Community Orchards

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am pleased, both as a Conservative Member of Parliament and as the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys, to speak about this important subject of community orchards. However, I am more pleased still, because I am also a russet, which is not merely a type of apple, but the name given to those who originate from the tiny village of Weaverham in the centre of Cheshire, which is where the Wareham russet was first invented. I am a true Wareham russet.

It is a pleasure to talk about community orchards. My home village of Weaverham was once awash with them. They grew both apples—Wareham russets—and our famous damsons, but in the immediate post-war period, they were all grubbed up to make way for council housing, to provide accommodation for those who went to work at the great Imperial Chemical Industries plant in Northwich.

We lost our community orchards, but sadly, we were not alone in our loss. Since 1945, we have lost 63% of our orchards one way or another. Indeed, in the traditional fruit-growing counties, such as Herefordshire, Kent and Worcestershire, the losses have been greater still.

However, things are stirring in the orchard world—a susurrus whistling through the bows, that some in the House have not yet quite heard. I should like to pay tribute to a very large number of organisations that I have contacted in the past week which have helped me to put my speech together. Common Ground, which is based in Shaftesbury in Dorset, is a particularly worthwhile organisation that has done much to promote apple day, which falls on 21 October, the same day as Trafalgar day. In fact, that gives added credence to the idea of making Trafalgar day our new bank holiday. We could perhaps call it apple day. Other groups, such as the Orchard Network and the Northern Fruit Group—the list is endless—do sterling work to protect heritage fruit species that I feel so passionate about. The People’s Trust for Endangered Species has just completed the national orchard inventory as part of its work to protect the noble chafer beetle. That is an example of biodiversity in action, which encompasses much of what orchards stand for.

However, I am sure the Minister is wondering why I summoned him on a Monday night, to sit here at the end of the day to talk about community orchards. I am sure he is not overly amused, but let me explain why I have come here tonight. This debate is not just about orchards, but about the meaning of localism. There is a need to recognise the distinctiveness of our towns, villages and communities, and orchards are a wonderful way of doing that.

Many people, when they heard that I would have this debate, asked, “What is a community orchard?” and I had to explain that they are orchards that are in the community. Anyone can go in and enjoy them at any time, and those people can come together as a community. They can be the focal point for a village, an estate or even just a block of flats. The concern that animates our national debate on cloned town centres, with their identical chains of shops, is also behind community orchards. We need distinctiveness and difference.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I absolutely applaud my hon. Friend in his call for more community orcharding. I come from the county of Herefordshire, which is thrilled to be the largest cider orchard county in the country. Does he share my view that we should not restrict cider and other orchards to rural areas, but encourage them within urban and suburban areas, where they can also give so much joy to local people?

[Paul Maynard]

Indeed, and I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. My constituency has no green space apart from a golf course plonked in the middle of it, so I would welcome more green of any variety.

It is also important to recognise that the last Government—although no Labour Member is in their place now—did something to recognise that orchards were a habitat at risk, as they were added to the list of 15 biodiversity action plan habitats. However, as no inventory had been made, we were not sure of the starting point for the action plan. The work that has just been done by the traditional orchard inventory project, helped by Natural England, has allowed us to identify 17,000 hectares of orchards, many of them basic community orchards. One sad aspect of that work is that 45% are considered to be in poor condition, and that is where we start to get into the political remit of this issue.

The natural environment White Paper contained a sole, but welcome reference to community orchards, in relation to Tower Hamlets, which is a very urban area. The issue of protection for these orchards is paramount so, with the authority of many of the stakeholders for these orchards, I ask the Minister what more he can do to offer protection to the orchards. Many people have complained to me about the difficulty of obtaining tree protection orders. There is a failure to realise that many fruit trees grow for many hundreds of years. For example, I had no idea that a pear tree could still be maturing after some 300 years.

We also need to ensure that any fruit produced by these trees is not wasted. That means better liaison with the cider industry and within communities. I was pleased to see that the White Paper mentioned local nature partnerships and nature improvement areas, which could encompass community orchards. I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that organisations such as Common Ground and the Orchard Network will be able to start to bid for money to allow them to assist local groups to conserve their older orchards through small grants for insurance, fencing, stakes and gates—all those things that are needed to put the infrastructure together to help us to build a community.

I am sure that the Minister recognises the importance of these orchards to biodiversity. I recall them from my childhood days as being an edible hedgerow, with so many varieties of fruit on offer in the village, but they are also communal assets. Some of the concern stems from the need for more statutory presumption against the grubbing up of these smaller orchards for in-fill development. We often have debates in this Chamber about back-fill, in-fill and bungalows popping up everywhere. Orchards are very susceptible to this, and I hope that the Minister will be able to guarantee that he will give some consideration as to how they can be more protected.

I recognise that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs cannot do it all. Orchards have a great potential. Indeed, the Department’s fruit and vegetables taskforce came up with a multitude of recommendations for cross-departmental working that will be very helpful. I am one of the few MPs who has managed to wade through the gargantuan Marmot review into healthy living, which is a 300-page leviathan of nanny-state prescriptions, but which made an important observation:

“Improving the good environment involves addressing issues concerning the accessibility of affordable and nutritious food that is sustainably produced, processed and delivered”.

I have referred to the importance of not wasting the fruit that grows in community orchards. My constituency is the fourth most deprived constituency represented by a Conservative MP and includes a particularly poor estate called Grange Park. It was where the Conservative party held its social action project during the 2007 party conference. That is where the fruit trees in my constituency came from—planted by the party as part of that social action project.

The great lesson I took from that experiment was that for many children on the estate, fruit comes in a bag from Iceland. In this week of all weeks, with Wimbledon being played just down the road from here, the notion that fruit such as strawberries have a season would be incomprehensible to many of the children on that estate. The importance of orchards as educational tools should be considered as well.

Although the Slow Food movement is growing in popularity—I was in Ludlow, not too many weeks ago, enjoying a food festival there—it must not become the preserve of the upper middle classes, or something chichi or fashionable. It has to be something that my constituents can access as well. I am pleased, therefore, that at the recent civic trust awards in Blackpool, a fruit-growing project in Blackpool South, Grow Blackpool, won a civic award. I have many other examples from around Lancashire of people who have written to me about their small community orchards.

There is a recognition that fruits and community orchards have a role to play in our local communities, and that, more importantly, localism is not just about what we ask our councillors to do, and what decisions we allow councils to take; it is also about how we see our communities and about this very important idea of particularism. What makes this country special, in my view, is that we manage to cram so much diversity into such a small geographic area. It is that local distinctiveness that makes this country so special. We should never become estranged from the nature at the heart of our communities, and orchards, in the right places, cared for, nurtured and built up, link people with the place in which they live and the history of that place. It certainly linked me to the history of the village I come from, and I very much hope that the community orchard movement will strengthen and grow, with the Government’s support and protection where appropriate. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts.