Environment: 25-year Plan

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, the point the noble Earl just made about the importance of working with those affected and interested is tremendously important. There is a lot of good will, and that needs to be maximised by enabling people to feel that they are part of the implementation of the plan.

I found the plan a good read. Those who drafted it should be commended; it is better than most government documents one reads. It also has a lot of interesting ideas and aspirations, as we have heard from several noble Lords. I like to put in a plug where it is deserved; the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, is winning a lot of brownie points in his role by his obvious personal commitment to the environment and the way in which he is going out of his way to get out of the ministry to meet and talk to people in the field. That is done well, and he should be thanked for that.

The plan is aspirational. It is short on detail and it is certainly very short on how it will be implemented. What the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, is also important: one must have an effective arrangement to measure progress. It will be crucial that it is felt to carry weight because it is independent and free-standing. It would be disastrous if the Government became their own monitor on progress. There needs to be an independent voice, which will be valuable for government itself.

When we look at what the plan talks about, we have to realise that for an awful lot of people the environment is not in this realm at all. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, once said something which really struck home to me: that we have to remember that, for very many people, “environment” is the block of flats in which they live. We must not become so concentrated on the countryside and the rural environment that we do not look at the importance all the time of enhancing and improving the urban environment. With the great drive in housing and affordable housing, it is terribly important that that is imaginatively tackled, with green space available to the inhabitants and with an immediate opportunity for youngsters, for example, to have fun and enjoy themselves without becoming a public nuisance.

It is also important in the urban environment to avoid stigma—but that goes for the countryside too. I have always thought it sad that we have created a situation in which people can say, “Those are the council houses”. With a bit more imagination, those houses could have been attractive houses which enabled people to feel that they were part of the community and not stigmatised as living on the council house estate. I hope that that kind of point will be kept in mind, too.

The plan does not overemphasise the issues of light and noise pollution, which have become great social curses. I was a youngster in the Second World War, and I came to appreciate the blackout. I remember my older sister taking me outside in the blackout on many occasions to look at the sky. How many children in our society have the opportunity to see the sky? It is crucial to their development and education to see themselves in perspective against the realities that are there. Light pollution needs to be given far more attention, as should the issue of noise pollution. Too many people have never had the chance to think in a peaceful and quiet environment—they experience noise all the time. Before I was born, my own family moved from central London to a rather attractive suburb outside London, on the North Downs. They said that one of the things they found difficult to adjust to was the noise of the individual vehicles, because for years they had been used to noise all the time, even back then in the 1920s and 1930s. That needs a great deal of attention as well. A lot of joined-up work needs to be done on healthcare, education, and certainly youth work.

We should remember that 80% of scheduled ancient monuments are on agricultural land. If the plan is talking about access, so people are able to learn from and enjoy our heritage, some issues need to be resolved. Again, this is an illustration of how we need more practical suggestions about how things will be tackled.

My last point picks up what has already been said by several other noble Lords. Environmental issues which affect us cannot be contained within national frontiers; they all have regional and global implications. If we are to have a strategy that is effective and right for our environment, it has to be one in which, inescapably, we work together with others in other nations on how we get it right.