Environment Bill

Debate between Tim Farron and Neil Parish

Report stage & 3rd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will restrict my remarks to amendments 47 and 49, which stand in my name, and amendment 29, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney). The amendments have in common the aim of protecting the landscape and the environment both in very rural areas like mine and in urban and suburban parts of the UK that are threatened by the Government’s planning reforms.

Amendments 47 and 49 would ensure that environmental land management schemes contain a mechanism to deliver adequate financial support to our farmers for delivering landscape benefits, in particular species conservation and protected site strategies, and so rewarding our farmers for maintaining the beauty of our landscape. We have done that inadvertently through various funding schemes over the past few decades, but it is about to drop by the wayside. It is hard to put a price on landscape beauty, but it is vital that we do so.

In the lake district and the Yorkshire dales, in a normal year our Cumbria tourism economy is worth more than £3 billion and employs 60,000 people in our county—tourism is comfortably the biggest employer in Cumbria. Underpinning that economy is the beauty of the landscape.

[Neil Parish]

I agree very much with the hon. Gentleman. Farming, landscape and tourism are closely integrated. As we deal with the Environment Bill, we have to remember that agriculture and tourism are interlinked, especially in the rural parts of this great country of ours.

[Tim Farron]

The Select Committee Chair is absolutely right, and I completely agree. We have to find a mechanism to make sure that we reward those who maintain the beauty of our landscape.

I have often been in places such as Barbondale, Dentdale, Langdale, Kentmere, Longsleddale and other glorious bits of my part of the world. I almost feel compelled to express envy of the hill farmer I am with in his or her glorious environment, but often the response is a slightly sad look that says, “I can’t eat the view.” It is all very well having a beautiful place, but if those who work there make a pittance, what good is it to them? That is what is happening in the uplands, where people are steadily moving away as farms fail and close. The Government’s plan to offer early retirement to farmers offers no mechanism to get young people in to replace them, and just in the last few days, the only agricultural college in Cumbria has closed.

I am desperate to ensure that the ELMS rewards farmers for landscape value, but there is currently no effective mechanism to do that. That should be added, which is why the amendment matters. I am also concerned about what the Bill means for the status of some of the beautiful parts of the United Kingdom. UNESCO awarded world heritage site status to the lake district just a few years ago. The report that resulted in the award of that status gave as much credit to the farmers as it did to the glaciers. These are managed, crafted landscapes, and we should reward the farmers who provide them.

There are many bad things about our not being in the EU, but one good thing is that we do not need to borrow EU measures. We do not need to borrow the plan for funding ELMS through the mechanism of income forgone. We should be rewarding farmers for the value of what they do, not paying the pittance they were paid in the first place.

In the time left, I will speak to amendment 29. Local nature resource strategies are a good idea. They are welcome, but they are weak, and they will not be worth the paper they are written on if they are not material to the considerations and decisions made by local planning committees. If we are to protect our green belt, whether it be in such places as the constituency of the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda), other parts of the ring around London, or indeed a very rural area like mine, we must not put planners in a situation where they have no power to prevent developers from damaging the countryside or, as is the case in a place like mine, to prevent developers from delivering up to 50 houses without having to deliver a single affordable property.

Nine out of 10 planning permission applications get passed. More than a million planning applications for homes have not been delivered. Planning is not the problem; planning is the protection for our communities and our environment. That is why this amendment is important to try to undo and mitigate some of the Government’s attack on our rural communities.