Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Agriculture
Charles Courtenay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and to address these amendments, which are focused on the highly valuable local nature recovery strategies. I am very supportive of the addition suggested by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, of "nature-friendly farming" to new subsection (2A) of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act. As I explained in an earlier debate, I am concerned that this House should temper somewhat the risk of environmental tyranny inherent in the Bill and ensure that we remind ourselves and local authorities that the core purpose of land management across these islands over many hundreds of years has been the production of healthy and nutritious food. I wonder whether the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, who will follow me, might agree with that I am also strongly supportive of the efforts of the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Lucas, to ensure that local nature partnerships and our diversity of local community members should have real input into local nature recovery strategies. These amendments go to a point that has been debated previously in Committee over the role of local communities and local land managers within the setting of local environmental targets. I was pleased when the Minister accepted the crucial importance of that. If local nature recovery strategies are to be a success, they must be developed in consultation with those who manage the land—those whose living derives from the land—as well as those who enjoy the land for their health and well-being. Local nature recovery strategies should not be determined by central edict from Westminster or by well-funded special interest lobby groups with no local mandate I too offer my strong support to Amendment 293 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and I applaud her tireless efforts to introduce a land-use strategy for our agricultural land. She indeed raised this during the passage of the then Agriculture Bill, at which time it seemed very sensible but maybe not essential. However, now that we are layering on top of ELMS so many other competing and potentially confusing land-use imperatives, it has become clear that we need to consider afresh what we really want of our land and to prioritise those imperatives accordingly I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Young, for the Cambridge University statistics, which counter the Minister’s earlier and surprisingly off-the-cuff assertion that we have sufficient marginal land to do all that is needed. I am not sure that is strictly true. We are a very small and heavily populated island with an incredibly long-established culture of intensive and successful land use. As I alluded to earlier in reference to biodiversity net gain, what we are asking of this green and pleasant land is arguably far more than it can deliver. Between housing, renewables, biodiversity, leisure and food production we are in very real danger of exhausting our much-beloved countryside. We need to find a means of developing a joined-up and dependable land-use strategy, informed by local communities and land managers, that delivers on our national priorities Finally, the Knepp estate has come up often in these debates and I should comment on it. I have always been hugely impressed by its achievements. However, I have always understood that the reason the Knepp estate chose to rewild was that it was relatively low-grade agricultural land that was not agriculturally productive and that it wished to do something remarkable with it: to recover nature and to provide public access and education. By putting a housing development approximate to Knepp, is Horsham Council not delivering directly on that ambition, converting low-grade adjoining farmland to housing and providing comparatively ready access to remarkable biodiversity for the benefit of the community’s health and well-being? As an additional bonus, Knepp can be paid to provide ecosystem services to that community, so it would seem potentially like a win-win situation.