Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-23
Topic: Mixed Topics
Barbara Young (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of the Woodland Trust This amendment would require the Government to put in place a land use framework for England to provide a structure for resolving competing land uses, including agricultural land use. I thank the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for their support for my amendment. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, who had hoped to voice his support today before events intervened There are multiple pressures on our finite amount of land, and they are all growing. We need more land for increased food security, for storing carbon, for biodiversity, for managing floods, for trees and increased timber self-sufficiency, for recreation and health, and for built development, housing and infrastructure. There are probably more pressures that I have not added to the list. The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership recently conducted a demand/supply analysis and found that, "to meet a growing UK population’s food, space and energy needs while increasing the area needed to protect and enhance the nation’s natural capital", the UK would have to have a third more land than it currently has—so the future competition for land will be huge. As we tackle these multiple pressures for land, we are hampered by the lack of a common framework within which to reconcile these competing needs It is interesting that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have a land use framework and are using it to greater or lesser effect to guide policy on these competing areas of land need. As we build the new future post Covid, it is overdue that England should develop and use such a framework. This has been called for by many people, including the Select Committee on the Rural Economy of your Lordships’ House a couple of years ago and the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. That commission will be commencing some real-life, county-level pilots on land use frameworks in the next few months. So I urge the Government to agree that a land use framework for England should be put in place. Otherwise, the competition for land will be a free-for-all and will fail to optimise the choices made to ensure that the most important land uses are given priority in the places that are best suited to them I assure noble Lords, landowners and land managers that I am not talking about lines on maps and precise delineations of what goes where. I am talking about a high-level framework within which negotiations, probably at county level, can take place. Let me give an example from Wales, which has the most promising land use framework in the UK. There was considerable concern among Welsh sheep farmers that some of these competing land uses would simply mean that there were no sheep left in the uplands. Discussions on the best places to put additional trees and woodland and convert land to agroecological farming have shown that only about 0.2% of the current agricultural land in Wales would have to change its use. It will be a huge reassurance for sheep farmers in Wales that woodland and agroecology schemes are not the Antichrist, banishing sheep from the uplands for ever, but can be integrated with comparative ease. That land use framework was extremely valuable in that respect.