Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-09-15
Topic: Agriculture
Anthony Robert Greaves (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 1 and speak to the amendments in the first group. We come to Report and therefore I repeat my interests, as set out in the register, as vice-president of the Open Spaces Society and my historical involvement with the British Mountaineering Council This is the Agriculture Bill, so it is fundamentally about agriculture, farming and farmers. It cannot avoid being about many other things too because agriculture takes up some 70% of the land area of this country. Therefore, the Bill inevitably is also about everything else that happens on that land. We had a thorough discussion in Committee of Part 1, which is all about the permissive powers the Secretary of State will have in future to provide funding for a range of things, starting with farming and farming-related activities, but also those ancillary to or related to rural land Like much of Part 1, the small provision allowing funding for the provision of finance and access is permissive and general. The fundamental difficulty we all had with this Bill in Committee is that it is all about what the Government might do, rather than what they will do. We do not know what they are going to do, and they do not know either. We will have to wait to see how the Bill will be put into operation. Then, it will be far too late to discuss it as primary legislation All the amendments in this group are about access. Thinking back, huge progress has been made on access in the last 20 years in different parts of the UK. The CROW Act 2000 created access land, rights of way improvement plans, access forums and a great deal more. By and large, despite the horror stories that some people told us at the time, it has been successful. Scotland had the Land Reform Act 2003, which resulted in my political colleague Ross Finnie, who was the Minister in charge of it, being described as, "Mugabe in a tartan outfit, by the Scottish Daily Mail, and lots of other things like that. That Act created the right of responsible access to land in Scotland—and it was all land—so long as the access was carried out responsibly. Again, people thought it would be horrific but, in practice, that part of the Act has been pretty successful. However, I emphasise the word "responsible". It is absolutely true that some people go to the countryside and do not act responsibly, and that matter should be dealt with Under CROW, we had English coastal access, which was started by the Labour Government before 2010. In 2010 there was an attempt by some Conservative Ministers, which I can bear witness to, to put a stop to it, but that was one of the things that the Liberal Democrats in the coalition made sure happened. In 2015, Nick Clegg announced that it would be completed in 2020. It has not quite happened, for various reasons, but it is going to be finished—so things have been moving forward What is happening now is dangerous in several respects. There is the problem of the potential loss of the ability, under cross-compliance and the environmental requirements on basic farm payments, for access authorities to make sure that farmers do not block access. In Committee, I asked what was happening about that under the new system, but I have not had an answer yet. Will the new ELM tier 1 payments require that farmers and land managers adhere to the law and allow access where it is legal? Will tier 2 take into account rights of way improvement plans, for example? Will they have to do it? Many tier 3 landscape-scale payments will, if I understand them correctly, be made on access land, so they are a wonderful opportunity to develop and improve current access for both people undertaking the access and land managers Other issues are being dealt with by amendments in this group in the name of my noble friend Lord Addington, to which I have added my name. However, Amendment 1 puts in a specific requirement for consideration to be given to funding for access improvements as well as maintaining and supporting existing access. This is a really good opportunity to do this. Improvements would be voluntary, so it does not force anything on anybody, but it does put into the Bill the possibility of providing money to strengthen existing access. In some areas, access on farmland is very good; in others, it is pretty poor. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mann, and my noble friend Lord Addington for adding their support to this amendment We want to see enhancements to the path network and, importantly, improved maintenance of existing public access. This is very important. If the existing facilities—the gates, stiles and paths—are clear and well signposted, that is a route to good management and is in the interests of everybody. It is not to anybody’s advantage if they are all falling down and you have to climb over walls and barge your way through to get access, or if you cannot find where you are going and get lost. Maintaining access is, therefore, in everybody’s interest, whether you are managing the land or going there for recreational purposes.