Volunteer Groups in Rural Settings

Debate between Tim Farron and Anthony Mangnall

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for continuing his record of intervening in nearly every one of my Westminster Hall debates. He does so with absolute accuracy and a commitment to raise important issues such as that. The National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association are fantastic organisations, but we need to look at how we can help within communities, such as in agriculture and fisheries in my community. During the pandemic, I saw fisheries groups, farming groups and young farmers band together to help in the community. It is right to use such a debate to discuss and contemplate how we can support those groups in turn, how we can reassess the structures that keep them going and ensure that we can tackle loneliness and, indeed, suicide, which is all too prevalent in the agricultural sector.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I wondered whether it might be helpful to intervene after another intervention, but the hon. Gentleman is being very generous. I congratulate him on all that he has said; he is making really important points and delivering them well. B4RN—Broadband for the Rural North—is a wonderful community interest company that has connected thousands of homes in rural Cumbria and north Lancashire to the internet, ensuring that there is connectivity. It is basically run by volunteers on the ground. The volunteer groups in Warcop, Sandford, Coupland Beck, Bleatarn and Ormside have done brilliant work alongside B4RN to bring hyper-fast broadband to their communities, but at the eleventh hour, the Government pulled the rug from under them by saying that their communities are no longer a priority area. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government should rethink and back these volunteers and their communities?

[Anthony Mangnall]

I am always concerned about any platform that might help the hon. Gentleman to get his message out to his constituents. In this instance, however, he is absolutely right. When living in a rural constituency, as I do in south Devon, internet connectivity is absolutely essential. We have upgraded our internet in south Devon through volunteer groups working together with state and private enterprise—something I will touch on later—and we absolutely need to look at how we can find the balance between private, public and charitable to ensure that people are getting the services they need, especially in the new working environment post pandemic. I thank him for his intervention.

Volunteer groups are the fabric of our society in rural settings, and we must do all we can to sustain, encourage and learn from them. In 2020, I visited Hope Cove lifeboat station, and I was made aware of the UK’s 54 independent lifeboat stations. These non-Royal National Lifeboat Institution stations operate at a local level, staffed by volunteers and funded by local donations. They do not benefit from being part of a wider system, at least until now. From seeing the vital work of Hope Cove’s independent lifeboat station and speaking with volunteers, I was energised into action. I am pleased to inform the Minister—and you, Mr Sharma—that since that meeting with Hope Cove lifeboat station, my colleague Rachel Roberts in south Devon and I have worked extremely hard to create the National Independent Lifeboat Association, known as NILA. I am grateful to some Members here who helped me in that process.

NILA seeks not to take away the independence of independent lifeboat stations, but to promote and highlight their work while ensuring that the machinery of state is taking notice of its work and using these vital stations to keep people safe on our waterways. Since its establishment, a board has been appointed, with myself as president—that is, until I am usurped by someone important. The Charity Commission has registered it as a national charity, and just last month, United Kingdom Search and Rescue admitted it to its ranks. Once again, this is an example of where local organisations and volunteer-led services can provide a national service without huge costs and bureaucratic rigmarole to deliver an important and necessary service.

Beyond LandWorks and NILA, I will mention one group in detail, I believe for the first time in the House of Commons: the Rapid Relief Team. I am grateful that some of them are in the Gallery today. The RRT was born out of the work of the Plymouth Brethren, and I confidently suggest that it has helped people in nearly every constituency across the country. I had my own dealings with the RRT a few weeks ago, when a constituent was in dire need of medical equipment. I did not know where to turn; I asked integrated care boards and local healthcare groups, but I found myself being continually rebuffed—that is, until I spoke to the RRT. Within a day of contacting it about my constituent’s concerns, my constituent was greeted and given the medical equipment he needed. He is now living a life where he can even get out and about, and I am particularly grateful to the RRT for its efforts in that case.

Across the UK, the RRT has 3,302 approved volunteers, and its most recent impact report shows how it has effectively set about helping in the community. It has supported more than 366 events, served 95,027 meals and gifted 22,571 volunteer hours. In south Devon and across the country, the RRT has helped to deliver incident and training exercise support to emergency services, and relief at home and abroad. It is a flexible organisation that can meet the need from unexpected events.

The work of the RRT takes it across Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as the UK. It has effectively harnessed the power of teamwork by working with the private sector to encourage philanthropy and volunteering. It is even more remarkable to consider that its work has focused on emergency and disaster relief, homelessness, poverty and hardship, youth, and health and disability, and that it has been able to effectively move the dial in those areas without a single penny of Government funding.

We owe those organisations, and all the ones that I have not mentioned, a huge debt of thanks and gratitude for their work. The three examples I have given remind us how to solve local problems from a grassroots perspective, as well as how to empower communities and encourage greater private sector involvement. They also remind us that the state does not have all the answers, nor does it always need to be involved. However, although fantastic organisations such as the RRT, LandWorks and NILA all depend on volunteers, the statistics since the pandemic have shown a concerning decline in the number of people willing to volunteer. We need to consider how we can encourage a return to volunteering. Failure to do so will irreparably impact the fabric of rural and, indeed, urban communities, and only cost the Government more in the future.

Several funds have been made available through national and local government. For instance, the £5 million platinum jubilee village hall fund was announced, and the bidding in for the funding process ended in January this year. May I ask the Minister how much of that money has been allocated to date, and whether any extension is being considered? The UK search and rescue volunteer training fund helps organisations such as NILA and the RRT to train their volunteers to go out and be as effective as possible. It would be interesting to have the statistics on how many people are being trained every year, and to know how the bidding process can be streamlined to ensure that it is as effective as possible.

The Minister’s Department has also announced the volunteering futures fund; I believe that £7 million has been made available to volunteering funds across the country. May I ask the Minister how much of that money has been allocated, whether the funding will be continued over the next few years, and whether we can provide certainty to local organisations, where necessary, that it will be available in the next five and 10 years? Of course, other methods can be used, such as local authority funding, section 106 funding and allowances within councils to be able to talk about these issues.

Time, job constraints and now costs are putting off volunteers. We need to think about how we can encourage more people to take up the worthy work of volunteering, not necessarily through regulation, but through encouragement and co-operation with fantastic organisations such as those represented by the people who are attending the debate. We need to think carefully about how we support volunteer groups across this country. I suggest that by encouraging private sector involvement, as well as Government adoption of local solutions, we can empower local communities and deliver across the country. Finding the balance between state, private and charitable sectors is the answer to addressing many of the challenges we face.

If Members will forgive me for recommending a book, this is well presented in “The Third Pillar: How the State and Markets are leaving Communities Behind” by Raghuram Rajan, the former Indian central bank leader. The case is made about ensuring that the balance is found between each of the three core structures in our society and ensuring that we can get the resources to where they need to go. We need to reset the balance and make the case for better co-operation between the three pillars so that we can meaningfully ensure that our volunteer groups can effectively deliver on their objectives, and support our rural communities.

There is, as ever, more work to be done in this field, but I conclude by saying that I owe a debt of gratitude to the extraordinary volunteers who have done so much in my constituency and across south Devon, and to all the volunteer groups who have done so much across all of our respective constituencies and, indeed, the country. Whether they worked during the pandemic, work abroad or work in the United Kingdom, they do so because they have pride in the work that they do and because they feel a need to take a part and a hand in society. As politicians, as Government and as officials watching this debate, we must do all we can to encourage that work and action. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

Trade Deals: Parliamentary Scrutiny

Debate between Tim Farron and Anthony Mangnall

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Ms Elliott.

I pay huge tribute to the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) for securing this debate and for his excellent speech, much if not most of which I agreed with. Like him, I am a free trader. Free trade is massively important, and not just for prosperity; if we had more free trade with the markets on our doorstep, the cost of living crisis would not be as bad as it is.

Free trade is important for fairness and prosperity, but also for peace, because it integrates countries and makes conflicts between them seem much less plausible and more unthinkable. Let us remember that the European Coal and Steel Community, in its first few years in the 1950s, was about knitting together countries that had been at war. The accession of the eastern European states through the ’90s and noughties was about knitting together countries that had been enemies on either side of the cold war.

Free trade is dead important, and my criticism of the Australia and New Zealand deals is a criticism not of free trade but of deals that are not free—if they are not fair, they are not free. It is absolutely right that, as a country that has taken back control as a sovereign nation, we should be able to dictate the negotiating terms on which we go about setting up trade deals. How could Parliament have dealt with this better or be given the power to deal with it better? Most MPs on both sides of the House wanted Parliament to do its job better than it was allowed to, particularly on the New Zealand and Australia trade deals.

Better scrutiny means that Parliament should be able to sign off the negotiating mandate, and then sign off the deal itself. Surely, as the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) said, we have a right as a country to dictate the terms on human rights, animal welfare, environmental issues and carbon reduction. They should surely underpin the negotiating mandate of any trade deal. Then, when a vote is taken, it must not be taken after the damage has been done.

The Conservative party’s 2019 manifesto stated:

“In all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards.”

That is not true. That manifesto commitment has been broken.

Let us look in particular at the deal with Australia. The average suckler beef herd in Britain is 30 cows. In Australia, it is hundreds upon thousands of cattle. It is not that Australians are brutes and terrible at animal welfare, but the nature of farming in Australia means that it is cheaper per unit and crueller in practice. The same animal husbandry cannot be done for 1,000 cattle as for 30.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good speech, but I urge a bit of caution on that point, because we would never sign trade agreements with other countries if we expect them to have exactly the same standards. As he rightly pointed out, we have the highest standards in animal welfare around the world. The hope is that, if we sign trade agreements with places such as Australia, they can start seeing how they can match our standards and rise up to them, rather than us lowering ours, because there is absolutely no intention of us doing that.

[Tim Farron]

Well, that is the theory, but the Government’s own figures and modelling show that the Australia trade deal, for the very reasons I was just setting out, will give a £94 million hit to British farming. There is no doubt that the deal has sold out and—in the words of Minette Batters, the excellent president of the National Farmers Union—betrayed British farmers. The impact of the trade deal undermines British farming and the standards and ethics of the United Kingdom in general—in particular of the way we farm. That is added to a set of assaults on British farming.

The transition to the new farm payments scheme is in complete chaos. The removal of direct payments—20% by this Christmas—will plunge many farmers into poverty. Meanwhile, many farms are trying to engage with the new environmental land management system. Two years down the road, they will change their businesses, and now they do not know what to do. The Government have sort of part-listened and have thrown everything up in the air; it is total chaos. There is chaos in farming and in the market.

The greenest thing that the British Government could do is keep Britain’s farmers farming, because without farmers we cannot deliver the environmental goods. Likewise, we cannot deliver the food that we all rely on. If we become less and less self-sufficient, that has a moral impact as we push up the price of commodities for the poorest counties in the world. The failure to conduct fair and transparent trade deals with the scrutiny of this Parliament undermines British farming in general and puts at risk our environmental imperatives, our food production and, by connection, the poorest people in the world, whose food prices will go up because we cannot feed ourselves. That is why we must get it right next time. Free trade is important, but we must not throw our farmers under the bus in the process. Free trade that is not fair is not free in the first place.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Tim Farron and Anthony Mangnall

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I agree. Rural communities such as mine are being completely overlooked, in terms of both funding and the powers we are demanding to tackle these huge problems.

In planning, enforcing affordability in perpetuity is crucial. In this country, we seem to give planning permission and to build for demand, not need. In places such as the lakes, the dales, Cumbria, Cornwall and Devon, any house that is built will sell, but will it meet local need? No, it will not. This Bill does not give us the powers to enforce affordability in perpetuity. It does so little to build in nature recovery, which is vital to our communities and to any new developments.

The Bill also does nothing to give planning authorities, national parks and local authorities the power to enforce planning conditions. If a developer starts work on a field for which it has been given planning permission to build houses—they may have been told to build 25% or 30% affordable housing, which is not enough in the first place—and finds a few more rocks than it says it expected, it can use a viability assessment to go back to the drawing board. The developer can then say, “We don’t need to provide you with any affordable homes at all, and the Government will back us up.” That has happened in Allithwaite in my constituency and elsewhere. Let us give communities real power.

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tim Farron]

I will continue. I am aware of the time, and other people want to speak.

The enforcement of conditions is vital, and we need to stop developers getting away with using viability assessments to take the mickey out of local communities, which is totally and utterly unacceptable, as is the fact that planning departments are denuded of staff and resources. Even the conditions we have are therefore not enforceable.

The Bill also lacks any support for public transport in rural communities. Cumbria got nothing from Bus Back Better, despite making a perfectly good bid. Why? Apparently because there is an emphasis on bus lanes. The country roads of Cumbria have only one lane, so there is no room for a bus lane. That shows the bias against rural communities such as Cumbria, Northumberland, Devon and Cornwall in the distribution of funding. There is also a lack of investment in internet connectivity. In areas such as ours, small business is king, so we need to support internet connectivity.

Listening to the Secretary of State, the Bill sounded like Roosevelt’s new deal. Instead, it is more like Major’s cones hotline. It is a massive disappointment.

Affordable Housing (Devon and Cornwall)

Debate between Tim Farron and Anthony Mangnall

Wednesday 27th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and I offer massive congratulations to the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing a really important debate. I apologise to colleagues, but I am a Member of Parliament for a western county—[Laughter.]

More seriously, I think we need to hunt as a pack because the issues that affect Devon and Cornwall affect Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Cumbria, Shropshire and other places as well. The hon. Member for North Devon was right to say that we should be sparing in our use of the word “crisis”, but she was right to use it in this case, because there is no doubt that rural communities like ours are under huge pressure. They were before the pandemic, but the pandemic has turbocharged a problem that already existed.

I want to echo something that the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) said earlier. The word “affordable” has become almost meaningless in how it is applied. In Devon, Cornwall or Cumbria, a house for sale at £200,000 is not affordable. The reality is that when average household incomes are in the £20,000s and average house prices are at least £250,000, that is a broken system and a broken market. I believe in a free market but I would intervene and referee to try to make it fairer. We are all trying to encourage the Government to take that seriously.

We represent desirable and beautiful places, with great, welcoming communities. We must get the tone spot-on, as we are not saying to people who visit or make their homes in our communities, or even have second homes in our communities, that they are not welcome. We are welcoming, British people—that is what we are. Our communities and economies thrive because of the tourism that underpins them, but we cannot ignore the fact that excessive second home ownership and holiday lets, excessive house prices in general, and a lack of availability of affordable homes for families who are either local or want to become local, are serious problems. We have a broken market, and we have to intervene to fix that.

The impact of excessive second home ownership is the death of communities. When a village or a town lacks the number of permanent residents needed to allow it to support a school, a pub, a post office or a bus route, its community becomes sad and dies as it no longer has any functional existence. No one wants to come on holiday to a dead community. We want to protect those communities so that they are alive and living.

I talked about the pandemic turbocharging an existing problem, but during the pandemic estate agents in my patch reported that anything between 50% and 80% of all house sales in the lakes were in the second home sector, showing a steady attrition of the already reducing permanent housing stock.

Holiday lets are vital and underpin any tourism economy, but if there are too many, where do they come from? In one year during the pandemic, there was a 32% rise in the number of holiday lets in my district council area. They are not being magicked from nowhere, but, as the hon. Member for North Devon rightly pointed out, arise from long-term lets where the landlord has ejected tenants using a section 21 eviction, and they then typically end up on Airbnb and similar places.

In my area, and I imagine Devon and Cornwall are very similar, we have high levels of employment and low levels of unemployment. Typically, we see couples, both of whom have jobs, with children at local schools, having to leave those jobs and take the children out of their schools in order to move to somewhere urban that is just about affordable, perhaps 50 miles away. That kills local communities, is tragic for the individuals and families concerned, and is a massive blow to the life of that community.

That point is worth bearing in mind when we look at new-build homes, wherever we live. There is a danger that we have got into the mindset that fewer planning regulations are better for creating more homes; that is not true. Planning authorities, whether they be national parks or local authorities, have to have the power to direct what kind of homes are built, in order to make them more likely to happen. In this country, we are constantly building to meet demand, but not building to meet need, which is what creates opposition to new development.

In most communities like mine, the people are the opposite of nimbys. They are desperate for new homes, but for homes that people need. Of course, a nice new-build four or five-bedroom property in Cornwall, Devon or Cumbria will sell and someone will buy it, but it is not what that community needs. We need planning laws that make sure that the homes that are built are green, sustainable, affordable and underpin the local community and economy.

[Anthony Mangnall]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise what the Secretary of State is trying to do through his BIDEN acronym, which means build beautifully, make sure there is infrastructure, hold developers to account, take into account the environment and make sure neighbourhood plans are fully weighted?

[Tim Farron]

Yes. That is massively important, because if a community supports a development, it is more likely to happen. I regret that we do not enforce zero carbon homes and that we still permit the inflation of the value of land through the massively outdated and hugely damaging Land Compensation Act 1961, which inflates the price of houses. Those issues could be tackled by giving local authorities and communities more power, and if better, more beautiful and greener houses are built.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, with which I wholeheartedly agree. When a planning Bill is introduced, will he support the measures set out in the Planning (Enforcement) Bill, the ten-minute rule Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) a few months ago? Those measures were specifically designed to ensure that plans presented to a community or a local council are not altered when the site is developed, driving down the affordability, greenness or environmentally friendly nature of the original proposal.

[Tim Farron]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, and risks my going off on one about viability assessments and so on, and the fact that when conditions are made, they should be applied. We need the Government to back national parks and local authorities, who impose conditions, get through the planning game and put affordability in there, and then developers say, “We have found some rocks in the field. It will cost too much money to do that now.” We need to ensure that communities get what they were promised and not otherwise. He makes an excellent point.

I will be quick in my final remarks. The impact on communities is huge and the impact on the economy is massive. We had a vote the other night on the amendment on health and social care workforces. In communities such as ours, as has been mentioned by right hon. and hon. Members, we have a serious problem. On the whole, these are older communities. My community is about 10 years above the national average age. That means smaller working-age populations. If those people are squeezed out even further, there is no one to run the health service. People will take jobs in the local hospital or care home, check the housing market and then give back word. That happens all the time, as has already been mentioned.

Cumbria Tourism carried out a survey of members a few months ago and discovered that last year 63% of Lake District hospitality businesses worked below capacity, despite demand being there. Why was that? Because they did not have the staff to meet that demand. That is in part due to the issues that we have raised today. What can we do? Change planning law to make first homes, second homes and holiday lets separate categories of planning use, so that planning authorities and councils can enforce affordability and availability, and ensure there is a limit on the number of second homes and holiday lets in a community. We could allow, as the Welsh Senedd has decided, local authorities to increase council tax above 100% on second homes. Councils would have the choice to do that; they would not have to. As the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) mentioned, quite rightly, we should ensure that council tax is paid on every property that is built as a residence.

The simple fact is that a wealthy person, with a second home on the Lizard peninsula or in the Lake District, is subsidised by somebody on the breadline and going to the food bank in the same community because they have let their second home for 70 days a year. That means they pay no council tax and, as a small business, pay no business rate. That is an outrage from the Exchequer’s point of view. It is also morally outrageous, that people barely getting by are subsidising wealthy people who can afford two, three, four or more homes.

We also need to ensure that section 21 evictions are abolished, as the Government promised in their manifesto. We need to decide the point at which a second home has become a holiday let, and raise the bar from 70 nights to more than 100 nights. It could be made consistent with the HMRC requirement of 105 nights a year to qualify as a holiday let.

My final point is this. I agree with pretty much everything everyone has said in the debate so far. We have been raising the matter for years. I remember raising it with the junior planning Minister a few years ago, a gentleman who is now Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am concerned that we make these points, which are obviously an issue, showing the need to tackle the lack of affordable housing in rural communities, yet the Government still refuse to take the action needed to deliver for those communities.

I hope that in a spirit of solidarity and hunting as a pack, we might persuade the Minister to listen and take the action that rural communities need.

Environment Bill

Debate between Tim Farron and Anthony Mangnall

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

I had high hopes of being able to start my speech by speaking the words of Margaret Thatcher in 1989 when she addressed the United Nations on the issue of climate change—she outlined the destruction and damage that was facing the world unless action was taken—but, sadly, there is not enough time to be able to read out the full quotation. However, those words are true now, and there is more that can be done.

I welcome the Government’s announcement today, their report and their Bill for what they do in addressing waste, water and air quality. These are all things that, as a triumvirate, must be addressed so that we are able to regain our control over the environment and help it to flourish in years to come. Of course, the Government have already set a number of ambitious targets—from net zero for 2050 to ending the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030, eradicating gas boilers, planting more trees and looking at new agricultural regenerative techniques. These are the ambitious things that we must do.

I would like to start by talking a little bit about waste. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) has already mentioned, there is an important element here about ending single-use plastics, but we can do more. I ask whether the Government might consider incentivising businesses to ensure that we have full-cycle plastics that are used from cradle to grave, and then recycled. We can incentivise the industries that pollute this world to make sure that they are adhering more to the rules and regulations of countries across the world.

In my own constituency, air quality has remained an incredibly important issue. The A385 runs through my patch, next to a school, which has some of the highest levels of pollution in south Devon, and planning development alongside it is likely to further add to that problem. It is the same in Brixham, where the new Inglewood development would see roads and traffic increased, leading to further pollution of air quality. These are the things that we must take into account when we are building, improving infrastructure and developing for our entire community.

On water, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) has done so impressively well on his private Member’s Bill, something I have supported since I coming to this place. I look forward to seeing what he brings back to the House and how the Government work further with him, but as a keen swimmer all year round—without a wetsuit, I hasten to add—I am very keen that we do all we can to improve the quality of our waterways and of our coastline, and to ensure that we are able to improve the way in which we engage on these issues, especially with groups such as Surfers Against Sewage.

The need to be able to discuss how reports might be put into this place was raised under new clause 6, but I would say that we do have the Environment Agency reports that come to Parliament and are reported on, but we also have the OEP, which I think is very welcome as it enables us to take a hold on our environment and improve it.

[Tim Farron [V]]

On the air quality amendments, the targets in this Bill do not even meet those recommended by the World Health Organisation, as has been said by other Members. That should rightly alarm all of us, especially given that the UK has such a terrible track record in recent years. When we were a member of the EU, it fined us regularly for failing to meet the targets set at that point. Air quality standards are of the utmost importance, and for the Government to under aim and be under-ambitious here is deeply troubling. We are being asked to accept not only decreased air quality standards, but delayed standards, as this Bill is pushed back once again, after years of delay. Yet, tragically, we now increasingly see “poor air quality” cited as a cause of death on the death certificates of many, many people. As many colleagues from both sides of the House, have said, this is a matter of life and death, Delayed action at this time, in the hiatus between the strong targets and standards we had up to the end of 2020 and the point at which we get whatever standards we will get when this Bill is finally agreed, allows bad habits to build up and bed in, and it makes Britain’s poor air quality harder still to clear up.

On waste, the absence of plastic reduction targets beggars belief, given the rhetoric we have heard from many in the Government. The Conservative manifesto made a specific reference—a promise even—to

“ban the export of plastic waste”

to developing countries. The Government have broken that promise. So not only are they not tackling our plastic problem here at home, but we are adding to the plastic problem of poorer countries overseas.

My amendment 30 related to water quality. We simply want the Government to monitor the impact of the abstraction of water on biodiversity in chalk streams and in other waterways. This Bill does not do that, and it is a simple and obvious request. Only 14% of England’s rivers and lakes are in a good quality water position at the moment, so the need for this measure is clear.

So we see an unambitious Bill and a delay, which means even this poor ambition will be hard to bring to fruition, given that we will have to wait many months. This takes commitment to underachievement to new heights, undermining the quality of our environment and animal welfare. These are times when we need to be setting clear and ambitious targets if we are going to lead the world, but I am afraid that we are lagging far behind.