Agriculture Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Greaves]

1: Clause 1, page 2, line 10, after “supporting” insert “and enhancing”

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, on the Minister’s last point, I am not in touch with a huge number of tests and trials. There are complaints that the ones with which I am in touch—which deal with things in which I am interested—are not getting on fast enough. We understand that there are problems with Covid et cetera. The people I talk to have no complaints at all about how they are being conducted; they are being involved. In terms of new rights of way, the tests and trials in parts of Somerset—I think they are in the Quantocks—in which the Trails Trust is heavily involved are certainly finding a lot of lost bridleways which are likely to be turned, in modern terms, into new access. The people there are quite pleased with what is happening.

I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this discussion. I am also grateful for the considerable discussions and consultations which the Minister and his department have taken part in during the summer. I believe that the words “health” and “being” in the amendment from the noble Earl, Lord Devon, belong in Part 1 of the Bill. They ought to be there somewhere. I would have hoped that this was something the Government might accept, if not necessarily in the exact form in which the noble Earl put it forward. I know that this is a Government in the early gung-ho stages of “We know everything, everything we do is right and we are not going to change anything”. It will change as the years go by; it always does. This is something to which the Minister should and could give further consideration. I would like the words “outdoor recreation” to be there, but I am not going to press this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

I shall speak specifically to my Amendment 48, which concerns commons. I am not sure how it ended up in this group, but it does not matter. In Committee, we had a longer discussion and I put it in a group on its own, so as to talk about quite a lot of the issues connected with commons. On this occasion, in order to save time, I did not mind in which group it ended up, as I can talk about it in any event.

Again, I am grateful for the help and advice that I have had from the Foundation for Common Land and the Open Spaces Society. It is interesting that they come from different angles. One comes from a management of the commons angle and the other starts from an access angle, but they come together and work together because it is necessary to do so.

I need to go through again briefly what common land is. It is land registered as common land in a register kept under Part 1 of the Commons Act 2006 or the Commons Registration Act 1965. It is land owned by one person or a number of people which is subject to the rights of other people—the commoners—to use and take some product from it. Nowadays, typically that is the grazing of animals.

Common land is only 3% of the total land area in England but it is 37% of the land above the moorland line. It is therefore used by hill farmers, who depend on the rough grazing, natural grasslands and other sorts of moorland. It accounts for a fifth of the area of the SSSIs in England—not a fifth of the number of SSSIs but a fifth of the SSSI land, as a lot of the moorland SSSIs are quite large. It delivers many public benefits and includes two-fifths of the access land in England. It is often designated in different ways for nature, and, not surprisingly, over 90% of common land was under an environmental stewardship scheme under the CAP. Importantly, these sorts of schemes can continue on the upland commons. However, there are also lots of small, local commons, such as the ones referred to by my noble friend Lord Addington, many of them vital for informal local recreation, such as the village common where people play rounders or whatever. They are also often environmentally important for the reasons given by noble friend.

The problem is the management of the commons under the ELMS. How does a system designed to provide financial support for all these different purposes to traditional owners cope with a number of different interests—owners, commoners and perhaps others? They may be competing interests, and individual commoners may have different views on what should happen. In Committee, I asked the Minister whether the Government had already turned their mind to the administration of agreements in relation to commons, with the particular difficulties that can arise in negotiating, administering and delivering them. The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, said among other things that the Government were working in the trials to create commons-specific land management plans and systems. There are two tests and trials which I understand include substantial amounts of common, one in Cumbria and one in Dartmoor.

Since then, I was very grateful to have a meeting with civil servants and lawyers, and I was astonished how many people in and around Defra had an interest in commons. It was an extremely interesting meeting, and I was very grateful indeed. I am sorry that the Minister could not come, but I understand. I asked about the two specific local tests and what the Government were doing in relation to small, lowland commons, to find systems for them. I understand that there will be some small, lowland commons in the tests and trials once the national system is brought in next year. I was told—this is where it got interesting—that they were developing toolkits to understand the issues; everybody develops toolkits nowadays. These are toolkits not for what should happen but to understand the issues. One very interesting comment by one of the people in the meeting was that we need to focus on what we need to learn. This all gave me to understand—and it was extremely useful for this, if nothing else—that, as had been suggested to me by some of the people from the Cumbria test and trial, working out what to do with commons is really in the early days. In particular, I asked about disputes and was told that they were still working out a way forward. This was all very honest, and I was grateful to be given that time.

It really comes back to what I said before about the Bill—that we really have to treat the Government as though they are on trust on these matters; we have to trust them to do it properly and do it right. As far as commons are concerned, as the months go by following the passage of this Bill, I shall certainly be on the Government’s back. Indeed, I got some promises in relation to the tests and trials taking place and so on, that people would keep in touch with me—and I shall keep in touch with other noble Lords, such as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, who are interested in this issue. I hope that together we can form a little group and follow it through with the Government.

It was confirmed that the details of the ELMS with regard to commons would, along with lots of others, be outside legislation. I tabled this amendment saying that that should not be the case simply because it was the amendment that I had tabled in Committee, and I had not had time to think of a new one, but I am not going to push it to a vote when we get to it in order. A lot of work is taking place, but it is at a very early stage, and it will be very important that a lot more work takes place much more quickly. This whole thing is going to come rushing up on people, and we really do not want the commons missed out.

[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and his very interesting thoughts on commons. That is a very useful debate to have and one we must take seriously. I echo the words of those who have been talking about the need to get new entrants into agriculture and develop diversity.

I have added my name to Amendment 16 in the name of my noble friends Lord Caithness and Lord Dundee, who have already spoken about it adequately. I am delighted to see that climate change mitigation is in the list, because we have to take it seriously. I know that the NFU has set an ambitious target with regard to being net zero, so that is something that the agriculture sector is taking very seriously.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Caithness on his myth busting around the fact that farming can be eminently profitable and nature friendly. As we have all been hearing, nature-friendly farming is the way forward. I also send my congratulations on his words about the Allerton project of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust. I visited it a few years ago and was incredibly impressed by the work there. He mentioned the grey partridge. In conjunction with the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, National England and others, there is also the Peppering Partridge Project, which shows that not only can farming be very beneficial to wildlife but game shooting can be very beneficial to wildlife. That might seem slightly counterintuitive, and I speak not as a shooter myself, but it shows how all those different aspects can work together.

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, talked about trust. I have immense trust in the entire ministerial Defra team. We are very fortunate in this House to have my noble friends Lord Gardiner and Lord Goldsmith, and in the other place we have other very committed people who take the environment and farming interests very seriously. There is always the case of not knowing what is going to happen later but, at the moment, I have immense trust in them and wait to hear what they have to say.