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.