Biodiversity Duty: Public Authorities

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that one problem is that the big developers can outgun the planners, and the planners are not always of very good quality? For example, in the beautiful medieval town of Framlingham in Suffolk, which I know rather well, there are two big developments. One is excellent and is by Hopkins Homes; the other is by Persimmon and is an absolute disgrace—it should never have been allowed and the developer has got away with everything.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I passed through that great town only on Friday, so I identify with what my noble friend says on the matter. That is precisely why we are going to mandate biodiversity net gain. We need to work with all developers—domestic and commercial—to ensure that there are habitats for wildlife enhancement and that we leave those habitats in a better state than they were pre-development.

Litter Strategy

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I had better check on that precisely for the noble Baroness. I will put a letter in the Library. The whole purpose of the deposit return scheme is to ensure that, in our ever more circular economy we need to recycle and reuse more, whether it is glass, plastic or aluminium. I will write to the noble Baroness.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that a much cleaner Britain ought to be a relatively easy political objective to achieve? Will he agree that one thing that is needed is more people picking up litter? As we are trying to keep people out of prison, a great deal more use could be made of community service orders to ensure that litter is picked up.

Ivory Bill

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 24th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Flather (CB)]

My Lords, the more difficult it is to register, the more difficult it is to decide what needs to be registered and the more difficult it will be to maintain the register. You cannot watch everybody doing everything. It is very important that matters are simple and can be taken on board by everybody. When I was 12 years old, my father had my portrait miniature painted on ivory. I hope it will not be caught by the Bill.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the Bill and its intentions, but it has failed the test of proportionality in many respects. I would not have supported my noble friend Lord Cormack’s amendment, because I thought it was too wide, but I support Amendment 24, in the name of my noble friend Lord Inglewood, on the need for de minimis registration. To introduce bureaucracy of that sort is quite crazy. Some of us have been fighting for years to prevent intrusion into people’s houses. I am glad to say that that has been reduced with the help of the Law Lords and happens much less now.

However, something like this is absurd. I remind your Lordships that in 1966, when there was a Labour Government and an economic crisis—they went together at that time—they introduced a statutory instrument requiring anybody who owned more than three gold coins to hand them in, but it was tokenism. People did not do it, of course. I remember various questions being asked about how many convictions there had been, and how many coins had been handed in. The answer was none.

Unenforceable law is bad law and we really must not encourage it. Some of the provisions of the Bill are so OTT that we must stand up to them, particularly as they have nothing intrinsically to do with the Bill. I support my noble friend Lord Inglewood’s amendment.

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Quin has spoken eloquently on the effect of the Bill on future generations of Northumbrian pipers. Like her, we cherish musical tradition and would not wish the music played by pipers and enjoyed to cease. I pay tribute to the department for organising a visit by a member of its team to assess the instrument and thank her for meeting the society. However, as has been reported back to the department, some of the pipes have problems under the Bill. It is my hope that the Northumbrian Pipers’ Society itself can take on a role in seeing that instruments are recycled to new pipers through bequests and other measures, and that new instruments avoid the provisions of the Bill. It would be difficult to create a new exemption for Northumbrian pipes. As the House will later see, we have tabled Amendment 78 to report on the effects of the Bill on musical instruments more generally. Evidence provided through the consultation, including from the Musicians’ Union, showed that the vast majority of commonly played and traded instruments, including violins, pianos and bagpipes, comprise less than 20% ivory.

Turning to Amendment 2 and others in this group, we do not support what they wish to achieve, which amounts to a reduction in the provisions and effectiveness of the Bill, which is a commitment of both parties to introduce a ban on the sale of ivory. The Bill includes limited exemptions to the ivory trade that are sufficiently narrow to ensure that they will not contribute to the poaching of elephants. The carefully crafted clauses represent the culmination of a productive collaboration between NGOs, law enforcement, museums, art dealers and musicians. It is Labour’s view that the Bill strikes the right balance. I call on all the proposers of amendments in this group to withdraw or not to move their amendments so that future generations can enjoy living in a world with elephants.

The Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference, held earlier this month in London, underlined the importance of the UK putting in place a near-total ban on UK ivory sales as soon as possible. This legislation builds on the resolution agreed at the 2016 Conference of the Parties to CITES to phase out domestic ivory markets and will give the UK greater credibility in continuing to press other key countries in south-east Asia with a history of ivory trade to commit to closing their markets and to implementing strong domestic ivory bans. China closed its ivory market in 2017. Ivory poaching is now the fourth-largest crime sector after arms, drugs and trafficking. I remind your Lordships’ House that 20,000 elephants are killed each year, or some 55 a day.

I turn to Amendment 24 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, which seeks to remove registration as a precondition of allowed sales of de minimis objects. The noble Lord raised concerns about proportionality and others have followed with remarks on both the registration fee and administration involved, which would necessitate photographing, measuring and examining the object for any distinguishing features before uploading the information to a database. I am sure the noble Lord would accept that photographing, measuring and examining the object for any distinguishing features would be part of any normal process of listing an item for sale at an auction house or on an online marketplace. It is our view that registration is necessary for enforcement. The proposed system places a small administrative responsibility and a small financial cost on the seller, who, in turn, will gain from the exemption to the ban on dealing in ivory. Crucially, by registering an item through the system, the applicant will be confirming that, to the best of their knowledge, all the information provided is correct and the item therefore meets the exemption. The APHA, the regulator and the police will have access to the registration system to enable them to carry out any enforcement and monitoring action necessary. The APHA will also carry out spot checks on items registered to check for accuracy and compliance. This is also a key and necessary part of the regulations.

Amendment 22 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, would remove the size criterion for portrait miniature exemptions. The noble Lord will recall from our previous consideration of this issue that the Government added the category of portrait miniatures to the list of exemptions in Committee in the other place. Emma Rutherford, a representative of Philip Mould & Co, an expert on portrait miniatures, gave evidence on how the exemption for portrait miniatures could be refined to add a size limit, and agreed that the suggestion of six inches by eight inches would be sensible. This is 320 square centimetres, which would allow between 90% and 95% to be exempt. The Government have moved considerably on many of these features and I therefore call on the House to reject these amendments.

Environment: 25-year Plan

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I should like to say, first, how glad I am that we have my noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble as the Minister. He is pretty good and we are lucky to have him.

My interests are declared in the register but the only one that I shall particularly mention in this debate is that I am president of the Suffolk Preservation Society. However, I would like to refer to the fact that I spent 12 years on the old Countryside Commission. I mention that because the chairman throughout virtually the whole of that time was our late colleague Lord Barber of Tewkesbury. He died just a few weeks ago aged 99, so he did pretty well in terms of the length of his life but he also did a wonderful thing for this country. We all owe him a deep debt of gratitude for his perceptive and dedicated work as a conservationist.

There is a bit of a lesson there. In those days, I happened to be on that commission and on the Rural Development Commission at the same time, and there was also something called English Nature. Those three bodies have now been amalgamated into Natural England. Following on from what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, I say to the Government that invigilation is very important. It is important to have a sensible body to advise the Government on what the pressure groups are saying. Pressure groups are quite different; they overstate their case. However, bodies such as the ones I have mentioned or indeed the Environment Agency, which the noble Baroness chaired with distinction, are there to give a balanced assessment, and that is very important. Civil servants in Whitehall are very clever and so on but you cannot expect them to know very much about these things.

One thing about having an invigilating body is that, if it covers too big an area, the people who form the council or whatever it might be—outsiders; people like us who sit on it—have too big a responsibility to be able to do it properly. If there are a dozen of them and they have a huge area to cover, they will not do it effectively. Having the Countryside Commission, English Nature and the Rural Development Commission was a better way of handling things than having one much larger quango.

We are talking here about the beauty of Britain. The countryside is one of our very greatest treasures and that is why we have to protect it. In earlier days, it could be destroyed and replaced; now, that is much more difficult—once it is destroyed and put under several feet of concrete, the danger is that it will never come back again. I remember the very wise words of one of our best Secretaries of State in that area, Nicholas Ridley, who was, I think, the uncle of my noble friend Lord Ridley. His policy was “the protection of the countryside for its own sake”. That really mattered. It stated succinctly something that we and the civil servants all followed, and it was very helpful. Conservation and protection matter to us. It is partly a matter of dealing with big problems that arise but it is partly also a matter of luck. If the old Palace of Westminster had not burned down in 1834, it might have lingered on quite unfit for purpose and been replaced, perhaps in the 1960s, with some ghastly concrete brutalism, which we would be only too glad to move out of. Let us cherish what we have.

I want very quickly to mention two or three points. The first is an example of where we can save things. One of the great achievements of the National Trust—a body of 5 million people, bigger even than Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party—is operation Neptune. Without it, we would have lost the coastline for ever. The original target was to acquire and protect 900 miles of coastline, and I think it has more than 700 miles already, which is good.

Let me give a practical example, however, of where things have gone wrong in my own backyard, the little medieval town of Framlingham. Framlingham is very important historically and in its beauty. There were three big development plans to plonk 360 houses in three different areas. One area was a genuine brownfield site, where there had been a mill. That development was done by a company called Hopkins Homes; it is not completely right, but the company made a pretty good job of it and should be praised. The other development is called Mount Pleasant. It was done by Persimmon and the results are perfectly frightful. I recommend that those noble Lords who have not done so read the wonderful speech by the noble Lord, Lord Best, when he introduced the housing debate on 11 January. The third development is in an area that has been taken over by Taylor Wimpey, which is putting in another 150 or so houses. It is a greenfield site, and the development will block the view of the castle and the church from the east side. It should never have been allowed but, sadly, the inspector allowed it. We in the Suffolk Preservation Society did our best to save it, but we did not succeed.

I hope that one thing the Government will do is ensure that the inspectors are kept well directed as to what the desires of the people and the interests of the country really are. You cannot rely on the developers: they will, understandably, do whatever they think will make them a quick buck.