Environment Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Lords Chamber

I believe that Amendment 52 in particular, which explicitly links time-bound measures to the delivery of long-term targets, is truly essential if we are to give people the clarity they need to make decisions about planting trees, managing land and all the things they have to do today, tomorrow, next week or next year. That is entirely lacking at the moment.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, have all withdrawn from this debate, so I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am sorry that I have not withdrawn yet as it might have hastened the business, but I want to support Amendment 52, in the names of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch, the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord Randall. I welcome the requirement in the Bill for the Government to have rolling statutory plans in place to improve the natural environment. In fact, I am mystified by the extent and detail of this section of the Bill. It rather makes a meal of the review and renewal process. Can the Minister give us a clue as to why the Bill has to go into such paroxysm? Being a suspicious human being, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. It would be useful to know why from the Minister.

I want to make two comments. First, the current 25-year plan for the environment is to be regarded as the first environmental improvement plan. That made my heart sink, as the 25-year plan is inordinately long and mostly narrative. It has a scatter of actions; many are unmeasured and some are not even measurable. It is a loose and baggy monster. There is no logical thread of targets to be achieved, what policies and actions are needed to achieve them and who should be responsible for implementing the policies and actions, so that they achieve their targets. I would very much like to see that sort of structure going into the requirement for environmental improvement plans.

My second point is that Clause 7 sets out the required contents of the EIPs. I agree with the amendment that these need to be strengthened to ensure that the EIPs have time-bound specific measures, which are explicitly linked to the delivery of long-term targets and interim milestones. I very much support Amendment 52, but also Amendment 53, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Boycott, which mirrors the wording of the 2008 Climate Change Act and requires the Government to set out the proposals and policies, not just steps, to meet all the targets and deliver environmental improvement.

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[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]]

I am sorry, I meant to withdraw from this group, so I do not wish to comment. I apologise for not withdrawing earlier.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has also withdrawn from this group, so I call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd.

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak briefly, as the points have largely been made. In my view, it is essential that Clause 7 is strengthened to give it greater effectiveness. The only requirement currently set out is that the plan

“must set out the steps Her Majesty’s Government intends to take to improve the natural environment in the period to which the plan relates.”

There can be no doubt that this is far too vague. The proposals in the various amendments tie the plans to the achievement of targets, and the precise language of these amendments is important. My view is that the use of the words “enable” or “ensure” in relation to the meeting or achievement of targets is the best approach, as that would require the plans to set out concrete and achievable steps to enable the target to be met. That I why I think that the language used in particular in the amendment proposed by the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, contains that specificity.

That is important because specific and precise language will set out what the duty of the Government is. The public must be able to see exactly what steps are to be taken to meet the targets, and then judge for themselves the commitment and realism with which the Government set about the significant changes that will be required. It would be unrealistic to take any position that there will be powerful interests that are adversely affected by such targets, and who—for reasons that may be understandable, but are wrong—would seek to delay the achievement of those targets. The easiest way to defeat such persons who seek to delay is by transparency and specificity, which is generally more effective than court enforcements, to which we shall return later in the Bill. Requiring the Government to set out the steps is absolutely essential; the vagueness contained in the current Bill is the enemy of achievement.

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Amendments 53 to 58 not moved.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

My Lords, we now come to the group beginning with Amendment 59. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate.

Amendment 59

Moved by

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, has withdrawn, so I call the next speaker the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken in this debate so I point first to my interests in the register. Specifically, I point out that I own land of environmental and historic significance. My comments are essentially probing ones attached to amendments in this grouping and relate to the Bill more generally.

My starting point is supporting the general gist of what the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has said. In particular, I would like to reiterate comments I made briefly during the Agriculture Act, where I sensed that some of your Lordships were a little bit sceptical about the point I was making, but I believe they were not right in that. It is commonplace to say that all landscape in the UK is, in one shape or another, made land by man. But there is a category—I am specifically referring to landscape parks and gardens—in which the natural and deliberately planned fuse in a kind of hybrid, because humans deploy natural materials to create a work of art. They range in scale from being only a few acres to being what Stephen Switzer, the 18th century designer and author, described as

“aiming at an incomprehensible Vastness, and attempting at Things beyond the reach of Nature”.

To use a contemporary form of words, they are a form of land art.

Our great parks and gardens are probably this country’s greatest distinctive contribution to 18th century visual culture and possibly to global visual culture more generally. I hasten to add that “landscaping” is not used in its general contemporary sense of hard or soft landscaping. “Park” in this context does not have its general contemporary meaning of urban or country and, for that matter, “garden” does not merely mean what it means these days, although it may include them. All these are conceived with a complicated and important cultural, philosophical and intellectual framework which links them to all kinds of other disciplines and art forms. Probably the best-known practitioner is Capability Brown, but he has many predecessors and successors from Charles Bridgeman at the beginning of that century to Humphry Repton at the end of it.

These are landscapes that are incredibly fragile and inherently physically unstable. There is a matter of course because of the inevitability of plants dying. This, though, in some senses, paradoxically, can help to preserve them, but they are easily swept away by changes in taste and in rural land use—things like golf courses and urban development, which, in turn, often lead to physical disintegration and dismemberment. Quite how many there are I do not really know, and I dare say not more, anyway, than 1,000. Sometimes, they can suddenly come out of the undergrowth, like, for example, the well-known Lost Gardens of Heligan. Or, equally, they can disappear more or less completely, like Eastbury in Dorset, designed by Vanbrugh and now green fields. As Sir Thomas Browne put it, “green grass grows where Troy town stood”.

The purpose of these remarks is simply to seek confirmation from the Minister of reassurance that such things as these, which are neither solely natural nor solely manmade, but a hybrid, will be given the highest consideration in the context of what this Bill does in respect of land. They are, after all, one of our nation’s glories and give a large number of people in our country both pleasure and inspiration.

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[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB) [V]]

My Lords, there are now very few true wildernesses left on earth. The vast majority of landscapes are the result of millennia of human interaction with the natural world. So when we think of the environment we should not just bring to mind an untouched pastureland; there is no such thing. As we know, the way fields have been laid out has varied constantly throughout the ages; the same is true of gardens.

These acres are also where people have lived, worked and played, and the environment cannot be considered apart from them. The land still betrays the marks of the past, as is dramatically illustrated by the finds at Sutton Hoo, and, to take one example, in the way the great tower of Ely Cathedral rises above the Fens.

I strongly associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, who was ably followed by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington. When we are thinking about the environment, what we are really thinking about is a fusion of the natural world and human creativity over many centuries. I therefore very much welcome this group of amendments, especially the inclusion of the words

“beauty, heritage, and people’s enjoyment of the natural environment.”

These words matter, because they concern the environment, which is of value in itself, but also because they have to do with human well-being—physical, aesthetic, and, yes, spiritual. They bring out the fact that being human involves being aware of our past and of the way we are shaped by it.

I also note the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, about the fact that there are also in the landscape people who have to make a living there. They, too, need to be taken into account.

The word “beauty” is not fashionable among philosophers or art historians today, but, as the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote about beauty:

“We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”


To put it more prosaically, most ordinary people do know that something meaningful is conveyed by the word “beauty”—and, more than anywhere else, they look for it in the natural world, that creative fusion of nature and human creativity over many centuries.

I hope the Minister will look favourably on these amendments, and that, if he cannot accept them in their present form, he will come back with revised wording that meets their main thrust.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, has withdrawn from this group, so I call the next speaker, the noble Earl, Lord Devon.

[The Earl of Devon (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the Committee appears to be in complete consensus on these amendments; I too am concerned about the gaping hole where heritage should sit within this Bill. Therefore, I am an enthusiastic supporter of the various amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and would have added my name to them were they not so heavily oversubscribed. It is essential for heritage to be in the Bill to ensure that man’s many historic and essential interventions in the landscape can be preserved and enjoyed for centuries to come.

In his response to these comments at Second Reading, the Minister pointed to the presence of heritage in the 25-year environment plan—our first EIP—but without heritage being in the Bill, there is no requirement that it will be included in the second EIP or any later ones. If it is anything, heritage is a long-term concern and that needs permanent status within this legislation.