Growth Plan 2022

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Investment zones will happen only where they are wanted by the local authority. The local authority might in some cases be a national park, and national parks do not want them. There are certain areas where they can be, but the Government are committed to green open spaces, the green belt and designated landscapes being maintained. We want to make sure that where there is a need for growth and jobs, which help the economy and help families and households keep a roof over their head and their pensions secured, this is not being done at a risk to the environment.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, recent data from the Food Foundation, of which I am proud to be a trustee, points out that, this September, 18% of households —over 10 million adults—had food insecurity. Some 58% of those households had cut down on buying fruit and 48% had cut down on buying vegetables, because they are too expensive. Where in the growth and future farming plans will we make vegetables and fruit more available to hungry people at reasonable prices?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

First, we want to see more of our fruit and vegetables grown in this country and shorten the food miles to get them to the people who need them. We are supporting families as never before in a variety of ways, and food is a vital part of household expenditure, but it is far from the largest. The Government have to act holistically to make sure that, in these difficult times, we help families with energy and other household costs as well as food.

Food: Imports and Security

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am very happy to take up any specific cases where the noble Baroness feels that undue influence has been applied to the supply chain. We have complex supply chains in this country; she is quite right to state that some companies are based overseas. However, where we find problems we can take action, not just through the Environment Act but through the Groceries Code Adjudicator, which this Government also set up.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit report last week found that the combined impacts of climate change as well as oil and gas prices have driven up food prices by £11.4 billion—that is £407 per household. Obviously, that is much more serious for those on lower incomes. Of that £407, £170 is due to climate change and £236 is due to oil and gas prices. That really tells us, if we ever need reminding, how much the food system is dependent on fossil fuels. Can the Minister agree and support the transition now to agroecological food systems? Can he give us any reassurance that the new ELMS subsidy system will be back on track with the announcement of the new Prime Minister?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I think that it is back on track with the existing Prime Minister, or the one that is still there as we speak. I assure the noble Baroness that the very basis of ELMS is an agroecological understanding of our soil standard, getting proper functioning ecosystems to support the food that we produce—so I can absolutely give her that assurance.

Climate Change and Biodiversity: Food Security

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Boycott]

To move that this House takes note of the impact of climate change and biodiversity loss on food security.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to introduce this debate today. It was topical when I first tabled it, and it is even more so now. I thank all noble Lords who have signed up to speak, and I especially welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, who will be making her maiden speech today. I am sure I join everyone in the House in welcoming her and being extremely grateful for her expertise, which is much needed now. I am also sure, like everyone else, we send our best wishes to the Royal Family.

The war in Ukraine has weaponised global food supply. In blockading ports and destroying infrastructure, Russia has severed the ties between acutely food insecure populations and the Ukrainian wheat and cooking oil on which they depend. The war is not the sole cause, but it has thrown fire on an already unstable situation which is being undermined across the world by climate change. The record-breaking 40-degree heatwave and prolonged drought in the UK—July 2022 was the driest July since 1911, and it has been the driest nine months since 1975—are stark reminders to us all, not least for the farmers and food producers in the UK. Retailers are rejecting vegetables because they are stunted due to a lack of water. Some 50% of the potato crop is not going to be up to much. They are being ploughed back into the soil—a quite horrific prospect as we face the most severe cost of living crisis in my lifetime. Livestock farmers are already using their winter silage or haylage due to a severe lack of grass. What is this going to mean for the winter months ahead? No one knows, because there is no plan.

This is not a problem for us alone. The shocks from climate change, such as drought and other extreme weather, and the associated biodiversity loss are not going anywhere. They are everywhere. Like us, China and Kenya are experiencing their worst droughts in living memory. Alarmingly, research by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine highlights that we import 32% of our fresh produce—the key to healthy diets—from countries that are most vulnerable to climate change.

But I now turn to the other part of the debate: biodiversity. All too often it is overlooked as part of the fight against climate change. But make no mistake: you will not get one without the other. Some 40 years ago, the world scoffed at James Lovelock’s understanding of the interconnectivity of life on earth—now, when it is almost too late, we are starting to understand just what a miracle it is.

A 2021 report gave a damning verdict on biodiversity in the UK: we are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Institutionally, we are not just failing nature; we are actually hastening its demise. The Dasgupta review, published brilliantly by our Treasury in 2021, highlighted this in one shocking statistic: globally, we subsidise the destruction of nature to the tune of between $4 trillion and $6 trillion annually. In the UK, it is a minimum of $70 million. COP 15, taking place in Montreal later this year, will be a critical test of the world’s resolve and a chance to change that trajectory.

Back to the UK specifically, since the 1970s our food system, from farm to fork, has been the key driver in the decline of nature. A study by the Natural History Museum found that we have lost half of our biodiversity since the industrial revolution. At present, we know that over 40% of UK species are in decline and that one in 10 are threatened with extinction, and that 85% of our soils have been severely degraded. Changes in the way we farm—overusing chemicals, planting monocultures and removing habitat features, partly driven by our own implementation of subsidies—have been a leading contributor to this loss.

Biodiversity plays a central role in both tackling climate change and establishing a farming system that naturally provides pollination and pest predation, as well as soil fertility and carbon storage. We cannot tackle these two issues in isolation; we must see them as one challenge.

Solutions start with the food system. It can be tempting to see something as sprawling as the global food system as completely beyond the reach of Governments. Yet global food insecurity and our food insecurity are the product of policy decisions—they did not just happen. The virtual exclusion of agriculture from climate change policy has spared the sector from the pressure to transition to more sustainable practices. Just as Governments have favoured fossil fuels over renewables, so they have favoured large corporations that say they will deliver cheap food and economic growth. We need to reimagine this system, from what happens in the field to what we eat.

Research is helping us understand that embedding biodiversity into farming systems and increasing the carbon content of soil will improve yields. But how do we manage that soil and the land to feed people and nurture the planet? That is critical. As the national food strategy set out, 22% of land that produces food in the UK is used to produce crops to feed animals. This is massively inefficient.

On land use, I want to debunk something that has been doing the rounds. It has been said that solar farms are a threat to food production. This is emphatically not the case. Solar farms currently take up 0.1% of land in the UK. Even if that is rapidly scaled up, as the previous Government said they would, that would still rise to only 0.3%. In context, that is only 0.5% of all our farming land and about half the size of the land used for golf courses. In addition, solar farms can be biodiversity hotspots if they are not grazed. On this, as on many aspects, we can hit multiple birds with a single stone.

The ecosystems that we degrade through overuse should be helping to absorb carbon, regulating surface temperature and protecting against the destruction wrought by weather and extremes. Instead, we have relentlessly weakened nature’s resilience and limited the capacity of soil to deliver healthy harvests. Agro-ecological approaches have very encouraging outcomes. For instance, Hillesden Farm, a 1,000 acre farm in Buckinghamshire, has since 2005 increased biodiversity while never losing crop yields. As farmers manage 70% of the UK’s land area, and the need to tackle the climate and nature crisis is great, the Government must consider increasing the budget for farming from its current £3.2 billion a year. A land-use framework for not just farmland but all land is crucial, and the Government must not miss the opportunity they now have to act.

Let us turn to another part of the food system. We know that the agri-food supply chain on both an international and national level is concentrated within a handful of companies which hide behind opaqueness. The just-in-time model and the oligopolistic nature of our food system make it vulnerable and fragile to geopolitical and climate shocks. We must have shorter supply chains and local food systems that are built on diversity. The Sustain alliance carried out a significant piece of market research in 2021 which found that most farmers in England and Wales want to supply much more locally and regionally. However, there are very big barriers, from a lack of affordable finance to any investment in infrastructure such as abattoirs.

There is a massive opportunity for our Government to marry up the levelling-up agenda and the net-zero strategy to deliver more climate-friendly and resilient supply chains that create decent jobs and put some pride in place around farming and food. Can the Minister confirm whether he will push for this to happen?

On procurement, the public purse spends over £2 billion a year on catering. It is therefore one of the Government’s most direct tools to change what people eat, reduce the amount of cheap industrial meat and introduce more fruit, veg and pulses, but the standard of public sector food across the UK is really patchy. It is the Government’s job to set standards that all caterers are legally obliged to follow, so that they will serve nutritious meals that demonstrate and normalise healthy diets, rather than cheap junk food.

The Food for Life programme, run by the Soil Association, is proof that good food can be served on public sector budgets. I have seen this for myself over many years. It serves 2 million meals a day and is produced to higher environmental and welfare standards. The Government are currently consulting on introducing a target for 50% of local food, of which at least 20% should come from high production standards, as I have proposed in an amendment to the Procurement Bill.

On what we actually eat, changing how we farm will not be enough to break the vicious cycle of poor diets and environmental harm; only by radically lowering the demand for meat in high-income countries can we do that. Animal products are an important part of high-quality protein but they are a huge drain on global resources. Our overconsumption is costing us our planet as well as our health. One-third of all the grain grown in the world is destined for animal feeds, and if population and the demand for meat keep rising as is forecast, agricultural production will have to increase by 50% in the next 30 years. Clearly, that is quite impossible. As an aside, right now there are 80 billion animals living in cages or feed-lots to feed us—that is four for every single person. It is quite disgusting.

The Committee on Climate Change has repeatedly called for the UK to reduce meat and dairy by a fifth, while the Dimbleby-led national food strategy called for a 30% increase in fruit and veg. How do we get there? The time for being reticent on making policy interventions to shape how we eat must be over. We are not just facing a climate and nature emergency but a big public health one. Governments, policymakers and parliamentarians can no longer claim that this is a simple case of educating children better or asking them to exercise more. In England alone, 28% of adults are obese and 36.2% are overweight; the Covid pandemic has exacerbated that. This is a disgrace.

How have the Government responded to this new challenge? In April, they cut £100 million of funding to local authority weight management services and in May introduced a go-slow on their own obesity policies to restrict “buy one, get one free” on junk food and junk food marketing. I would be interested in hearing from the Minister an explanation of exactly how junk food adverts help citizens afford good food.

The problems of poor diets do not just lie at the feet of individuals, and not all meat and dairy has the same impact. The challenge for all of us—government, policymakers and businesses—is how, in the face of a rocketing cost of living, to guarantee that everyone has access to a healthy diet that does not cost the earth. According to the Food Foundation, there has been a 57% increase in food insecurity since January 2022, and we now have 17.2% of households with kids experiencing lack of food, which affects 2.6 million children. The poorest fifth of UK households would need to spend 47% of their disposable income just to meet the cost of the government-recommended healthy diet. Clearly, they cannot do it.

Here are some things that the Government could do: uprate benefits in line with inflation; increase Healthy Start; and have supermarkets, the top four of which announced pre-tax profits this year of £4 billion, top up the value of vouchers. Government could auto-enrol eligible children in free school meals. The Child Poverty Action Group estimates that currently nearly 900,000 kids are missing out, and they have parents on universal credit. If we are to live in a green and pleasant land, all children going to school must receive a hot and healthy meal, in the same way that they receive a pencil and a ruler.

Can the Government think more creatively about shifting dietary habits? Are there ways that prices could be lowered on healthier foods? Given how resource-intensive and damaging intensive meat farming is, what could Governments, national and local, do to curb their spread? We need to study food insecurity in the round. We should at the very least have a special inquiry into this issue.

It is possible to get a better world, but changes must be fundamental. Farming lobbies are powerful, leaving politicians reluctant to shift from large-scale agriculture. while advising people what to eat is regarded as the nanny state. The result is that our tackling of the environmental harms of industrial agriculture is weak to pathetic. The worst health outcomes have been blamed on the individual, never the system. Food poverty and food insecurity is the result of being unable to cook or being a rotten household manager. We have done everything to prop up a system that is not only killing us—diet-related disease is now the number one cause of preventable death on the planet—but killing our wildlife and soil, and contributing massively to the climate change that is destroying the planet.

Finally, what are the Government for if they fail to look after their people and ensure that they are adequately fed, their children can grow into healthy adults and the soil, the country and the fields they inherited are not used just as an inexhaustible cupboard? This is no easy task for any Government, but I should really like the Minister to agree that just because something might be really difficult does not mean it is not worth doing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. As I think he knows, I have a great deal of time and respect for his points of view. I am afraid I do not completely share his optimism that we are getting it all right and looking at green and pleasant lands or sunlit uplands—whatever you want to call them. I have been told that I only have two minutes, so I cannot refer to everyone’s fantastic contributions, but I would obviously like to single out the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, and say how thrilled I am that she is here.

I also point out that people have talked about what is happening in Pakistan and across the world. In this country we have always been shielded from this stuff; we do not think it affects us. In fact, it is affecting us hugely. The noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, talked about the rice production of Pakistan being severely curtailed. That will affect not only our supply but our prices. I chair Feeding Britain and see this every day.

Food security is to do with everyone. Food is at the bottom—or top, wherever you want to put it—of practically everything we do. We can live without energy, but we cannot live without food. This has been shown by the fantastic contributions from everyone in this House. It is in everything, whether we are talking about water, soil or big companies that run the world. It needs an extreme shake-up. At the moment, we fiddle at the margins. Politically it looks impossible, but that is no reason to say that we should not try.

I thank noble Lords very much for being here tonight. I would be grateful if the Minister could write to as many people as possible as some really important points were made.

Motion agreed.

Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 8th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and I hugely congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on getting to No. 1 on the Bill list and on getting this Bill going. I honour the presence of Rosamund here in the House—it seems wrong to say “congratulate”, but it is amazing how she has turned a personal tragedy into the most powerful campaign.

I am going to start with a really bad joke that is going round the States this week. It goes like this. The United States Supreme Court decision to curtail the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide has drawn a puzzled reaction from the nation’s foetuses. A statement from the Association of American Foetuses expressed bafflement that the court would issue a ruling that increased the amount of atmospheric carbon monoxide, which has been shown to have a damaging effect on foetal health. “It’s impossible for us to see today’s ruling as anything but flagrantly anti-foetus,” the statement read. “To say that we are disappointed would be putting it mildly. When you consider that this has followed the decision to overturn Roe v Wade”, the foetuses added, “it just doesn’t seem very pro-life to us”. I am kind of with them on that—not on the Roe v Wade bit but on the other.

My daughter is pregnant with twins. They are 26 weeks and bouncing along; they could be born at any time. She lives in the city and she rides a bike. I guess that the twins are going to be biking, and they might also inherit the asthma that so tortured her father. We live near the Edgware Road, a site that was later found under one of our mayors to be one of the most polluted areas in the city. We spent many nights in A&E, literally waiting for the oxygen supplies while he gasped on the floor. They did not say then that it was to do with air pollution, but I absolutely know that it was. Unlike dear young Ella, he survived, but it was a really miserable experience.

The weird thing about air is that it is a bit like pumping sewage into rivers, about which we had a debate yesterday. You think to yourself: why are we legislating about this? The curious thing about the right to clean air is that, when any constitution or such things were set up, it was not even debated.

There is a case going through in America called Juliana v United States, which involves a group of young people taking on the American Government to demand the right to clean water, clean air and a clean environment. The Trump Government managed to knock this back at every turn of the screw. A friend of mine, who is an academic, was asked to stand up and talk about clean air. She made the point that when the founding fathers wrote the constitution of America, no one assumed that you would ever have anything but clean air—it was just an assumption. Why do we have to legislate for something that is humanity’s right, as the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, points out?

I want to make one specific point about something I am pleased to see in the Bill. Clause 8 excludes biomass and wood from the definition of renewable energy. I welcome the fact that this definition would exclude generating electricity from wood pellets, as we do in the UK with companies such as Drax. I have spoken about Drax before and am going to again, briefly. Drax is currently classed as a type of energy generation that is renewable, but Drax’s power plants are the most polluting sites in Europe. Drax is the single largest source of CO₂ emissions in the UK, according to Ember, and the fourth largest emitter in the EU among coal plants. However, we do not count these as carbon emissions due to their classification as renewables and the fact that the trees which were harvested to feed the power plants could, theoretically, be regrown.

Furthermore, the emissions that we produce in the next 30 to 60 years are those which are going to have the make-or-break impact on the warming of the planet. If you look at the info from Drax itself, you see that the emissions from biomass being burned today will not be fully offset, according to analysis by the MIT Sloan School of Management, until 2140. That is a long payback. Biomass pellets produce emissions all along the supply chain: they are harvested, transported, dried and processed, and then transported to Yorkshire. As MIT said, it is actually better to burn coal at source, because the coal is at least dry.

The post-2027 future is wholly dependent on a technology which does not currently operate at a scale even close to what is required—carbon capture and storage. If Drax gets its way and expands its production, we could end up using our entire government budget to offset for biomass while simultaneously subsidising it at £1 billion a year. We are locked into contracts until 2027. If we can get the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, into place long before that, that would be one of the many things that will not happen. I thoroughly support the Bill and absolutely congratulate her.

Food Strategy White Paper

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Boycott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to monitor the delivery of the proposals in their food strategy white paper, published on 13 June.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. The Government food strategy is cross-departmental. We will monitor delivery of the strategy across government, including drawing together evidence on the impacts of individual policies to determine the overall progress of the strategy. We have committed to report on how we are taking forward our actions under the strategy alongside the next UK food security report, drawing on independent analysis from the Climate Change Committee, the Food Standards Agency, and the Office for Environmental Protection.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I am very glad that he is still in his job this morning. However, I beg to disagree. The National Food Strategy, in its original state, was a real attempt to bring food together across all the different departments. In fact, the White Paper response from the Government has put various elements back in different departments, and the one chance that we have had since the war to see food systemically as a whole has been thrown away. No one can be in any doubt that the food system is breaking: childhood obesity, health, effects on farming and biodiversity, and now an inability to get three decent meals a day by some 10 million people in this country. How can the Government call this a cross-cutting strategy?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I always defer to the noble Baroness because of her great experience and passion on this issue. However, this is absolutely a cross-government initiative. We have set up our cross-government food group, which brings together senior civil servants across government departments and the FSA to examine our strategy and monitor it on key delivery points. We will bring together the monitoring and evaluation of individual policies to enable us, and the wider population, to evaluate the food strategy and how we are performing against our targets.

Environmental Principles Policy Statement

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, on securing this debate. As others have said, these principles are unbelievably important. Without them, we will not have a chance of meeting the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced.

I sit on the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and I completely agree with her about how few enforceable standards and commitments there are. Indeed, many of the submissions we have had from government departments have shown a lack of joined-up thinking, commitment and follow-through. It has been pretty frightening, and it continues to be a frightening state of affairs.

Let us talk about the principles here. Ministers have a statutory duty to have due regard to the policy statement when designing the policy and embedding the environmental principles into policy-making, but it seems quite extraordinary that there are total exemptions for the Armed Forces, defence, national security, taxation, spending or the allocation of resources within government. There are basically no policies, or very few, that do not involve spending, so can the Minister give an assurance today that these exemptions about spending will not simply be used as a loophole by departments if they want to do something not in the spirit of the principles? This is a point that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, made when he talked about these vast framework Bills under which an awful lot of things about which we know nothing can go on.

When asked what scrutiny there would be of the implementation of the principles, Defra responded to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee:

“It is primarily for Government Departments to ensure the duty is implemented effectively in their policy making. The Office for Environmental Protection will monitor the implementation of environmental law, which will include the requirement to have due regard to the policy statement.”


I do not see how it is at all clear how government departments will monitor whether new policies are consistently supportive of positive environmental outcomes, how they are to report on the implementation of the duty in their policy-making or, indeed, how its impacts are driving environmental improvements. What is the assessment process going to be?

The issue of monitoring constantly raises its head, most recently this week in the Climate Change Committee’s latest progress report to Parliament, which warned that without a clear way to monitor areas such as peatland restoration or tree planting, we just will not meet our targets. It also said that there was a clear lack of cross-departmental consistency in policy, a point I have just made and which has come up over and over in the committee. In fact, we have seen it recently, with the Minister’s own department and the trade department squabbling over trade standards with regard to Australia, and with health wanting to reduce the intake of junk food but DCMS overturning that to protect the interests of advertisers, couched in some idea about the cost of living crisis. I simply do not see why this measure will be different.

I do not doubt that the Minister wants it rolled out properly, and perhaps he shares my doubts about some of the other departments, but, without proper monitoring and reporting, there is really very little hope that it will be a success. If it is left to the individual discretion of individual Ministers with no accountability, recent history teaches us that it is unlikely to work.

The recent OEP report, Taking Stock: Protecting, Restoring and Improving the Environment in England, stressed the importance of urgent action to deliver environmental improvements. On the Government’s overarching ambition that this should be the first generation to leave the natural environment in a better state than it inherited, it says that

“we are concerned this vision does not have cross-government support or the same urgency, gravitas and awareness as the vision for Net Zero.”

Those are all points that have come from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who said earlier this week in relation to the CCC report that

“although the Government is doing well on some things”—

everyone acknowledges, recognises and congratulates them on EV rollouts and on the bid for alternative energy—

“right across the board there are serious gaps, and under the present proposals”—

this is the noble Lord, Lord Deben, not me—

“we don’t believe that you can reach the statutory, legal targets which we need to reach.”

He was very clear that ambition is one thing, and it is welcome and necessary, but it is implementation that the Government have to focus on—something that the OEP agrees with. Again, I know that Defra Ministers get the issues and want to take bold actions, but I worry that some of their colleagues across government do not share their desire for rapid implementation. It is worth noting, as other noble Lords have done, that the public, right across the political spectrum, are overwhelmingly now in favour of bold action.

The Environmental Audit Committee 2021 report, Biodiversity in the UK: Bloom or Bust?, found that excluding the Treasury from being bound by environmental principles would mean that

“the impact of Government policies and projects on nature is not adequately factored into spending decisions”

and that if we are to

“achieve the transformational change necessary to address biodiversity loss, nature must be considered to ensure the best balance in policy-and decision making. Failure to do so will mean we continue to over-exploit nature, to the detriment of the natural world and ourselves.”

As we all know, the CBD conference is coming up this year and there will be binding targets. I do not feel that very much is yet in place, in our Government or in our finances, to be able to implement the type of targets that will be agreed. We do not want to see the same thing happening as happened before with the Aichi targets.

The Environmental Audit Committee followed up by writing to the Secretary of State in March, reiterating its calls for a net-zero stress test on the 2021 Budget and all subsequent fiscal events, and for the development of nature tests to be applied to spending decisions as a means for the Treasury to demonstrate its continued commitment to integrating the lessons of the Dasgupta review into policy-making. Where is this? What is it, and where can we find it?

Defra aims to publish the final environmental principles policy statement in the autumn, but no date has been given for when the “due regard” duty will commence. How will the environmental principles inform policy development and decision-making pending publication of the final policy commitments of the duty? Greener UK has raised a number of concerns about the draft policy statement watering down principles around proportionality and how the precautionary principle is implemented, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, has spoken about.

I will say a few words about the “polluter pays” principle. In this situation pollution is synonymous with environmental damage, but it is extremely unclear who is meant by this. The document states:

“The polluter pays principle is applicable where there is evidence of, or potential for, environmental harm”.


Who judges what is proportionate? If a chicken farm is polluting a local river to the extent where it is harmful for animals and humans to be in it, but the argument of food security is posed, who is allowed to go ahead and what is considered proportionate? I know this has been raised by other noble Lords, but it is a very important point.

Finally, what will paying constitute? Is it fines? Is it an environment equivalent of a carbon tax at a flat rate? Will it be set at a level to ensure that organisations or individuals do not just accept the fines and work them into their business models? Will it include a ban on the polluting activity in question? I think we all remember the famous quote from the head of Southern Water who, when asked why he had poured sewage into the sea off Sussex and just accepted a £90 million fine, said it was cheaper to put the sewage into the sea and take the fine than to try to fix the problem. Can the Minister tell us whether these principles will apply in those areas of policy-making as well as across such other areas as procurement and fossil fuel extraction?

I will end by saying more generally that the onus is entirely on the Government within this Parliament, because we do not have a lot of time to turn the rhetoric into ambitious policies that enable business and other sectors to achieve positive tipping points in our economy.

Water Companies: Sewage Discharge Monitoring

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I very much hope that I and the noble Baroness are spared until 2035, so that we can see that priority waters—those for public bathing and those which we mind desperately about, such as chalk streams and other very special environmental ecosystems —are prioritised. That is what we are intending to do. Our ambitions are both high and achievable.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister mentioned the River Wye, yet the rivers in the west of England are largely polluted through industrial chicken farms. Can the Minister enlighten the House on what regulation the Government might take to stop this form of pollution?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right that the problem does not just exist with water companies. Agricultural activities in certain parts, particularly the Wye and Usk catchment, are detrimental to water quality. We have to make sure that, for the phosphates that are run off from the chicken and poultry farms in that area, there is more join-up to protect waters. This is not just an agricultural issue; it is also a planning issue. There is an added problem, in that that river catchment runs across Welsh and English boundaries, and so we have to work with the devolved Government as well.

Food Security: Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Boycott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on food security.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, in 2021 Defra published the United Kingdom Food Security Report, which examined the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. We have received the Climate Change Committee’s latest assessments of climate risks to the UK, which will inform the third national adaptation programme, due in 2023. Improving water security and soil health is crucial to food security and closely linked to the significant action we are taking to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank the Minister very much for his Answer. While the immediate situation in Ukraine is, as we all know, putting incredible pressure on the world’s food security and this will undoubtedly get more acute, we must not be lulled into thinking that this is the only driving factor. As the Minister said, droughts, fires, floods, desertification and deforestation are the drivers and causes of climate change and biodiversity loss, and indeed of food insecurity. Will the Minister give us a clear assurance from the Dispatch Box that the Government will not use any legislation from this Session to reduce the high environmental standards that have already been set, in the pursuit of getting more cheap food into the system?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness has long experience in this area, and I assure her that the Government take this area of our responsibilities really seriously, not just domestically but internationally, where I believe we are a leader in trying to get the world community to come together to address global food security risks. The Pentagon, in a paper it published, called climate change the “risk escalator”, and it is. It will lead to further pressures on populations right across the world, and it is an absolute priority for this Government to help resolve it.

National Farmers’ Union

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The situation for pig farmers affected by this is serious. That is why we continue to work very closely with the industry. There was a perfect storm of a loss of exports to the Chinese market, disruption to CO₂ supplies and a temporary shortage of labour in the processing sector. We have been working hard on that with the private storage aid, the slaughter incentive payment and a package of measures to address these unique circumstances. On 10 February, my colleague Victoria Prentis chaired a pig summit and she is doing another one on 3 March. We are working really hard to resolve the problems in this sector.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I speak as a member of the Environment and Climate Change Committee and, in fact, in relation to a letter that Minister Prentis sent us in relation to ELMS. She says that the Government are exploring how they can best support leverage of private finance into ELMS. The recent spending review set an ambitious target to raise £500 million in private finance every year to support nature’s recovery to 2027, rising to £1 billion by 2030. Exactly how will the Government commercialise the environmental land management scheme?

National Food Strategy

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Boycott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government when they will publish their response to the National Food Strategy.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, in begging leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, I declare my various interests in this field as stated in the register.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. The forthcoming government food strategy will set out the Government’s ambition and priorities for the food system, considering the evidence set out in Henry Dimbleby’s independent review and building on additional topics. We are actively collaborating across government to cover the entire food system, to consider the unforeseen challenges that the agri-food sector has faced in this last year since the independent review was published. We expect to publish the Government’s food strategy very shortly.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank the Minister, but I am disappointed that I did not get an answer as to the date, since it is now already two weeks since the agreement. I am glad that the Government agree that the food system is in urgent need of reform. There are many major risks to not acting. Our health is worsening, supply chains are fragile, and the climate and nature commitments cannot be met without more action on food. The NFS has created a rare moment of consensus across the board, which should be grasped by the Government. Do they agree that part of the food strategy White Paper will demand a commitment from the Government to follow through with a good food Bill which will set this stuff up as a framework for the future?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The food strategy is an attempt for the first time to draw together all different aspects of the food system. I am very admiring of the noble Baroness’s work, not least with the Food Foundation. I assure her that the Government will take any measures necessary, legislative or otherwise, to implement this very well thought-through piece of work. I regret that it was not published exactly within six months, but it will be published very shortly.