argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Patrick Cormack (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I always remember with great gratitude when she came to my constituency to help with a particular problem, and went to infinite trouble so to do. She speaks with knowledge and authority I have never heard a debate in your Lordships’ House that has been opened with two more impressive speakers, who illustrated the expertise we have here. A powerful case was made by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, and I was almost totally persuaded by it—until I heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington. They both made powerful points, but what has emerged from the debate for me, as a pure lay man in these discussions, is that the prime purpose and overriding concern of an environment Bill—as underlined by the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, who has an extremely sensible amendment in his name—must be the health of the environment, and you cannot have a healthy environment unless you have healthy rivers. The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, made a perceptive point when he underlined his support for the Chidgey amendment Where do we go from all this? Of course there has to be fairness at the end of the day, and an appeal procedure that can be respected by all concerned. I very much hope that, in the discussions that take place between now and Report—we say that again and again on this Bill—there can be an agreement on an appeal process whereby people do not feel that they have been harshly dealt with and, when following practices that they have followed over the years, they are not abruptly penalised. That is the direction in which we must go because—I come back to the prime point—the health of our rivers is fundamental to a healthy environment, and nothing must be done that further damages them. We referred in earlier stages of the Bill to the crucial importance of clean waterways—the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, has his own Private Member’s Bill in that regard—and we are a long way from achieving the cleanliness that is, I hope, the desire of us all.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Ian Duncan (Conservative, Centre-right): Before we move on, perhaps we need a pause to allow people to escape from the Chamber They have escaped. We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 188. Anyone wishing to press this amendment or anything else in the group to a Division must make that clear during the debate. Clause 83: Water quality: powers of Secretary of State Amendment 188
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Rosalind Altmann (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 188A, 188B and 188C in this group, which are also in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. I also add my support to Amendment 188 in the name of my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering. These amendments have already been extremely well explained, but I will add a couple of points The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, suggested that metering is the fairest way of charging. I completely agree on that. It is important to note the improvement in water usage that has occurred when metering has been installed. Therefore, controlling the supply and use of water is a major step forward in trying to ensure that our water supply is sustainable.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Patrick Cormack (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I can be very brief because I have great sympathy with most of the amendments before us. The amendment that the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, spoke to briefly but eloquently should commend itself to my noble friend. I hope he will be able to give some encouraging comments on that. Water metering is clearly essential and must be brought into effect as soon as possible. In the context of this Bill, I think the Parminter amendment has a great deal to commend it.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Zac Goldsmith (Conservative, Centre-right): In moving government Amendment 194B, I will speak to all government amendments consequential to it. I am pleased to be introducing today a new biodiversity net gain requirement for nationally significant infrastructure projects. This complements the existing provisions in the Environment Bill for biodiversity net gain for all other development and fulfils the Government’s recent commitment in response to the Dasgupta review. This will ensure that new nationally significant infrastructure projects, such as new roads, railways or airports, will contribute to our vision of a nature-positive future These government amendments will also enable the Government to extend net gain to major projects in the marine environment in the future, once a suitable approach has been developed, so that developments at sea will be required to increase marine biodiversity as well. I hope that this is welcomed by the noble Lords, Lord Teverson, Lord Randall and Lord Blencathra, in particular, who have spoken with great passion on the protection of the marine environment. The detail of the requirement will be brought forward through policy statements following consultation, and we will waste no time in implementing this measure. We will publish a consultation later this year, which will include proposals for an appropriate transition period and a range of other important details In addition, I am pleased to say that the new version of the biodiversity metric for development under the Town and Country Planning Act was launched earlier today by Natural England. It is accompanied by a draft small sites metric, which is designed to provide process simplifications for small sites aiming to achieve biodiversity net gain. We will be looking at the responses to this draft small sites metric and wider engagement later this year, and will consider further opportunities to simplify net gain for small developments I know the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is due to speak to this group, and that the net gain clauses were the subject of one of the recommendations of the report on the Bill from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. I am therefore pleased to take this opportunity to inform him that the Government will be accepting all the recommendations of his Committee. I will write to the Committee today, and of course I will deposit a copy in the Library, and I will table a couple of government amendments on Report To return to the subject at hand, I look forward to hearing contributions from noble Lords about biodiversity net gain more broadly as part of this debate. I thank all noble Lords—there are too many to name—who spoke at Second Reading in support of extending biodiversity net gain to nationally significant infrastructure projects. I hope they will take some comfort in knowing that they have played a part in moving the Government and that the Government have listened to them. I beg to move Amendment 194C (to Amendment 194B)
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Lucy Neville-Rolfe (Conservative, Centre-right): I am sorry I missed the list for this amendment. Noble Lords will know the importance I attach to cost benefit, whatever the nature of legislation and however much support it has. Improving biodiversity is clearly very desirable, given past losses. However, the proposals before us on nature, notably on net gain, will have a large and certain impact on development while they might or might not significantly improve biodiversity. They will add grit to the system, placing a further burden on local government and decreasing productivity, especially in infrastructure and housing This could cumulatively cost a lot, and it could hit smaller operators disproportionately, as the Minister was kind enough to acknowledge. The costs, of course, fall mainly on business and other developers and not on the Treasury, which is no doubt one of the reasons why it has been supportive. One of the main beneficiaries will be consultants, as with the environmental impact assessments that I remember coming in in the 1980s. They added costs—a lot of costs—and gave a lot of work to consultants, but may not have been entirely effective I am not sure that the published impact assessment—for which, many thanks—gives the full picture on costs. These will depend on the details and the complexity, on the time taken to assess biodiversity loss, on registration, on maintenance, on inspection, on enforcement and on covenants and the credits scheme the Minister has mentioned. My noble friend Lord Lucas was very good on some of these points, I thought, and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, made an interesting observation about the pressure on land use that needs to be assessed. Moreover, and this is the reason I have stood up, the Bill has been added to quite substantially. That has been well received today, and there is pressure to add more. How much will the costs to businesses and public authorities rise as a result of adding so many new areas to biodiversity gain in Schedule 14A I acknowledge that today’s audience is an entirely environmental one, including our "environmental superhero", my noble friend the Minister, and that this is the year of COP 26. However, the productivity of the economy also matters to the interests of our children and grandchildren, and to the disadvantaged. There is lots of work still to do on getting the detail right and understanding the costs.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Zac Goldsmith (Conservative, Centre-right): It is impossible to answer the question, because it depends on the site and the type of ecosystem created, which determines the kind of protection that applies. My point is that there are protections for natural sites already, although I am not suggesting that there are enough. It is not easy to get permission to destroy important ecological sites. As I have said in this and in many other debates, we intend to build on those protections. The idea that, in 30 years, it will not be significantly harder to grub up valuable ecosystems—even 30 year-old ecosystems, which are important—is highly unlikely or virtually impossible to imagine.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Malcolm Sinclair (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, first, I congratulate my noble friend, as others have done, on getting this amendment into the Bill. It is a major step forward I have two questions for him. He was again critical of the UK’s performance worldwide on nature and biodiversity. We know that it is not good. I remember being heavily criticised when I was a Minister, but I then discovered that most countries criticising us were not using the same basis of measurement. I recall that, not so long ago, we were portrayed as being very bad on Covid, only to find that the countries doing better us were assessing Covid on a totally different basis. Can my noble friend say that his comments will apply universally across all other countries? My second question follows on from what my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said about securing good use of public funds. I thoroughly approve of biodiversity net gain, but what happens if nature destroys one of the projects subject to support for biodiversity net gain? Perhaps my noble friend wants to restore a bit of peatland and get some sphagnum moss back. Everything works well for 10 or 15 years but, due to climate change, the land changes and can no longer support sphagnum moss. Therefore, the whole point of that bit of net gain falls down. Does my noble friend envisage having some sort of remedy to achieve a different type of net gain? How does he foresee that sort of situation being remedied?
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Zac Goldsmith (Conservative, Centre-right): On the first point, my noble friend is absolutely right. My comments relate to the fact—it is a fact, there is no doubt—that our biodiversity has decreased very sharply in recent decades and continues to go down. That is why our goal is to bend that curve so that, instead of going down, we start to increase biodiversity At the same time, the UK is, I believe, doing more work internationally—not just by wagging its finger but through example—than any other country in the world. If you compare what we are doing on nature with, for example, what is proposed by the new Administration in the United States or any other country in Europe, I would say that we are miles ahead in our ambitions and in what we are doing with our international climate finance and ODA. We were the first country to deal with things such as our fossil fuel subsidies and our land use subsidies. Our campaigns internationally, not least the 30by30 initiative, are changing the debate around nature. I am very proud of where we are in the debate but, like everywhere in the world, we have an enormous amount of work to do to translate that into action on the ground My noble friend’s second point is very interesting, and one that I shall have to come back to him on for any details. My only observation would be that a proper net gain project is not going to be about one species, it will be about the habitat that supports that species. Even if climate change were to render the conditions too difficult for that particular species, you will not have no gain—you will still have gain on that side as a consequence of the habitat improvement. He raises a very interesting point; it is one that merits thought and I will think about it.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Zac Goldsmith (Conservative, Centre-right): I understand that some may not have heard of this, but developers should have, because it is already current policy in the National Planning Policy Framework. Not everyone goes to bed reading such a document, but if you are in the development sector you ought to be familiar with what is in it, so I am surprised by that. I certainly did not say that they were overwhelmingly supportive: I think the term I used was "broadly supportive". I do not want to exaggerate, but the feedback we have had has been broadly supportive from people at all stages of the spectrum, from the large to the medium and the small—but, as I said, this is our job. We need to do this; it is a really important part of the nature recovery journey we are on, which I believe is backed by most people in this country. Most people recognise that this is something that has to happen, and our job is to make it work As for consultants, this is an entirely new thing, a world first, so there will not be loads of consultants waiting to start advertising their skills as of tomorrow. But when you create a market for something, the market responds. People will recognise that there are careers and opportunities in helping companies at all levels to deliver biodiversity net gain. So I imagine that, as with most things market-related, we will see ever more people entering this field with ecological expertise, knowledge and skills to offer those businesses.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Ralph Matthew Palmer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, in addition to moving Amendment 205A, I shall speak to the other amendments in the group If one is setting out to restore nature in a bit of the countryside, it is dead easy to restore the plants. Almost every native British plant—certainly all the common and half-common ones—are available from a number of seed sources. All you have to do is plant the seeds or, if you are that bit keener, to grow the seeds on in the garden and then plant out plugs. There is no difficulty in doing it and no laws against it. It is a process widely used to bring nature back into farms, and we are all used to it When it comes to animals, it is much harder. Of course, some big animals introduce themselves. I do not know any way of keeping a fox out of a bit of territory, and mice and similar mammals seem to move pretty well. But when it comes to glow-worms, crickets, soil animals generally and even lizards and frogs, that is not the case. These animals just do not have the ability to move across gaps in countryside. They have not evolved a widely mobile strategy. If I want glow-worms back somewhere, I have to put them there; they will not come to me The BBC celebrates, as do I, a glow-worm reintroduction process under way at the moment to add 500 glow-worms in two sites over two years. That is ridiculous. It is a pathetic level of ambition. We ought to be distributing millions of glow-worms to tens of thousands of sites to get a decent effect on nature and to get things back to where they should be if we had looked after nature This sort of process absolutely needs to be properly controlled, which is what I am trying to achieve through the amendments I propose. We need not small, underfunded, academic efforts to introduce one or two little bits of nature back but something much larger, more widespread and popular. We do it for plants; we ought to be able to do it for animals. That is what I aim to do in Amendments 205A and 257D Amendment 253 looks at land that has been seriously rewilded and asks whether we can take that rewilding just one bit further. If a rabbit or deer dies in a rewilded estate, the carcass lies where it is and is consumed by whatever carrion eaters are around, be they beetles, fungi or birds, but that is not true of the stock used to maintain the landscape within a rewilding scenario. If a sheep or cow dies, the carcass has to be removed. If we want the rewilding to be truly natural, we ought to explore the possibility of leaving that carcass to be consumed in a natural way This is already being done in Holland. A month ago, I sent my noble friend some detailed information on what happens there. I would very much like the opportunity to explore with him whether this might be a relaxation we can bring into the UK. Again, things need to be done in a controlled way. You do not want an animal with a serious disease left out as a carcass, but all that is required in Holland is a veterinary inspection. That seems to work well. I hope we can do the same here. I beg to move.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Zac Goldsmith (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I declare a personal interest in rewilding, which goes back a very long way. I am a strong advocate of supporting species recovery and have been excited to see this issue catch on. I welcome my noble friend Lord Lucas’s interest. Well-managed releases of native species, including reintroductions of formerly native species, are a really important aspect of this. However, they can be complex and can carry risks, including for the animals themselves. The taking of animals from wild populations, or poor-quality breeding programmes and releases, can undermine conservation efforts. We should continue to work in a targeted way, under existing regulations which already make provision for the taking of protected wild animals under licence The Government are already taking positive steps to reintroduce and release native species, such as the pine marten in the Forest of Dean, which has been credited with reducing grey squirrel populations elsewhere, and the pool frog in Norfolk. I will take this opportunity to celebrate the wonderful work to reintroduce white-tailed eagles on the Isle of Wight in a project led by the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation supported by Forestry England. They released the first birds two years ago, and there were further releases last year, to local acclaim and excitement.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Environment
Ralph Matthew Palmer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am delighted to be part of this group and to be supporting the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, in her Amendment 209. If we are to have nature recovery strategies, they have to be followed. I touched on this in a previous group in relation to biodiversity gain and planning consents. If that great source of nature improvement is done willy-nilly, with no reference at all to the nature recovery strategy, what is the point of the nature recovery strategy? This is one of the main ways in which things are going to improve. Why is it disconnected? Amendment 209 from the noble Baroness would reconnect it and other things in a most useful way My own amendments in this group are aimed at seeking remedies to things which seem to me, from my experience locally, not to be working as well as they might be and which could be made to work better, under the structures proposed in this Bill, with a bit of additional power. First, I observe that, within the land owned by the local council, there are substantial SSSIs which are supposed to be chalk downland and which are actually largely bramble. How has that come about? I think it has come about because the negotiations on what should be done are conducted between a council that is extremely willing but short of money and Natural England, which understands that and does not see the purpose of pushing a long-term relationship harder than it reasonably can. The net result is that things go gently backwards.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Agriculture
Malcolm Sinclair (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am grateful for the reply my noble friend the Minister gave, but I am slightly perturbed by his answer to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, to which I put my name. He said we need a lot more Knepps. Yes, but where will they go He went on to say that the Government have a strategic approach. I do not think they have. My noble friend is battling with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on many issues at the moment, and he will be battling with the Treasury and the Department for Transport. This goes across government. The Government might think they have a strategy but, without a strategy that we can all look at, it will be dependent on the budget and annual spending plans of each department. It will be a horrible annual battle I hope my noble friend will reconsider this between now and another stage, because the more I have listened to on the Bill and the more I have talked to farmers, the more I am absolutely convinced that the only sensible way forward is for us to have a strategy to which we can have our input and support the Government. That will make life clearer and better for everybody in future. Not only will it protect our environment much better but it will help produce the food that we want. The way we are going, we will have to import a whole lot more food than we do at the moment; that will be the downside of the Bill.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-07
Topic: Agriculture
Zac Goldsmith (Conservative, Centre-right): I think we are agreed. In the past, I have heard the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, agree—as most people in this Committee would agree—that we need to do all we can to reverse biodiversity loss. We cannot do that without the measures that I have described today and that we have been debating over the last seven days in Committee. We can bank that as something we all agree on and put it to one side We also know that we need to produce food, and that we probably have to produce more food. The only answer to that is to maximise the use of land that is not highly productive, to increase productivity on land that is productive and to ensure that the farming we do does not undercut or undermine the work we are doing on areas that are not farmed. That means reconciling farming with nature. No one is pretending it is easy, but that is what we have to do. If we do not do that, we fail with nature, food security and pretty much all the ambitions we set ourselves. It is difficult, but that is what we are trying to do. Things such as ELM and the other mechanisms that exist will, I hope, create the incentives we need to take us down that route.