Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-14
Topic: Agriculture
William Fletcher-Vane (Non-Affiliated, Unknown): My Lords, I wish to speak principally about Amendment 276A, which relates to common land and which I have discussed with the noble Lord, Lord Cameron. The reason for that is that there is a very large amount of common land in the bit of north-west England where I come from, currently known as the county of Cumbria. I should declare that I am president of the Uplands Alliance and I own on my own account a few common rights and a very small area of registered common. I am also a farmer in his late 60s looking into the future I begin by reassuring the noble Earl, Lord Devon, that one of the advantages of speaking remotely is that I can, and do, have a copy of Megarry & Wade to hand. I urge your Lordships to take seriously the points that he has raised, because he is talking not merely as somebody who understands the way land works in the real world but as a property lawyer. His indictment of the implications of what is currently in the Bill is significant. There are massive potential problems here, starting with the definition of "responsible body" and going through the saga of how disaster can strike. It is not merely a matter of disaster hitting the particular owners or successors in title of owners of bits of land; it is potentially a disaster for the countryside and the environment as well. For what it is worth, my advice to the Government would be to tear these proposals up, start again and, if necessary, bring them back in another place and we can vote on them again at a later time after a period of reflection. It is not the aspirations behind what is contained in the Bill which are flawed; it is the mechanisms that they put in place to try to bring them about As has already been said, common land is a very complicated legal and administrative matter, as the discussions on the most recent Bill to pass through your Lordships’ House, in 2005, show. In that Bill, a balance was struck between a range of interests which do not always see eye to eye. Common land is as legitimate a form of land tenure as the more usual form found across much of lowland England and Wales. While it was at one time more widespread than it is now, it is still an entirely appropriate basis for farming and land management in a number of upland and lowland, particularly wetland, areas of England and Wales. It is not a hangover from feudal England, although its ancestry lies there, nor is it an anachronism in the 21st century. The various rights which exist under it are in legal terms qualitatively no different from those that exist elsewhere in land law. Furthermore—and this is important—it is a cultural phenomenon which is part of the basis of the rationale for the Lake District National Park having been designated as a world heritage site I can see what the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, is trying to do, and I have no criticism of it. However, I feel that he has oversimplified some things in a number of ways. Issues relating to conservation and the environment are not the only part of the story; there are other aspects—for example, grazed habitats; cultural landscape, which I have already mentioned; traditional farming systems; rural communities and so on. Furthermore, one thing we can learn from the history of commons is that the interests of the owner of the soil and those of the owner of the common rights are not necessarily the same. Indeed, the interests of different owners of rights, which are not all the same, are in turn not necessarily the same. I must confess that I am not happy that the owner of the soil could gain a kind of advantage over all the other legitimate legal rights involved in it in the way that has been described, particularly in respect of the long-established rights of commons, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. It seems to me that if someone involved in common land wants to buy up some other land or rights or soil, they should do so in the ordinary way in the open market.