Environment Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for her useful intervention. She is right: the cost of pollution rarely features on the balance sheet. Her suggestion that, in order to move forward, we need to find a way of internalising those costs is spot on. It is also the main thesis of the Dasgupta review. She asked who will be responsible: ultimately, the water companies will need to improve their act in order to prevent pollution of our waterways, but it is for the Government to set the framework and the rules. It is not the Government who will deliver the solution on the ground: that will be for the water companies and they will be required to do so. She also asked if I would be willing to meet. Yes, of course, I would be happy to meet her, my noble friend the Duke of Wellington and anyone else who has a particular interest in this issue. I am very keen to get this right.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for assuring us that he is talking to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government about greywater and other related issues. I ask him to work really hard on this, because the longer it goes on, the more homes—hundreds of thousands—will be built that are not up to the standards that probably everybody in this House wants, including the Minister. Can he give us some idea of when we will get the new standards up and running, be it on greywater, flooding, heat conservation, net zero, or keeping houses cool in the future when temperatures rise? This is urgent, and housebuilders need to get on with it.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I am not sure that I can give the noble Lord a date, because that is not in the hands of Defra and certainly not in in mine. I can absolutely offer him an assurance, however. There are an enormous number of things that need to be done to building regulations in order to maximise the chance for nature to flourish, to tackle water waste, and to slow down the flow of surface water to prevent flooding. The list goes on and on. I am certainly not an expert: I have ideas of my own, but I am talking to a number of people outside government who really are experts. I am harvesting the best possible ideas and suggestions for building regulations. I cannot guarantee that I will win every argument, but I extend that invitation to Members of this House. If people have ideas about things that should be included—particularly for new-builds, but also retrofit—I will gratefully receive them because I am in the market for ideas.

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[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I have just been camping at Knepp for three nights—Friday, Saturday and Sunday—so I walked the land extensively, went on guided tours and saw the work being done. He is not correct when he says that a housing estate next door will in fact be of some kind of educational benefit. The whole point of Knepp is that a wildlife corridor was going to be created where this new housing development is that would take the birds, as well as some other animals, to the sea.

I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, because we need a rethink of how we look at land and what we do. We need to start using things imaginatively such as the middles of towns for people to live in. I live outside Taunton, the town centre of which has completely fallen apart in the last couple of decades. There are empty shops and closed-up buildings; there is no life in that town. Instead, you have miles and miles of small boxes outside the town that are extremely environmentally non-sustainable. They are miles from the schools and the town centre and the place has become a doughnut—it has that sort of hollowed-out feeling.

Unless we start to reimagine how we want to live, of course we will go on having the problems that we have all talked about, and 3,500 houses will continue to be put on the Knepp site. Storks have just been brought back and there are now about 120 storks flying around. We had lunch on Sunday under three trees where there were storks’ nests. It is completely magical. Those creatures will go if they suddenly find that they are under houses. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, is right: the Burrells decided to rewild Knepp because their land was not productive. They were losing £150,000 a year in 2000 and felt that they could not go on drowning the site in chemicals and trying to make weak soil support high-yield crops, so it was logical to rewild that site. However, they have no ambition to rewild the whole of England. They know that Knepp is a site of special interest and should be seen in that way—as an educational tool. It is buzzing with researchers from all over the world who are studying everything, including how a pig’s trotter makes a little pool that enables a particular flower to feed, which in turn has brought back the turtle dove. They have found all those connections that had been completely lost.

Of course we need good food, good farming and grade 1 land, so I hugely support the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, when he says that agro-ecology and agro-friendly farming have to be the way forward. I have recently been to the Groundswell conference, which is about min-till or no-till, whereby one makes just slices through the earth and does not disrupt the magic of our soil. Just as many crops are being grown without the inputs. We can do it.

I come back to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, to which I have put my name. What really matters in this is that if we do not give local authorities the ability to stand on their own two feet and enforce rules on people, we take away their agency. If one looks at causes such as the transition towns or Incredible Edible Todmorden, these are absolutely miraculous and wonderful community initiatives that have brought life, health, friendship and masses of plants in all sorts of forms back into the middle of towns. It destroys one’s belief in the system if one constantly fails, if the housing development goes up against all local opposition and if, over and again, one’s voice is turned down. We are going to need all those local people with vested interests in their local community if we are really going to make a difference. It is therefore blindingly obvious that local authorities need the teeth of this amendment to fight off any imposed housing quotas. We have to put nature first in the planning system. It is not tangential and we do not have an option.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, once again, I declare my interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership, which is rather relevant to a couple of my amendments.

I want to go back to the basic argument of what the Bill is about. There is a real issue—an emergency, as I and many others would describe it, in biodiversity and the quantum of nature in England. Because of that we have this Bill. It is about doing something—and we have to do something. However, while we all welcome nature recovery networks as a great initiative in the Bill for which I congratulate the Government, when we have that emergency and we have seen how the Aichi targets over the past 10 years mean that we have gone backwards in this area, we need those nature recovery networks actually to work. Exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, if we do not do that, what is the point?

This group is about the rubber hitting the road, if you like. This is “make your mind up” time. Are Nature Recovery Networks and biodiversity targets going to be something we can all feel good about because they are in legislation, or will they make sure there is change over the next decade? That is the choice that the Government have in these amendments. I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s response.

There is a great deal going on, as we have heard from noble Lords. If the biodiversity targets that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, described so well, are not implemented and joined up with the fundamental area of planning, we are throwing away this opportunity. We must tie it up with land use and farming, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and the noble Lord, Earl Caithness, have mentioned. Roughly 75% of England is agricultural, and if we get that right we can move forward in terms of biodiversity.

Farming is crucial to making nature recovery networks and biodiversity work. We have to tie that up with the organisations that have these responsibilities already, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said: drainage boards and the Environment Agency. That is true as well. I believe that it is essential, and I think the Committee does, that there should not just be “regard” for these nature recovery networks. They have to be embedded, planted, and statutorily mandated to comply with them. Otherwise, they will not have strength.

Down in Cornwall, as the Minister is probably well aware, we have a lot of beaver introductions—we were talking about those earlier on—and have gone through one of five nature recovery pilots. I have been very much involved, as chair of the local nature partnership. It is a great exercise to go through. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, talked about consultation with local communities. We have to get that buy-in, and I am pleased to say that some 700 people were involved in consultation with our pilot in Cornwall. We have a really good scheme there, but, coming back to one of my amendments, how the heck are these going to be resourced?

There are two necessities here: one is tying and mandating their use with other machinery, whether it is the Planning Act or agriculture—we will come onto ELMS in the next group—but there also have to be the resources. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said local authorities do not have ecologists at the moment. We have to have them so they can work on nature recovery networks as well as net gain. If we do not have the resources to develop nature recovery networks and get them to work, how will it happen?

The Government might say that we have the environmental land management scheme, with £2.5 billion worth of state aid to buy public goods, but I do not see that necessarily fulfilling the needs of nature recovery networks entirely. We have net gain; I hope most of that net gain will be done onsite, and there are potentially ways of having resources there, but those two together are not enough to make nature recovery networks work. How are we going to resource the implementation of these strategies? Those are the fundamental points.

In terms of my other two amendments, local nature partnerships were, I was sad to see, not even mentioned in the Bill. They came about through The Natural Choice: Securing the Value of Nature, the natural environment White Paper of June 2011. They were never put on a statutory basis, but they exist throughout England, full of people from all walks of life. In Cornwall and Scilly, we have local authorities, the Environment Agency, Natural England, farmers, ecologists and ordinary independent directors to make nature work in our region.

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[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall be pretty brief on this, because both my amendments should really have been in the previous group, although one of them is particularly important.

First, I take just one minute to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. She was concerned that she should not be consumed by vultures, but on the of Isles of Scilly, we have an Egyptian vulture visiting this year. There may not be an opportunity next year, so there are big decisions. That vulture joins Wally the Walrus, who, unfortunately, has come some 2,000 miles too far south on an ice floe and is trying to land his big weight—up to a tonne—on local vessels. I say to the Minister that we have some introductions that were not necessarily there before the last ice age, but there we are.

I shall be very brief. My first amendment says that local authorities must have a duty to implement nature recovery networks. That comes back to the theme of the previous group, and I shall not go through that again. My second amendment, which is also slightly out of place here, is key. It comes back to environmental land management schemes, which will be the big game-changers in practice in the countryside over the next decade. Why? Because they have real resources behind them—£2.5 billion per annum, potentially—to put into nature recovery. Their whole ethos and guiding hand is public goods being paid for by public money, and their concentration is to be on biodiversity—not all of it is for nature recovery but a large proportion of it is.

We have the three tiers, as they were called: the sustainable farm initiative, the nature recovery area and the whole landscape side. I am stating the totally blindingly obvious, but you cannot have that going off in one direction and nature recovery networks going off in another. One is primarily produced by local government, AONBs or national parks; the other is produced and decided by Defra centrally. The good news is that they are both within the “Defra family”, but I have little hope that, without real concentration, one part of Defra will be talking to the Natural England side, on the other, on nature recovery network implementation. My challenge is this: how are we going to get those two key elements to work together, rather than working in conflict?

The only other thing I would say is that I was delighted to put my name to my noble friend Lord Oates’s amendment; he has expounded those virtues tremendously. I will not follow on from that, except to entirely endorse his arguments.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb.