Environment and Climate Change Committee Report: An Extraordinary Challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our Land and Sea by 2030

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I appreciate that speech. I have to echo a lot of what has already been said by many noble Lords. The noble Baroness, Lady Miller, recalled that many years ago, when we were opposite numbers on the right to roam Bill, we were addressing the problems of squaring access with beautifying the countryside, but also starting to talk about reversing the decline in biodiversity—which, regrettably, has got significantly worse since then.

I then spent four years at Defra, largely dealing with the common agricultural policy and various livestock pandemics. I do not remember much attention being paid to the greening of the countryside, nor do I remember addressing the designation of protected areas until very late in my role, when I received a question from a noble Lord about SSSIs. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, referred to the favourable status of SSSIs declining dramatically; it was already declining when I received this question, and it has not been reversed.

Monitoring the areas we have already designated has been ineffective. The main purpose of the other protected areas is not greening, increasing biodiversity or whatever; it is the beauty of and access to the landscape, and ensuring that fairly large areas have a degree of protection from industrialisation or residential development.

This is a complex problem, because people assume that the label of protection, which includes AONBs and national parks, actually means something to do with nature. In reality, it means relatively little. The whole thing has to be reversed. The public do not fully understand them, normal maps used for walking or visiting the countryside do not mark them, there is little effective status to these designations and there are too many of them.

I hope that part of the future programme will look at the current designations and see if we can go further, using them as a tool in the context of the broader land use strategy we are supposed to be developing. We can then begin to meet the targets that were—I think the word is “boldly”—designated by the Government and adopted internationally. I praise the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and others who committed to and are pushing that, but the fact is that the whole structure of designation, of regulation and of the resources available to regulators such as the Environment Agency, Natural England and local government has reduced in this area in recent years. I hope that we are about to turn a corner and that new Ministers recognise the need for that.

This is broader than that, because the biggest environmental and land use policy, the principles of which we all approved in the last Parliament, in the Environment Act and the Agriculture Act, envisages improvement in what is usually referred to as carbon reduction and greening but is agricultural practice more broadly. That needs driving in a new direction. Unfortunately, most of the schemes that have come out, particularly in the Agriculture Bill, make the mistake of emphasising hiving off from farming bits of land that are to be regarded as green and as contributing to biodiversity targets.

Some of that has to happen, but we will not achieve our targets if we do not also address the problem of making sure that food production, which should continue at a high level, also becomes greener, less carbon intensive and less biodiversity destroying. If we hive off bits of agricultural land, grazing land and upland land in particular, from the requirement to help meet biodiversity targets, we will be making a serious mistake. There is no need for there to be such diverse problems.

One of the issues for the ELMS strategy is that we deliver an outcome that is consistent and points in the same direction, instead of dividing up land into different parcels with substantially different biodiversity approval rates. That strategy has to be abandoned.

We have not tackled the problem of marine areas. We have designated some as higher marine areas, but we have not taken steps to reduce fishing and dredging in our inshore and beach areas. Unless we do that, we will not fulfil the target on the marine side. There is a great possibility of managing to do so on the land, but there is a lot more to do on the marine side, starting, as someone suggested earlier, with banning bottom dredging.