Land Use in England Committee Report

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to speak as the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle’s swansong die away across your Lordships’ House. I have been one of his flock in the diocese of Carlisle for the 21 years in which he has served both as suffragan and then as diocesan bishop. While it is true that I am president of the National Sheep Association, I do not think I am ever likely to win a rosette in his class at the Loweswater Show.

As his comments today have shown, he has throughout his time here ceaselessly promoted the concerns and problems of his diocese in your Lordships’ House. As he has explained, he has also been the Bishops’ spokesman for health and social care. I understand that this arose out of a slight misunderstanding about his previous experience, which seems to me to echo the generality of how things work in politics. One of the leitmotivs of his activities has been an overriding wish to try to draw people together to get genuine agreement about the appropriate way forward.

While I have made innumerable speeches in your Lordships’ House about sheep, I have never once in over 30 years spoken about health or social care, so I am not qualified to comment, other than to say that it is quite clear from the respect he is accorded across the House that he has made a real contribution. I am sure I speak for all of us when I say to him and his family that we wish them every good wish as they emigrate from Cumbria to Oxfordshire.

Before I proceed with the rest of my remarks, I declare my interests in the register. For my part, I welcome this report and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and his committee on it, as much for the corpus of evidence assembled as for its detailed conclusions. They underscore the problems facing rural England today—indeed, rural Britain as a whole—and they are, as we have already heard, a real challenge. This collection of all the evidence is important, because the discussion of this topic has been bedevilled by there being no clear overall picture of the underlying issues, which in turn has to be the starting point for resolving the problems they pose.

The Government may have rejected the report’s main conclusion, but that does not mean that they should or can reject the reasons the committee had for reaching it. They simply cannot say, “We’ll just muddle through; it’ll all turn out all right on the night”—because I do not think it will. I, and I expect the whole House, will be interested to hear what the Minister has to tell us, if anything, about all this.

One of the most refreshing aspects of the report is that I believe it starts in the right place—the breakdown of the post-war agricultural and rural policy settlement—and does not tilt at the windmill of the CAP, which really has remarkably little to do with it. We are now in a world where the aspiration for rural England is that of a “place”—I use that word in its contemporary, slightly changed, meaning—of a mosaic of differing, quite exactly defined, land uses, rather than that of a broad sweep of a narrow range of quasi-agricultural activities. Unfortunately, it seems to me that government policy appears principally to be focused on saving money and doing this on the cheap.

On 13 July, I happened to intervene at Question Time and asked the Minister at the Dispatch Box, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, whether he agreed that emissions trading schemes offered a very valuable opportunity for regions of both this country and elsewhere to generate some much-needed income and revenue. I am afraid that the response I got was:

“I understand the point that my noble friend is making. A happy by-product for the Treasury of the emissions trading scheme is the considerable revenue that it generates, and I am sure that it is spending all this money very wisely”.—[Official Report, 13/7/23; col. 1890.]


Frankly, I was horrified by that, and I hope your Lordships are too, because it amounts to saying that the Treasury intends to use emissions trading schemes as a cash cow for itself and not to enable rural and other areas to earn money from their own activities that they need to level up. I hope the Minister can confirm that the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, on that occasion were a slip of the tongue and that the revenues generated will go to the people in the places earning them and not elsewhere. I am equally interested— as I am sure the whole House is—to hear the thoughts of the Opposition Front Bench on the same point.

It is well known that, according to economic and social indicators, much of rural England is in need of levelling up, as are the more urban and northerly parts of the country. Indeed, there is quite a lot of overlap. Critics may say that there are millionaires in the countryside, and of course that is true. But equally, there are millionaires in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and so on, so that is deliberately missing the point, because much of the wealth now concentrated in the countryside comes from elsewhere. Rural England, as opposed to suburban or urban England in the countryside, needs, deserves and is entitled to expect that the countryside should be able to pay its own way and should not be a kind of neocolonial satrapy of urban Britain. Currently there is insufficient internally generated working capital, which inhibits the changes sought and the longer-term continuity and sustainability they require.

These days, the word “partnership” is on everyone’s lips, but it seems that there are at least two problems. First, there are many different visions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, already said, and there is need for at least a degree of agreement about what is needed. It is no good agreeing about what you do not want; it is necessary to have at least some consensus about what you do. The various arguments so often tend to be advanced by obsessives and extremists. What is required is an overall compromise to resolve mutually conflicting ideas, and intellectual rigour and flexibility are needed to effect acceptable compromise. I ask myself whether it is there.

Secondly, when government is involved in partnerships, too often it imposes its ideas and does not accord genuine engagement with others’ opinions. In this context, as was hinted at earlier, it seems that the current Government’s and the Administration’s understanding and appreciation of the realities of rural England are, shall we say, not strong.

Furthermore—again, this has been touched on—hearts and minds have to be captured. If that does not happen, it cannot work, and things cannot be achieved, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, said, only by the “big battalions” or the substance of the command economy. Private property, frequently in small units, is the essential characteristic and building block of the countryside, and that and the role of SMEs and microbusinesses are at the heart of solving these problems.

As well as the obvious physical characteristics of the land itself and what is happening on it, two further essentials are not really touched on in the report. The first is tax. A lawyer I know who specialises in these matters recently commented that it is now simply not clear how either capital gains tax or stamp duty land tax affect conservation covenants. If they do, they will probably render the whole idea more or less useless, and without clarity and certainty there can be no significant progress. The same principle applies right across the board. As I intimated earlier, in the real world, unless it is worth people’s while to implement these new ideas, things simply will not happen.

Secondly, at least as important albeit perhaps more esoteric is the legal character of the rights and processes needed to bring this about. For example, how do conservation covenants relate to instruments involved with carbon capture or food production? Can payments be stacked or are they mutually incompatible?

A century ago, the complications of traditional English land law and the manorial system were comprehensively reduced by the impact of the property legislation of 1925. There is a real risk that what may now come into being, with all its attendant cost, delay and obfuscating, could recreate much of what I might call the Dickensian law that was swept away at that point—again, the noble Earl, Lord Devon, touched on that point. Perhaps that might be a matter for the Law Commission.

In conclusion, when I was a boy, I remember enjoying Aesop’s Fables, one of which your Lordships will recall was “Belling the Cat”. A convention of mice concluded that their safety and well-being would be enhanced if one of them tied a bell around the cat’s neck. A volunteer was sought but none was forthcoming. It was a good idea but a bad plan because it could not be put into effect sensibly. There is a real possibility that the same may be true here.