Environment Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a landowner, a passionate conservationist and the president of the Moorland Association.

I wish to talk about the new policy of biodiversity net gain—although I agree with my noble friend Lord Blencathra that it would be better to call it “nature net gain”. It is good to see this policy being enacted into law. I remember the fury with which a lot of green pressure groups reacted to Owen Paterson’s suggestion of offsetting when he was Secretary of State. Now, seeing that it might be a source of revenue, they have changed their tune. However, a lot can go wrong if the policy is badly implemented, so I want to set out how the Bill can be improved to ensure that the policy benefits biodiversity rather than bureaucracy. To do that, I will tell two stories from recent personal experience.

First, I own a converted barn as a holiday home in the Durham Dales. Last year, we drew up plans to extend it with an extra bedroom. We were told that we could not even apply for planning permission until we had had a bat survey, and this being October, we could not have a bat survey until spring, and then not until the temperature was consistently above 15 degrees. It never got that warm in April and May this year, so the bat survey is happening this week, done by three ecologists at dusk. There are bats about, but they are common pipistrelles and there is plenty of roosting space that will not be disturbed by the work, so we will probably get the go-ahead. However, the episode will have delayed the work for nearly two years and it will not have done anything for the bats. The better approach for the bats is offsetting: building lots of bat roosts right at the start and then going ahead with the development. That is biodiversity net gain in action. The trouble is that it is bad news for bat surveyors, who will lobby against it. My first question for the Minister is this: can he assure me that biodiversity net gain will be introduced instead of rather than as well as the wasteful policy of endlessly paying out vast sums of taxpayers’ money to do futile ecological surveys before development?

Secondly, a few weeks ago I went to see a farm on the Isle of Sheppey on the outskirts of London, where a man named Philip Merricks has done something remarkable. He was a normal arable farmer until the land was designated as a site of special scientific interest and a national natural reserve, which meant farming in a more wildlife-friendly way. But he took one look at the recommendations from the Government and said, “I can do better than that. If you want redshanks and peewits”—sorry, they are called lapwings down there—“I will farm for them as if they were sheep.” He now has 350 pairs of both lapwings and redshanks on a spectacular landscape, rich in birdlife, of wet meadows and grass grazed by cattle. He achieves this by ruthless predator control, killing hundreds of crows a year and excluding badgers with special fences, as well as imaginative habitat management.

Next door, the RSPB had similar habitat, just as good, but was rearing only 0.1 chicks per pair of lapwings. That means, as Merricks realised, that it was, in effect, draining his population by making good habitat tempting to birds but where the eggs and chicks were all taken by crows, gulls, foxes and badgers. It was actually doing harm to the species and would be in breach of the new species abundance target my noble friend the Minister mentioned in his speech. Yet this is how most conservation is done in this country: we count the birds but not the chicks. We pay by intentions, we do not measure the results and we reward failure.

The RSPB owns a huge moorland in north Wales, at Lake Vyrnwy, where it has presided over steadily declining numbers of curlew, lapwing, merlin, black grouse and red grouse. It has been rewarded with millions of pounds of grants and subsidies precisely because these species are doing so badly there, whereas the land my family business shares with farmers in the North Pennines has a huge and healthy population of curlew, lapwing, redshanks, snipe, woodcock, golden plover, dunlin and black grouse, all achieved at our own expense through the relentless control of foxes, crows and stoats—but, of course, we are pilloried by environmentalists because we also shoot grouse.

I have two more questions for my noble friend the Minister: can we have nature-based policies that reward success and not failure, and can we allow experimentation and local initiative and not try to determine everything from the centre? We need conservation entrepreneurs like Philip Merricks who are incentivised to find cost-effective solutions, not risk-averse monopolies of bureaucrats playing safe by never trying anything new and insisting on a one-size-fits-all policy that does not tap local knowledge.

The Bill’s ambitions for nature recovery will not be met unless private sector investment into private landholdings is facilitated. Nature recovery cannot be left solely within the domain of the big environmental NGOs. They do not have access to sufficient land, and landowners rarely want them involved in the management of that land. Natural England is progressing with the establishment of a credit sales platform through which government credits in biodiversity net gain will be sold to developers. This is a huge mistake, because it will inevitably crowd out a developing market in these credits. It is statist and anti-competitive, and hence open to legal challenge.

Nature should not be left to risk-averse public sector monopolies. We should all be allowed to play our part in its enhancement.

Environment Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to this group of amendments in my name and thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, for adding his name to Amendments 123 and 136.

Fly-tipping is a blight on the countryside. Sometimes it is individuals not bothering to dispose of their larger redundant items of furniture properly. Sometimes it is criminal activity on the part of opportunists who offer to dispose of awkward items for households for a fee, then take them away and dump them in the countryside—mostly in some quiet rural lane, in a field gate or on a farmer’s lane.

Evidence suggests that fly-tipping affects 67% of farmers and that it costs them upwards of £47 million a year to clear up fly-tipped waste. In 2019-20, there were just under 1 million incidents of fly-tipping in England—the equivalent of nearly 114 every hour—at a cost to local authorities of millions. It is having a significant impact on our rural areas and wildlife. These miscreants do not have to pay for their actions; it is the landowner who has to pay to clear up the resultant mess, and there is little redress through the courts.

How often do we see the countryside littered with cartons from takeaway food? It really is time that the manufacturers and producers of this type of waste picked up the cost of clearing it up—McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken spring to mind, and I am sure your Lordships can think of others. It is often very difficult to trace the person who has done the fly-tipping but much easier to see who has manufactured the waste. The “polluter pays” principle is key in helping to solve the problem. This issue cannot be sidestepped.

The Bill makes provision to reduce the occurrence of fly-tipping and littering by the introduction of deposit schemes and powers for secondary legislation to tackle waste crime and the scourge of littering, but this will not help with the larger items that are often left in quantity on farmland. The Bill will introduce new measures for regulators, including local authorities, to tackle waste crime and illegal activity. It would be helpful to know what these measures are likely to be but, as they are expected to be determined in secondary legislation, perhaps the detail has yet to be written. The Bill also enables the Secretary of State to make regulations to amend the primitive range of penalties for existing fixed penalty notices. This is critical in attempting to dissuade people from fly-tipping. Can the Minister say why this power is not being extended to local authorities and the police? They are much closer to the problem on the ground and may well know who the likely culprits are.

Private landowners are liable for any waste dumped on their land and responsible for clearing it away and paying the cost. If they do not act or inform the local authorities about the fly-tipped waste, they risk prosecution for illegal storage of waste. This is a nonsense. Now is the time to think about how landowners and farmers can be recompensed for the amount of money spent on clearing up other people’s waste. There needs to be greater support for the protection of landowners coupled with tougher penalties on perpetrators, such as seizing the vehicles used to fly-tip.

Having been a councillor for many years, I understand the role of local authorities and that some are more diligent than others in tackling the problem. Local authorities should make it easier for people to dispose of their waste legally at recycling centres. Sometimes their rules are inconsistent and unclear. Now is the time for these rules to be replaced with common sense and practical measures that enable people to recycle or dispose of their waste legally. This is a very serious issue and needs to be addressed urgently before the countryside becomes an unsightly dumping ground. I beg to move.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, on this amendment and thank her very much for her contribution. I also declare my interest as a landowner in Northumberland. I am not here to carp about the cost to me of doing this, more to carp about the inconvenience of finding your gateways blocked again and again, as well as the unpleasantness of this problem. It is often a really unpleasant thing to have to deal with.

Fly-tipping is a huge problem. It has got worse during the pandemic because a lot of local authorities closed their tips when there was social distancing of various kinds. The fly-tipping industry—if we can call it that—seems to have a sort of momentum behind it now, so even though those tips are open, it continues. On my farm, we experience this problem about once a week, to give you an idea of how bad it is. There is usually a chunk of leylandii hedge, a fridge, a cooker, some flooring, bits of clothing, toys, random chunks of concrete, lots of plastic, plenty of polystyrene packaging and some really unmentionable things as well.

If you are lucky, there is also a bank statement or a utility bill and this can be very helpful. However, when you go round and knock on the door of the person whose bank statement it is, they apologise profusely and, as the noble Baroness said, say, “I’m terribly sorry, we thought they were a legitimate waste disposal outfit”. That is, again and again, the problem that one encounters. There are plenty of rogues masquerading as legitimate waste disposal people. Surely it is possible to tackle that problem.

In our case, many of the tips are—because we keep our gates firmly locked—on the public highway side of the gate and they end up being the local authority’s problem to get rid of, not ours. All it takes is a couple of calls and a lot of inconvenience and it happens. As I said, I am not here to complain about the cost to me. It is £250 a time to hire a skip and it is a lot of work.

What would work extremely well, because this happens again and again in certain locations, is CCTV. But if you put up CCTV you have to put up a sign saying that you have put up CCTV, otherwise you cannot bring a prosecution based on it. Now, if you put up a sign saying that there is CCTV in a gateway, you are simply shifting the problem to somebody else’s gateway.

I worry that the cost of legitimately disposing of waste is too high and the inconvenience too great. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, touched on this as well. More effort needs to go into making it easier for households to find somewhere to dispose of their waste cheaply and easily. That would help a lot.

I think this amendment would help and it is right that landowners should not have to bear the cost of removing this stuff from their land, but further changes are necessary to alter the incentives and stop the dreadful nuisance created. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, in asking for further detail on what the Bill is likely to be able to enable, in terms of secondary legislation, to try to tackle this problem.

While I am on my feet, may I touch on one other issue? If you go for a walk on remote moorland in the Pennines, you encounter zero litter except one thing that you encounter on every walk and that is birthday balloons. They just appear all the time, but not in very large numbers. They are not terribly inconvenient and not so difficult to get rid of—you stuff them in your pocket—but it is upsetting in a beautiful landscape suddenly to find something shiny and bright purple. Well, purple is all right on a moorland—bright yellow, shall we say? It would be quite easy to ask the birthday balloon industry always to put an address on birthday balloons, so that I could send them back in a package.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, and my noble friend Lord Ridley, who set out the case for this amendment so convincingly and cogently. I can be very brief by comparison. I strongly support these amendments. It is simply a matter of natural justice and fairness. If someone dumps their old sofa or mattress in the street or a council car park, the council will initially bear the cost of removing them and then, of course, the council tax payers will share that cost. Of course, in an ideal world, people would not do that, like the people who left a bathtub, a commode and a pile of polystyrene beside some official recycling bins I was using recently. I would love it if we could catch in every case the despicable people who dump their garbage like that, but catching them, as my noble friend said, is very difficult.

The police and councils need to put more effort into tracking down the organised criminals who dump commercial and building rubbish in the countryside on a vast scale. What is worse, when these same vile individuals dump their rubbish in a farmer’s field or lane, there is no council or council tax payer to share the cost. The farmer has to bear the complete cost of removal. Of course, some of that waste may have poisoned his land and his animals. That is simply wrong and unfair. The cost burden has to be shared among society, as these amendments would provide for, and be passed on to producers.

I perfectly well accept that Mercers, Sealy beds and Argos did not dump the mattress or the sofa and that their hands are clean in that regard, but they profited from the original sale of the items. The farmer got no financial benefit from the sale, but has to pay the cost of their disposal. That is not right, and it is why I support the amendments.

Environment Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Noakes, whose expertise on these matters is extraordinary, and to support the very important amendment of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. This is only the second time I have spoken in Committee, and I will try and keep it brief because I know we are at the end of eight long days.

At Second Reading, I paid particular attention to the issue that some environmental policies do not end up being effective—do not work. Others are worse; they actually produce counterproductive results in environmental and economic terms. This amendment is a way of making sure that this does not happen—at least, not for a long time—that we learn from mistakes, that we put things right and, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe put it, that we have a fail-safe.

I would like to give four short examples of policies that were brought in to help the environment and ended up hurting it in significant and expensive ways. The first was the policy of encouraging us all to buy diesel cars as opposed to petrol cars 20 or so years ago. There is no doubt, if you go back and look at the debates at the time, that this was pushed as an environmental measure, because diesel cars had lower carbon dioxide emissions per mile. It was pushed strongly by big German car manufacturers as a way of encouraging Governments to think they could get a quick win on the environment. Of course, the effect it had was to increase emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulates, which are much more harmful to human health, as well as to the environment.

The second example is the diversion into compact fluorescent light bulbs. Around 10 years ago, incandescent bulbs were banned, and we were all forced to buy compact fluorescent bulbs. This was pushed strongly as an environmental measure by the large manufacturers of compact fluorescent bulbs because they used less electricity to produce a given amount of light. But they were very unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways, including that they did not switch on very fast, gave a pallid light, were very expensive and were toxic for the environment if they broke. Along came a better technology, the LED bulb, which we have all willingly gone out and bought to replace them. It is even more efficient in terms of the environment, even more energy efficient; it is expensive, but not as expensive as compact fluorescent bulbs; and it has easily replaced both the preceding technologies. My point here is that we did not need the diversion into compact fluorescent bulbs. It probably delayed the arrival of LED bulbs. The evidence on that is quite good.

My third example is the fact that we are burning trees in Yorkshire in Drax power station to keep the lights on in Britain. The trees mostly come from North America; we are stealing the lunch of woodpeckers, beetles and other organisms to have electricity in this country. We are subsidising this. We are calling it renewable, because the trees regrow. But they regrow over decades and, even then, if we are continuing with this, we will presumably cut them down again. Doing this does not make any sense, because burning trees produces more carbon dioxide than coal in the production of electricity. About 7% of our electricity came from biomass burning this morning.

My fourth example is one I referred to in my Second Reading speech and is that some environmental policies have encouraged farmers to make peewit-friendly habitat, where lapwings will come and breed. That sounds good from an environmental point of view, but it has recently become clear that if you do that, but do not control crows, foxes and stoats in the area, you will draw in lapwings to what looks like an attractive place to breed, but they will never see any grandchildren, because the success rate of lapwings in these areas is about 0.1 chicks per pair, which is not sustainable. So you are draining the population of lapwings if you do only one part of the policy and not the other.

A similar point was made in an excellent speech by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, who talked about the problem of making conservation covenants in perpetuity, then struggling with what to do when we find that we have made a mistake in a conservation covenant and have put in place a policy for a piece of land that is inappropriate and doing more harm than good. That is why it is vital that we apply sunset clauses and cost-benefit analysis to environmental policies. We need a chance to pause and say, “Sorry, chaps. I know you are making a ton of money out of this policy, but it is not helping the environment, so we are going to shunt your gravy train into a siding, because it has failed a cost-benefit analysis”. That is what we should be in the business of doing.

Those who support greater action on the environment ought to be especially welcoming of this amendment, because it is all about finding out what works, what delivers good value for money and what should be ditched because it does not work. If the Minister does not like this amendment, I would be grateful if he could set out how he plans to deal with it the next time we find that an environmental policy foisted on us by lobbyists turns out to be counterproductive for the environment.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Ridley, who gave a fascinating speech. I was much impressed by his four examples of policies that we thought were going to be very good but turned out to be mistakes and had to be changed. I am sure the same will happen with some of the current policies being proposed for the environment and other things that we think, today, are bound to give the right answer when, in 10 or 20 years, some are certain to be counterproductive.

I will not detain the Committee long, but I extend my support to the sensible Amendment 297A in the names of my noble friends Lady Neville-Rolfe, Lord Ridley and Lady Noakes. The Bill takes no account of any negative impacts that the environmental targets set may inadvertently cause. As your Lordships are aware, we do not always get everything right. We should pay attention to the proportionality principle, as sensibly proposed by the Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform, chaired by my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith.

My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe is the strongest advocate of impact assessments in your Lordships’ House. As was also pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, planting trees in areas that were not historically forests may assist climate change mitigation, but may also harm biodiversity. Similarly, some actions taken to advance environmental targets may have a negative impact on carbon emissions, such as the plastics tax, which is likely to cause a shift from plastic to glass and aluminium bottles—about which I spoke in an earlier debate. For these and other reasons so well explained by my noble friends, I hope the Minister agrees that it is right to include a sunset clause and that the Government should conduct a cost-benefit analysis if they wish to renew these regulations beyond five years after the passage of the Bill.

On the interesting subject raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, whose support on other aspects of the Bill I much appreciate, I am conscious of my oath of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen and of everything His Royal Highness the Duke of Cornwall does for the environment. I would prefer to remain silent on this matter, but I look forward to hearing how the Crown replies to the noble Lord through my noble friend the Minister.

Environment Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

We also agree with my noble friend that ancient woodlands are too precious and valuable to be disregarded. We believe that both these amendments deserve to be in the Bill, which is sadly lacking both a forward strategy for trees and a crucial protection for the unique and much-loved ancient woodlands that we have inherited and must protect for the future. I look forward to the Minister’s response and hope that he will be able to address these concerns.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for butting in; I realise that it is not proper procedure to do so after the Front Bench has spoken but I have somehow got lost in what proper procedure is. I wish to make two quick points before the Minister replies, with the indulgence of the House.

First, with respect to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, we need to bear in mind that, in the 20th century, a semi-natural woodland had a far better chance of staying that way if it was in private hands rather than belonging to the Forestry Commission. The Government, as an owner of woodland, need to look to their own house.

Secondly, on the other amendment and the target of 30,000 hectares a year, I would just point out that this policy is being eyed up with relish by the commercial forestry industry. There is a huge amount of momentum behind the planting of alien Sitka spruce trees, particularly in the uplands, which will have a damaging and detrimental effect on the environment. I therefore have some sympathy for the second of these amendments.

Again, I apologise for butting in.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, apologise but I wanted to say that I regard this amendment as not just important but essential. These woodlands and trees, whether they be ancient or veteran, are crucial. They are part of the heart of our country. If you remove them, they will be gone for ever. It is similar to removing ancient and important buildings. I well remember when Mr Heath was being pressured to allow the whole of the Treasury and Foreign Office to be swept away so that we could have more efficient offices; we would have had another Marsham Street there. My God, what a thought.

If we do not accept this amendment—perhaps the Minister will accept it, or say that he will do something —we will send completely the wrong signal to the outside world: that we do not mind about something about which we care deeply.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

Follow that, my Lords. I declare my interest as a landowner. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, has made some very good arguments, both today and in Committee in what is a very good example of the House of Lords at its best. He made a very powerful speech in Committee that made a lot of people think hard about a difficult topic. Like him, I support the scheme for conservation covenants very strongly indeed. I saw how conservation easements work in the United States years ago and have argued for years that we ought to have a similar system here. However, he raised some key questions in Committee, and I do not think they were adequately answered either from the Dispatch Box or in later correspondence. That is why I have added my name to these amendments. I am not looking to cause trouble; I am looking for reassurance from my noble friend the Minister that the Government have listened to his concerns and come up with some important reforms to this legislation.

Conservation covenants are, or should be, formal, solemn, momentous undertakings. That should be reflected in the way they are entered into. They should be done by deed and not by an email. They should be with a focused and specialised partner, not a potential scallywag, as we have heard. I am not a lawyer, but the law that worries me here is the one we cannot repeal: namely, the law of unintended consequences. As the noble Earl, Lord Devon, put it, the prospect of zombie covenants blighting our green and pleasant land is not a pleasant one.

The other key concern is the possibility that the advice on how to conserve a habitat, species or piece of biodiversity may prove wrong over time, and a sort of flexibility needs to be built into this to correct a covenant. I spoke at Second Reading about a real example of this with peewits on the Isle of Sheppey. Essentially, it was discovered that, by providing super-habitats for the peewits to nest but no predator control, you were actually draining the population of birds. They were attracted to the place but could not rear any chicks and died of old age without any grandchildren. There has been another example recently in the media of the fact that the willow tit is declining largely because there are too many bird feeders, benefiting the blue tit, which takes over the willow tit’s holes and evicts it.

These are small examples and may seem trivial ones, but the point is that we learn that conservation advice changes over time. We need to be able to reflect that in these very solemn and long-term undertakings. Again and again I have seen practice in one decade that turns out to be wrong in the next. I will listen carefully to my noble friend the Minister and to any response that comes.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to give my support to the amendments in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and he will have the support of these Benches. I must say he has caused me some slight difficulty as, like him, I also have an American spouse, who recently watched the programme about Powderham Castle with Mary Berry and turned to me and said: “How come we don’t have a castle? Aren’t you a lord too?” I have put that aside in the interest of these amendments and I will not detain the House too long, as the noble Earl has set out the case very compellingly.

Whatever anybody’s views about Part 7, we are all agreed that it is significant and the covenant agreements that will be entered into are significant. Therefore, those entering them should do so not simply by email but with advice. That amendment is a basic thing we should be able to agree on.

The other amendments set out by the noble Earl also have compelling resonance. We do not want private companies with no interest in conservation buying up land, and there should be no perpetual obligation on landowners, with no payments. So we support these amendments. They are very reasonable, even modest, and can only improve the Bill and the likelihood that conservation covenant agreements will have a good chance of success. I hope the Government will be willing to move on them but, if they are not, and the noble Earl wishes to divide the House, he will have the support of these Benches.