Land Use in England Committee Report

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow my noble friend Lord Leicester, who, not for the first time in his family’s history, is at the forefront of agricultural innovation. It is a great pleasure, too, to take part in a debate on such an excellent committee report.

I very much agree with the central recommendation that we need a connected, comprehensive and long-term look at how we use land in this country—something that is full of research, revision and questioning. I see it very much as a body which is concerned with curation and comment, rather than control. I take to heart what my noble friend Lord Moylan said about the tendency of institutions to fossilise and become stuck in their precedent and their past. I think that it is possible to create something which is much more interested in getting conversation going, creating controversy and pursuing new avenues, but not within the Civil Service. The Civil Service, with its habit of changing personnel every three years and constant interdepartmental quarrels, is really not the right environment for this. It has to be something separate, and I hope that the Government will come to realise that. In summary, I rather share the vision of the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, which she expressed rather better than I have.

I will give some examples of the sort of things that we need to pay attention to. For instance, it is clear to me that we should not encourage forestry on prime agricultural land. It is also being borne on me, in the context of where I live in Eastbourne, that we should not encourage forestry on grassland, where it is intended to let the water soak into the aquifer so that we can have a bit more of it. Forestry tends to send water back into the atmosphere rather than down into the soil, so what we want is well-managed grassland.

Further, if you start introducing forestry into some of our open landscapes, you make big changes in them, both visually—something that is important to us as humans—and to wildlife. The curlew is an obvious example; it requires open spaces and a decent distance between the nearest forestry which harbours its predators and the space where it is nesting.

We are looking at something which requires an integrated understanding and a set of government policies which reflect that. When it comes to forestry, we should not only control, to some extent, where it is but really encourage the development of a long-term industry, so that it is a profitable and sensible thing for people to do.

It seems to me that, in moving in this direction, we should recognise that we are, in adding to the planning system, restricting the rights of private property owners. Again, my noble friend Lord Moylan pointed out that that is something that we have to have regard for.

If we go for a right to roam—something I have sympathy with; I have a woodland in Kent, and I allow public access to it—it is not without consequence. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said: “Let’s let everybody into woodland”. That is a wonderful idea, but who is going to pay for the management and insurance that follows from that? The amount of money that it is necessary to spend to make sure that bits of trees do not fall on people, and to cover the consequences of what might happen if they do, is quite considerable. Woodland in the south of England does not realise an income, unless it is somewhere that is sandy enough to grow pine trees. We need to think through the consequences of a right to roam for the landowners and, as my noble friend Lord Leicester said, for wildlife. It is fairly obvious that, if you have got a wood full of dogs, this will not encourage the ground-nesting birds much.

Respect for private property is something which is becoming obvious in the controversy over the Welsh plans for agricultural reform—the idea that farmers should be mandated to have 10% of their land under woodland and 10% under wildflowers. I just do not think that things work that way. To work as a matter of collaboration and incentivisation, recognising that each piece of land is unique and that you need flexibility, with different people doing things in different ways, as we are doing through ELMS, is a much better idea. I very much hope that the Government will come, even in the cause of multifunctionality, to encourage flowers on golf courses, which are at the moment a green desert but do not need to be. I cannot see that daisies on the fairway would be a great impediment to the noble game, which probably shows that I do not play it.

We clearly need guidance from the Government on where they will allow solar farms. Allowing solar farms on prime agricultural land is just daffy. We know we need that land for other purposes. We should also not allow biodiversity net gain schemes on prime agricultural land; there are bits where we really ought to be growing crops, and there is plenty of this country that we could happily cover in solar farms and wildflowers without losing a great deal. As the noble Earl, Lord Devon, said, if you manage a solar farm well, you will get an increase in wildlife, because you produce a pretty varied habitat among and between the panels.

To come back to what the noble Earl, Lord Devon, said, we are heading towards an understanding that owners of land have public duties, which we have forgotten and ought to be reminded of. My ancestors, as his did, got a lot out of King William and his successors, but it all came with obligations. Over the centuries, we and our successors have managed to shed those obligations; perhaps now is the time we get them back. I do not think that would be a bad thing at all.

As my noble friend Lady Rock said, why are we giving tax incentives to people who put in a solar farm or who run short agricultural tenancies? The point of giving inheritance tax exemption to farming was to encourage a long-term outlook. It is not necessary if you have a wind farm or a solar farm, or if you are running a five-year agricultural tenancy rotation. You are not doing what the tax incentive is there for. We really ought to review that.

I hope the Government—in whatever structure they choose, but if they choose the structure advocated by the committee—will look at research into carbon offsetting. We do not know enough over a long enough timescale about what land management systems work to achieve that. We ought to be looking at carbon sequestration in everything we do, in all our activities—building, infrastructure, planning, everything. One of the questions we ask should be, “How is this going to sequester carbon?” We are very short on that at the moment. There are big opportunities to come from adding that to our list of questions.

In looking at how we use land, we ought also to take a real look at infrastructure. I particularly think of water in that context. It is already becoming clear that substantial areas of this country are bad and will get worse when it comes to water shortages, whereas other bits will become inundated by the sea unless we are really careful and spend a lot of money on it. Eastbourne, where I live, comes into both categories. I would really like to see us having an institution which will take a really long view. In terms of water, we are talking about a hundred years rather than tens of years. Where is water going to come from? How are we going to keep water out? What are sensible policies to make that happen? A centre for conversation and research—something with no policies of its own, but a mission to uncover and encourage the generation of policies from around the country and its academic and active institutions, something long-term and independent —would be a great outcome of this report.