Nitrogen Reduction, Recycling and Reuse (Environment and Climate Change Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I sincerely thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and the committee for forcing to the forefront an issue on which it has long been evident that action is urgently needed in the UK and around the world. I join the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in saying that we have had a comprehensive introduction to a comprehensive report. But because I am a Green, I am going to go further and get into some broader systematic and international issues before coming back to some of the key points, which have already been raised but need to be stressed.

I thank the Sustainable Nitrogen Alliance for its excellent briefing on this issue, which starts by describing the nitrogen paradox: something so essential to life and food production is also a major pollutant. It is a threat to the life and well-being of humans in the UK, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, just set out, and to the health and well-being of the ecosystems on which we are all ultimately dependent. Nitrogen makes a perfect case study for the current broken state of our food system—indeed, our current broken economic system. It shows the disastrous outcome of producing more, selling more and consequently dumping more into the environment.

Noble Lords may be aware of the brilliant little video “The Story of Stuff”. You could make a similar, if perhaps for some tastes a little too excrement-filled, video about nitrogen. It goes right through to the adverts that noble Lords in the Committee have almost certainly seen today, plugging ultra-processed food-like substances sold wrapped in plastic and shouting in large letters “high protein” as though they were health foods. This is despite the fact that protein consumption in the UK is around 1.5 times our dietary needs, with the resultant nitrogen-rich waste flowing into the sewage system, into wastewater treatment plants and, all too often, directly into our rivers and seas. We know that these products and advertisements for them are damaging our public environmental health, yet away they blaze. As comprehensive and informed as the committee’s report is, that may be stretching beyond the direct topic of today, although it is essential to it.

I will go back to what noble Lords might call “the other end”, and something that has already been raised several times: the Haber-Bosch process. The so-called miracle that enabled the “green revolution”—I am putting that in scare quotes as it used vast quantities of fossil fuels to produce nitrogen fertiliser that would further heat the planet, destroy soil ecosystems and enable the development of industrial food systems disastrous for human health—was anything but green.

With the greatest respect, I have to respond directly to the contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Leicester. He said—of course, he is right—that, if you put the same crop in the same field in the same farming system and you put more or less nitrogen on it, you get differences in yield. Of course you do, because that is the primitive system of outdated 20th-century science behind our current arable farming systems. The noble Earl also spoke about crop rotations but we need far broader rotations. We are going to need many different crops in the climate change world that we are in now.

We need agro-ecological systems that work with nature instead of trying to turn it into a factory. I point the Committee to a single book that sets this direction of travel out very clearly: Miraculous Abundance, whose subtitle is One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World. It uses the fact that plants have evolved on land over some 500 million years to get their nitrogen and other essential nutrients by working co-operatively with fungi and bacteria in immensely complex systems. What we have done is throw nitrogen and other chemicals on those soils and destroyed those systems—then we have nutrient-deficient plants.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

I just make the point that the whole point of regenerative agriculture is to regenerate those mycorrhizal fungi and the soil. If the noble Baroness is saying that we cannot and should not use artificial nitrogen—I am advocating for using less of it—half the world will starve.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

There is a whole other debate there, but I go back to an Italian proverb from the 1930s: “Artificial fertiliser is good for the father and bad for the son”. I entirely agree with the noble Earl that we have to restore those systems, but they cannot work with the application of artificial nitrogen.

I shall now agree with the noble Earl to balance things out. He spoke about nitrogen as the elephant in the room. I agree with that, although I would use a different metaphor: the idea of a nitrogen bomb. We have to fit within the world’s planetary limits. We need to be fixing only 62 million tonnes of nitrogen on land a year; here, I am of course talking on a global scale. That is the process by which atmospheric nitrogen is converted into nitrogen as compounds by either microbes or human industrial processes. We cannot do more than 62 million tonnes but we are currently fixing at least 300 million tonnes—five times as much as the world can bear.

This is where I come to a question for the Minister; indeed, let me make a constructive suggestion. The International Nitrogen Management System project was set up by the UN to do, in essence, what the IPPC did for carbon emissions: set global targets. It set out targets in the Colombo Declaration, which the UK has not signed. We are operating in a global environment in which we are seeing massive cuts in international aid and development support. One area in which the UK could show real leadership and support is acting on a diplomatic scale, with very modest spending, to encourage that international effort. I know and understand that the committee was focused on the UK, but it is important to look at this on a global scale.

I draw noble Lords’ attention to that awful single graphic of planetary boundaries from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Seven of the nine boundaries it has identified have been exceeded. Biogeochemical flows are where the dark orange for danger extends, with the “N” as far beyond the safe operating space as the other screaming graphical element, “Novel entities”, for which, again, the so-called green revolution bears significant blame.

I have said slightly more than I intended; I have focused on the big picture. I shall finish by focusing on some of the specifics in this report. I hope that we will hear some good news from the Minister. We have already heard from other noble Lords that we expect from the Minister today a cross-government, holistic nitrogen strategy across sectors; that is obviously needed. I note the fact that Scotland is using the national nitrogen balance sheet approach, which seems to be working. Surely that would add value for England. Can the Minister update the Committee on what assessment the Government have made of the Scottish approach? Do they intend to pilot or adopt a similar framework in England? What timetable is there for considering that?

We have heard clearly—credit where it is due—that the Government plan to include nutrient circularity in their circular economy strategy, although I note that that is apparently turning into a circular economy growth plan. I refer back to where I started: we are creating a problem whereby growing the whole system is only going to grow the problem. None the less, I should like to hear from the Minister today, whether it is called a growth plan or a strategy, whether the Government plan to apply the waste hierarchy to this work so that reduction is given overwhelming priority in what is happening with nitrogen in this system.

Also, do the Government plan to apply the strongest possible controls to prevent so-called pollution swapping, thereby ensuring that solutions applied to one sector of the economy do not drive environmental harm in another? There is a particular concern here around energy recovery from manure incineration, which means burning a useful nutrient and rich resource for energy recovery and means that those nutrients are not then going into agriculture or nature; you are generating air pollution, carbon dioxide emissions and a phosphorous-rich ash that needs another outlet.

Noble Lords may think that I have been controversial up to now, but I am going back to controversy because I return to that issue of growth. We are soon going to hear some more about slurry and the issues of intensive animal agriculture. We are in the nation of England, where the number of large, intensive livestock mega farms is continuing to grow despite the unsustainable pollution impacts of those units. I note that the Environmental Audit Committee has said that there should be a presumption against expansion, at least in polluted catchments.

This inquiry supports the Corry and Cunliffe reviews’ recommendations for gap analysis of the existing regulations on agricultural water pollution and for the current rules for other intensive livestock farms to be extended to intensive beef and dairy units. That is a step but, ultimately, I put it to the Minister that we must acknowledge that the factory farming of animals is a nitrogen problem, a huge pollution problem, an antimicrobial resistance problem and, of course, a huge animal welfare problem—although I acknowledge that the Government put out before Christmas some good animal welfare provisions, which were somewhat buried in the Christmas rush; I look forward to seeing them be put into force at speed.

I have probably spoken for long enough but I want to add one final point; it picks up points made powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, about the human health impacts of all this. As others have already said, this issue causes 30,000 deaths a year in the UK. Those people are someone’s grandmother or child. We have long known about the impacts on asthma of nitrogen dioxide pollution, in particular PM2.5; we are also increasingly coming to understand just how important this is in terms of cardiovascular, respiratory and even musculoskeletal diseases. All of the evidence regarding the human health impacts is there—and is growing fast. We are taking steps, particularly in reducing the burning of fossil fuels. We are going to see a reduction in the sources of other forms of this pollution, which will only mean that the issues we are addressing here around agricultural emissions are going to rise up the agenda and rise in terms of their percentage impact on human health.