shortcomings.

Amendment 171 will provide the necessary architecture for the Government to take this forward. It will be a failure if, having taken the time to consider the importance of having a food security report, the Government did not also ensure that this report was used to inform changes in policy and procedures. A statutory requirement for the Government to address these issues is surely the sensible thing to include in this Bill.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, 163 and 172, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for having put his name to them. Since this is the first time I have spoken in Committee on this Bill, I probably need to draw your Lordships’ attention to my entry on the register of interests. More significantly for my noble friend, he will be glad to hear that, though this is the first time I have spoken, it will also be the last time I am going to speak. Bearing in mind the stately progress that is being made, I shall not be holding up proceedings any further.

The amendments in this group discussed so far are about the frequency of reports. I have no particular dog in that fight, but I offer one word of caution, which is that if these reports are going to mean something, they need to be relatively infrequent. If they are too frequent, they lose their impact. I suggest to those who are seeking too frequent reports that these may pass by too easily and quickly. A report wants to be an event when it happens.

My amendments go to another part of this clause and try to give it some teeth. Clause 17, as drafted, could result in some pretty anodyne, platitudinous reports—general statements of principle without any detail. When we talk about food security, detail will be very important. My noble friend on the Front Bench will say, “Absolutely, I understand that, and I will ensure there is going to be detail, and the reports will have plenty of focus.” But we have been here before, and we have been here recently. A Green Future contained similarly impressive objectives and an impressive monitoring procedure. This was to be under the Natural Capital Committee chaired by Professor Dieter Helm, who was the subject of some adverse comments by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, about five minutes ago. Professor Helm was to monitor performance under the green future proposals. The last annual report from Professor Helm’s committee, which was in September last year, read as follows:

“Unfortunately, the Progress Report does not in fact tell us very much about whether and to what extent there has been progress. On the contrary, the Progress Report provides a long list of actions, and presents very little evidence of improvements in the state of our natural capital.”


If we do not strengthen the wording in this clause, we will get a long list of actions and very little evidence of improvement. We need to build in some specific teeth.

The second weakness of the clause, as presently drafted, is that it could be a snapshot, whereas what we should be looking for is a continuous look—a cine film in the old-fashioned way—at the process of our food security. Perhaps I could explain further by analogy. When you go to your annual medical, the doctor looks at your heart and lungs, he sees whether your weight has gone up or down, and he tells you what the results are. That is, of course, very important. If you have a poorly performing heart, you want it treated quickly. But what is really important is how you compare with the previous year. Are you getting heavier? Are you getting lighter? Are you losing weight? Has a new mole emerged? Has your blood pressure gone up? All those sorts of things give you an idea, over a period of time, of how your health and physiology are changing. From that, the doctor can prescribe more exercise, less food, pills or whatever.

Agriculture Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 10th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his very clear introduction. An advisory speaking time of four minutes is not long to tackle the far-reaching provisions of this Bill, but I want to use a few of my precious seconds to protest to the Whip on duty about how the Bill is being handled. It is not just the four-minute limit; more importantly, a good number of our fellow Peers from all parties have been scrubbed from speaking at all. Things have reached a pretty pass when Members of your Lordships’ House are prevented from speaking at Second Reading of a Bill of this magnitude. Please do not play the pandemic card in reply. It will be perfectly possible to extend this debate by another half day to enable all who wish to speak to do so. Our fellow Peers deserve no less.

In my remaining time, I will focus on Clause 17 and food security. I remind the House that I am a controlling shareholder in a company that owns a modest amount of farmland. On 14 May, there was a very interesting debate in your Lordships’ House on food security, ably moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and equally ably replied to by the Minister. However, given the scale of the challenges we face to our future food security, through a combination of 40% increase in the world population—some 4 billion people—the impact of climate change and risks to the ability to move food around the world, Clause 17 is far too bland and unsecure. We need not expressions of hope but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said, duties on the Government.

I will give three quick examples. First, there needs to be a stated government policy on what level of food security is sought. Currently, it is about 50%. Is that the right level? Should it be higher or lower? The public are entitled to know.

Secondly, the clause says nothing about water. The Environment Agency tells us that we will run short of water within 20 years, and that we are entering, in the words of the chairman of the Environment Agency, “the jaws of death”. Significantly for our food security, the shortage of water will be most acute in the south-east of England, where some of our most productive farmland is located.

Finally, the clause makes no reference to the number of mouths that will have to be fed 20 years or so from now. What will the population of the United Kingdom be? Those numbers are stark. The ONS mid projection suggests that the population of the UK 25 years from now will be 72 million people, an increase of about 6 million, equivalent to two and a half cities the size of Manchester today. To provide the necessary homes, offices and other space for those people is likely to require us to tarmac over an area the size of Bedfordshire.

One of the challenges faced by all Governments is the inevitable public bias towards the present at the expense of the future. People find it hard to give proper weight to problems that lie 20 years away and are, unsurprisingly, inclined to focus on the short-term challenges they face, but if the pandemic has taught us anything it is that an absence of strategic thought and planning can carry a heavy cost, so I shall end with that great Jewish saying, “Start worrying. Details to follow.”