Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-21
Topic: Agriculture
Anthony Robert Greaves (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): Amendment 159A, which I rise to move, covers a very specific and important question: the treatment of commons, and their commoners and owners, under the new system of agricultural support. I hope that by getting a full and clear response at this stage I will not have to bring the matter back at Report. This amendment has been put together with the assistance of the Foundation for Common Land and the Open Spaces Society. I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the latter group, and I thank both for their help. A number of noble Lords are knowledgeable about commons, and indeed several survivors of our discussions on the Commons Act back in 2006 are in the House. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, for adding his name to this amendment, and to the Public Bill Office for its help with phrasing it The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, apologises for not being able to take part in this debate: he has been called to the hills, the lucky man. He has asked me to make the point that where there is common land, which is so prevalent in the uplands, in the event of ELMS the arrangement will have to be multilateral, not bilateral. Hence, every commoner will have to agree, and there is always a difficult so-and-so who could veto the arrangement. There is a need, therefore, for a mechanism to prevent a generally agreed plan being vetoed in this way. This echoes an earlier debate about the resolution of disputes under the new system of environmental and agricultural support Clause 2 makes no specific provision for how financial assistance is given in relation to registered common land. The amendment therefore confers powers on the Secretary of State to make regulations to specify or vary the scheme in relation to common land and any lands subject to shared grazing rights, in order to make allowance for the special circumstances inherent in managing common land What, in any case, is common land? On one level, it is land registered as common land in a registry kept under Part 1 of the Commons Act 2006 or the Commons Registration Act 1965. In real world terms, it is land owned by one person but subject to the rights of other people—the commoners—to take some product of the land. These rights of commons nowadays typically relate to the grazing of animals, but may also include the right to take wood, peat, bracken, furs or fish. I remember that in our discussions on the commons Bill 14 years ago, noble Lords enjoyed learning words such as estovers, turbary, piscary and, indeed, pannage. Commons are a survival from the medieval period—land that escaped enclosure. They are, however, of huge present-day importance in historical, biological, cultural, landscape and recreational terms In England, common land occupies no more than about 3% of the total land area, but it is key to the viability of many upland farms, comprising 37% of all land above the moorland line and over one-fifth of the area of SSSIs in England. Common land delivers many public benefits. Compared with enclosed land it is seven times more likely to be designated for nature and four times more likely to have a scheduled ancient monument on it.