Agriculture Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests, as on the register. I too regret that I was unable to participate in the Second Reading, but I will be mercifully brief with my comments on this group of amendments.

My worry with this group is the same as that which I had with the first two groups, on which I desperately wanted to speak but, through my incompetence, I notified the Whips incorrectly. My worry is that these amendments, like the others, are too prescriptive and not necessary to achieve the objectives on which all noble Lords agree. I counted and, if all the amendments in the first two groups are agreed, Clause 1 of the Bill will have 42 new and additional purposes added to it. I think that is unnecessary.

I am very keen on access to the countryside and to all green space, and I share the views of my noble friend Lord Randall that we need to increase the number of people from minority groups who visit the countryside. Studies show that the problem is that some youngsters will not go to a park 500 yards from their home. In such circumstances, it is difficult to get them into the wider countryside. This is a huge educational problem.

I do not support the amendments of my noble friend Lord Randall and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, on a small but important technicality. I believe that the word “supporting” can include “enhancing”; therefore, changing it is not necessary and could be damaging. If the definition is simply enhancing, it may freeze out farmers who have done a lot of access work, above the minimum, but can do no more to enhance it and would not qualify. It would therefore be a bit unfair if those farmers, having already reached a high access standard, got no payment, but those who had done little got payment for enhancing by just a small amount. I submit that the word “supporting” is adequate and can do all the enhancing work that colleagues suggested.

I say to the noble Earl, Lord Devon, that the NHS and Public Health England are working with lots of organisations, including Natural England, on something called social prescribing. I believe that, until a few months ago, about 2,000 NHS staff were being trained in GPs’ surgeries to get people to do various things other than queue up for pills. That put it rather crudely; I do not mean that to be unfair on people who need pills. But social prescribing could save the NHS billions. Once this Covid-19 crisis is over or under control, I hope we get back to social prescribing.

On Amendment 34, I agree it would be good if the wider or urban public understood what agriculture does or where their food comes from, but this is not a job for government. Farmers themselves and their organisations—the NFU, CLA and Tenant Farmers Association—through farm open days and schoolchildren visits, must promote public understanding and engagement with agriculture. That is their business. No one knows it better. They are the best people to educate the public, rather than the Government.

[Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Government deserve congratulations for bringing forward this Agriculture Bill. It offers the same potential as the Attlee Government’s efforts in 1947 and the common agricultural policy that has dominated us for so long. I am particularly pleased that the Government have realised that farming is changing and changing quite dramatically. I sometimes feel that those at the centre do not quite understand the subtlety of those changes.

I have an advantage: I live in the area where I started work, on the land, 50 or 60 years ago. I can determine the changes in agriculture. I will come back to that in a moment on these clauses. This has been a particularly interesting eight hours of debate. There were issues in the previous two groups of amendments related to those we are discussing now, but I held back because I wanted to speak on rights of access, which I think are critical.

Before I develop that, it seems as if this has been a Second Reading debate, made even more confusing by the considerate and detailed response of the Minister, who has gone out of his way to sum up, on two occasions, which has been an advantage. One point has kept coming up about forestry and woodland. There is confusion on what the Government have in mind; perhaps they have not got their sights completely set at this stage. I was led to believe that certain parts of woodland, and certain forests—which were a bit different—might receive a public grant. We were certainly looking at huge areas of new woodlands being created up here in Cumbria, just outside the national park. There is a great deal of potential for access in and on forestry land.

I had the honour of being chair of the Forestry Commission for nine years. It will be no surprise to the Minister that I was very keen to promote the right to roam in forests. We were not covered by the legislation—that was mountains, moorlands and heath above a certain height. But, when I was chair, we decided that there would be a legal right of access in all our freehold Forestry Commission land. This has not caused any fundamental difficulties in running our forests. I press the Minister to look at the possibility of permitting access to forestry land as well.

I also want to make the point that, amazingly enough, quite a lot of forestry land is near the centres of big towns, cities and urban areas. There is great potential for access in those areas. You can often get there much easier, but there are difficulties. I remember trying to negotiate access to a large forest within two miles of the centre of Newcastle. The Forestry Commission—we the people—owned the freehold, but I could not grant access, because when the land was bought it was agreed that the shooting rights in the forest would remain with the original vendors. To this day, people in a concentrated, built-up area are not allowed to use that forest, because of the shooting rights. I hope it might even be possible that some of the money available under the new government proposals could be used to buy out those rights. I know that there are difficulties, but I cite this because it is the way we ought to be moving forward. The holistic approach which the Government are taking to agricultural support in the future is the right one.

I mentioned earlier the subtle changes. Just outside the Lake District National Park in the lower levels of the valleys there were a lot of small mixed farms. Those farms provided employment and were viable, but I can tell the House that in the Bowness-on-Windermere area in which I live, I cannot think of a farm that has a single cow. There is the odd steer about, but all the land is grazed by sheep. That means that most of the small farmsteads have been sold off to be converted into country cottages. We are now finding the cost of that. Field upon field which used to be pristine hayfields are now covered in reeds. Stone walls which were maintained and rebuilt if they fell over—you had to do that to keep the cows in—are now left unbuilt. It is a real problem when you are trying to have countryside that deals with so many people. The Lake District National Park—I tell the House this repeatedly, and I do not apologise—has 19 million visitors a year, a vast number.

Fisheries Bill [HL]

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 24th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker]

The next speaker on the list was the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of Cradley, but she has indicated that she does not wish to intervene at this stage. Therefore, I now call the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra.

[Lord Blencathra (Con) [V]]

My Lords, although subsection (2) of the new clause proposed in the amendment states that the UK Secretary of State must consult fishing bodies and the devolved Administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the clause would require this United Kingdom Parliament to legislate for the devolved Administrations in a manner that is not consistent with the devolution settlement. I do not think that Mrs Sturgeon would like that very much, and I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord McConnell.

The Bill is carefully constructed to devolve as much power to the devolved Administrations as legally possible, and we should not adopt an amendment that requires the UK Secretary of State to legislate for the devolved Administrations on a devolved issue. Furthermore, it is not necessary. I refer noble Lords to Schedule 3 to the Bill, which states, inter alia:

“Power to attach conditions to sea fishing licence


1(1) A sea fish licensing authority may, on granting a sea fishing licence, attach to the licence such conditions as appear to it to be necessary or expedient for the regulation of sea fishing (including conditions which do not relate directly to fishing).


(2) The conditions that may be attached to a sea fishing licence include, in particular, conditions—


(a) as to the landing of fish or parts of fish (including specifying the ports at which catches are to be landed);


(b) as to the use to which the fish caught may be put”.


There is more but it is not relevant to this part of the debate. Therefore, the Bill already provides the powers necessary for each of the fisheries Administrations of the United Kingdom to introduce a landing requirement designed by them for their own specific national conditions. Thus, it is not a national landing requirement for the UK; it is four national landing requirements for each of the countries of the UK.

Indeed, each fisheries Administration has a landing requirement as part of the economic link condition in the licences it issues. This is one of several economic link criteria that ensure that the UK receives economic benefit from UK-registered vessels that fish against UK quota.

The amendment requires 65% of fish caught in UK waters to be landed in the UK. That is a desirable aspiration. Superficially it is appealing, and it appeals to me instinctively. However, at the moment there are good reasons—commercial or economic—why a vessel might want to land its catch abroad. The current economic link criteria allow this flexibility while requiring vessel owners to contribute to the UK economy in another fashion. The amendment would seem to place unjustified restrictions on the ability of vessels to seek the best market for their catch and therefore would not necessarily be in the best interests of the industry.

I suspect that I am the only Peer taking part who is a supporter of Fishing for Leave. Indeed, I am probably the only Peer in the whole House who is a member and supporter of this organisation. I commend Fishing for Leave for its splendid work during the referendum and its campaigning on fishing issues since. I think I am right in saying that it is a Fishing for Leave point that the UK has lost fish processing capacity. It must be a key objective to rebuild that capacity in our ports once again. However, at the moment our UK fishing ports cannot handle and process the fish which British boats could land. The noble Baroness made the point that some ports cannot take big boats, and time is required to reconstruct those ports. Now that our fishing grounds, catches and landings will be back under UK control, I look forward to that capacity being rebuilt, but we are not nearly there yet.

Finally, the fishing industry has long objected to the inflexibilities imposed by the common fisheries policy. One of the much-anticipated outcomes of Brexit is the opportunity to move away from the CFP. That was a key demand from Fishing for Leave, which I strongly support. The amendment requires that the landing requirement be imposed by secondary legislation, but the current economic link criteria exist in licensing conditions, enabling alterations to be made fairly quickly in response to changing circumstances. I do not think that we want to leave the CFP while introducing a more restrictive approach to our management of the economic link policy. That would seem to waste the opportunity that leaving the EU has provided us with to improve our fisheries management.

Therefore, although the amendment is well intended, I submit that it is wrong in devolution terms; it is unnecessary, since Schedule 3 already provides for it; and it is inflexible when there are faster solutions.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I can see the superficial attraction of this amendment but, in my view, very serious questions arise from it. First, I understood that this was just a consultation but, of course, it is not. The proposed new subsection (1) makes it clear that

“the Secretary of State must make regulations establishing a national landing requirement”.

One has to remember that we are still negotiating fisheries arrangements with the EU. If there is an obligation on the Secretary of State to make such an order as this, it must be possible under the negotiations with the EU. It does not seem wise to make these negotiations more difficult by interposing a requirement of this sort.

On Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Hain, made an impassioned speech on the difficulties of the arrangements with the EU on fisheries. He inclined to the view that they might lead to a difficulty about the whole arrangement, with prejudice to other matters which, in his view, held larger significance economically for the United Kingdom. That is my first point. It is a requirement to regulate, not just a consultation—and it is a requirement that would impinge on ongoing negotiations between the European Union and the UK.

Fisheries interests—that is, people who are actually involved in fishing—have suggested to me that these are impractical requirements being set down from above when, in fact, the conditions under which a vessel goes to a particular port vary from time to time. For example, if a good market is near the fishing ground—nearer than any route that would get to that market otherwise—there is no economic reason why the boat should not go there and get a higher price for the fish than it might get if it had a much longer journey.

Secondly, there is the problem of the weather, an important consideration in deciding which port you go to. I also take up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, as well as my noble friend Lord Naseby, about the nature of the arrangements available at the different ports. I am an ardent supporter of the ports in the north-west of Scotland, particularly Lochinver and Kinlochbervie, which have a considerable number of landings from vessels other than British vessels. It means a tremendous amount to them, but that is because people choose to do that—fishermen choose to do it because of the convenience to them. Surely, if we are to have a flourishing fishing industry, it is important that we do not put obligations on fisherman which are not particularly good, from their point of view, for the practice of fishing.

I am also told that it is quite common for people to find the nature of the establishment at the port an important consideration in whether they can go there, and whether it could be suitable for them to land there; the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, has already made this point in relation to ports near the area in which she has an interest. It is really not wise for us to legislate in this way. It is much better that we rely on the economic link arrangements in the licensing. My noble friend Lord Blencathra has referred to this in some detail, which I do not need to repeat. It is a very flexible arrangement with regard to particular licences and therefore much easier to apply than a top-down thing that is supposed to apply to the whole of the United Kingdom.

It would not be wise for us to go down this road at present. It may be that, at a later stage in the history of this matter, some consideration could be given to it, but to do it while the negotiations with the European Union are still open and being conducted would be unwise.

Fisheries Bill [HL]

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 22nd June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I have listened carefully to the arguments made by the proponents of the amendment and I understand the desire to promote environmental quality as the highest priority, since sustainability itself affects the amount of fish available to catch. But I am not convinced that we should downgrade all the other noble objectives in Clause 1, which would be the case if sustainability was classed as the prime objective.

The Government have constructed the Bill with a number of important objectives that contribute to environmental protection, including objectives covering science, the precautionary principle, the ecosystem and climate change. However, the Bill also allows policymakers and fisheries managers to balance actions across these objectives to achieve sustainable outcomes that protect the environment and still ensure that we have a viable and thriving fishing industry. Sustainable development recognises the needs of society alongside the environment and thus points to a balanced approach. If we place environmental sustainability as the prime objective, we will prevent fisheries managers taking balanced decisions by always favouring the environment over social, scientific, national and economic matters.

I am not being facetious, but as a Star Trek fan I am aware of the Prime Directive—not to interfere—but I do not know how the “prime” objective would be implemented, and nor has the mover of the amendment sought to define it. I looked up some meanings and synonyms of the word “prime” and got the following: “main”, “chief”, “key”, “central”, “principal”, “foremost”, “first”, “most important”, “paramount”, “major”, “dominant”, “supreme”, “overriding”, “cardinal”, “pre-eminent” and “ultimate”. If that is how our courts would define “prime”, I am concerned if that is how it would be interpreted in the Bill.

Of course the sustainability objective is essential, but so are the precautionary, scientific, bycatch, ecosystem, equal access, national benefit and climate change objectives. The lawyers and no doubt my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern will correct me if I am wrong, but the wording of the clause means that all of these must be complied with, so all of these other objectives must still satisfy the test of being sustainable. It is not an either/or list. Thus, if the Government are making rules under the national benefit objective, the bycatch objective, or any other objective, these rules must still satisfy the test of being sustainable. Setting one objective above the others would create confusion and undermine the basic construct of the Government’s future fisheries legislation.

Managing trade-offs is complex and not easily amenable to simple rules, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, just warned us. I believe that the current drafting of the fisheries objectives strikes the best balance between requiring Ministers to respect the science and be precautionary, and also to consider the impact on our fishing communities before acting.

We all recognise the need to protect our precious marine environment, but we must find a way to do so that supports our equally precious coastal communities. I urge the House to consider the potential costs to those communities if we constrain the Government’s ability to make balanced decisions—a balance that appears to be central to this Bill’s ambition to support both the environment and the people living and working in fishing communities.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op) [V]]

My Lords, I fully support Amendment 2, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and others. It would make it clear that fish and aquaculture activities must not compromise environmental sustainability. The Government have said that they will continue to strive for the ambitions of the relevant directives in this regard, but many are concerned that these could be weakened. That is why it is important to set this out clearly in the Bill with the amendment.

If the Minister will not accept the amendment today, will he set out how the Government will ensure that the important principles in directives such as the European marine strategy framework, the bathing water directive and the water framework directive will be taken forward and not compromised, as my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, highlighted in her speech? If they are compromised, what mechanism will there be to ensure that they are properly enforced, since we will have no access to the Court of Justice of the European Union? What mechanism is proposed by the Government?

Proposed new subsection (b) would put commitments in the Bill on economic, social and employment benefits and not overexploiting marine stocks. Again, it is important that this is clearly in the Bill because the devil will be in the detail and we must have clarity that the principles are set out without any dispute. The details will be issues such as licensing powers, catch limits and other restrictions on fishing.

As my noble friend Lord Hain set out in the previous debate, the reality of today’s British fishing industry is how much of the catch is in fact exported to the European Union and beyond, and how much of the fish we eat—cod, haddock, langoustine, salmon—is in fact imported into the UK. That has not been made clear in the debate, in the media and elsewhere over many years, much to the detriment of the debate, to the reality of the situation, and to the British fishing industry and the UK at large. The Government should aim to get this right by accepting the amendment.

Food Supply and Security

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on securing this important debate.

I have no worries about food security in this country. We will always have more than enough—except fish, possibly—but we might not get what we want all year round. I do not particularly want a choice of 20 different lettuces in January, nor Moroccan strawberries for Christmas. I believe in eating UK-produced food in season when it is a delicacy and a treat. Nothing from anywhere else in the world can beat it for taste, not to mention food miles. In that regard, will my noble friend the Minister give all his encouragement and support to those excellent initiatives to create massive glasshouses near sewage plants, where they can get cheap heat? We have the capability to supply a huge range of more produce grown under glass in this country. I look forward to the report from Henry Dimbleby on a food strategy, which should address these issues.

Will the Minister also give encouragement to agricultural innovation and technology, as articulated by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles? This has had a huge boost in the USA because President Trump has curtailed cheap foreign labour from planting and picking crops. We must go this way in the near future too, rather than toward a permanent supply of cheap EU labour.

I come to fish, where I am worried about supply. The common fisheries policy is quite evil and destructive of this finest of natural resources. I want a cast-iron assurance from my noble friend that we will not sell out our fishermen, that we will take back full control of our fishing waters, that we will impose our own catch limitation so that we conserve and increase stocks, and that any deal with the EU will be on an annual basis.

Finally, in these dire times, let us raise a glass to the English wine industry, which is a superb example of innovation. English champagnes and white wines are beating the French in international wine tastings. What is more, vineyards are excellent for wildlife in that they are not being ploughed up every year—a good example of not digging for victory.

Fruit and Vegetable Harvest

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 30th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, that is precisely why we have launched Pick for Britain and the DWP Find a Job website. This will be escalated. We think that currently, there is sufficient labour on farms, but there will be a peak in late May and therefore much more work. A public-facing campaign will be launched so that many more people are aware of this and of the demand in their local areas.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, in the short term it is vital that all steps be taken to make sure that crops are planted and picked this year, but has the Minister seen reports of a huge expansion in horticultural technology and automation in the United States because President Trump has curtailed cheap immigrant labour? What can the Government do to give a big boost to horticultural automation and technology in this country?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

It is important that we advance technology to bring about improvements and more sustainable production. The government-funded transforming food production initiative and sustainable productivity schemes are all about increasing automation. I was interested to read of Tiptree and the University of Essex developing a robotic strawberry harvester, for instance.

England Coast Path

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I may have to write to the noble Baroness on that precise stretch. I have not walked it yet; I have walked some of them. There are certainly advantages in terms of physical well-being and for local economies. I hope that farmers in rural areas will find this a useful part of diversification. There is a lot to be said for walking, which is why the new national trail pledged in the Conservative manifesto—the Coast to Coast trail in the north—is a very good part of that project.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, as the deputy chair of Natural England, I support what my noble friend said. The money for this is ring-fenced. We were delayed slightly for 18 months because of the court case—that is the only reason why the path has not been completed according to the regional schedule—but we are on schedule to complete it properly and we look forward to more stretches being opened this year.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I am most grateful for my noble friend’s confirmation from Natural England. I want to confirm the enthusiasm within Natural England to secure this path and all that it represents: 2,711 miles.

Plans to Improve the Natural Environment and Animal Welfare

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on his absolutely superb opening speech. I agreed with 99% of it and I particularly liked his stress on soil. Many years ago I used to listen to “Gardeners’ Question Time” with a Yorkshire gardener called Geoffrey Smith. No matter what he was asked, whether it was about aphids on roses or leaf drop, he would always say, “The answer lies in the soil, laddie”—even if it was a woman asking the question.

The 1% where I disagreed with my noble friend was on the need for a super-duper new environment agency. I will pop out in a wee while and fetch from my desk a superb op-ed piece from the Times written by my noble friend Lord Ridley. It points out that we already have all the best environment agencies in the world and that we do not need to create any more. However, almost every day we hear a new pronouncement by a worthy and knowledgeable body on the sort of animal welfare and countryside environmental regime that it wants to see once we are in charge of our own policy once again.

I read all of these reports and articles and I am concerned that far too many people and organisations have unrealistic ideas about how the whole countryside can be transformed overnight into a paradise where all farmers are farming organically but still making a profit, where they are running their farms as if they were in the upper tier of the Countryside Stewardship scheme, where all endangered wildlife returns to pre-war levels, where all non-native invasive species are exterminated and where there is unlimited money to satisfy the aspirations of every single-issue pressure group that is dictating how the countryside should be run. It is unrealistic and it cannot happen in the real world.

However, today I will focus briefly on animal welfare issues. I, too, welcome the introduction of cameras in slaughterhouses and I hope that ministry vets will be ruthless in closing down any and all halal slaughterhouses which are flagrantly breaching the law by slaughtering animals without even the slightest pretext of stunning. I know that this is a sensitive issue and I respect religious rights and freedoms, but the rest of us have the right not to eat meat which has been killed in this way. The public would be appalled if they knew about the massive amount of halal meat which actually gets into non-Muslim food chain.

The Government have said, quite rightly, that we will be able to enhance even more our animal welfare rules once we are out of the EU. Let us absolutely clear about one thing: the UK already has the tightest and most humane animal welfare rules in the whole of the EU, the whole of Europe and possibly even the whole world. While I am happy to consider tightening them further, we must not then let in meat products which have been produced under systems that we have banned here.

Way back in the late 1980s, I was a MAFF Minister. We were under enormous pressure to ban sow crates and tethers. We resisted, on the basis that the whole EU should do it, but the majority in the Commons was for a ban. So we had to ban them, and the rest of the EU looked on and laughed at our stupidity. What was the effect of the unilateral ban? Quite simply, more British pig farmers went out of business and we imported more pigmeat from the EU—produced under the same so-called cruel system that we had banned here.

One thing I learned in MAFF—now Defra—is that we have the finest vets in the world and some great chief veterinary officers. I liked the CVO’s statement last week that there was nothing wrong with proper battery cages. But apparently the supermarkets have said that they will not sell any eggs produced in battery cages in future—or will they? Is this another big lie? They said that they were not selling any of the eggs from Holland that were contaminated with the insecticide fipronil, but that was true only to the extent that they were not selling them in boxes of six or a dozen—all the poisonous eggs were in their ready-made sandwiches and meals.

So, if the supermarkets decide that they will not sell battery-cage eggs, putting some of our farmers out of business, they must not be allowed to import battery-produced eggs and hide them in ready meals and salads. I suggest that the same principle must go for all other foodstuffs. We need to concentrate on the real issues of trade, not on fripperies such as chlorine-washed chicken; so long as it is labelled and people have a choice, I do not see what the problem is. Quite frankly, I would prefer to eat chlorine-washed chicken than some of the stuff that was slopping about on the floor of the 2 Sisters Food factories that we read about a couple of months ago.

Similarly, if we ban live animal exports, we must ensure that we do not permit live animal imports. Let us be clear: we can move live animals round this country safely, without any problem. We can move them just across the Channel and still enforce standards of watering and feeding, and treat them humanely. However, we cannot enforce the rules in the rest of Europe, where animals are driven across Europe for days on end and are not fed, not watered and are treated cruelly. Of course, any ban on live exports should apply only to animals for slaughter and not to breeding or pedigree animals, where we need an exchange under the highest possible welfare standards. Perhaps, when we are in charge of our policy again, we can bring back the wonderful minimum value rule for horses, whereby horses or ponies worth under £300 could not be exported live for slaughter.

I believe in completely free trade—but it must also be fair, as other noble Lords have said. If we impose higher welfare standards on our farmers, there must be no question of any food or food products coming into this country that are produced under systems that we have banned here because we think that they are cruel. Brexit gives us a chance to impose that high level playing field across the board.

Air Quality: London

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing this important debate and on the extremely knowledgeable way he gave us a complete dissertation on all aspects of air pollution. I cannot aspire to copy that, so I shall concentrate on diesels.

I would never buy a diesel car in a million years. Perhaps my noble friend the Minister may appreciate this, because when I was a little boy on the farm in the highlands of Scotland, we could go into the car shed, start up the petrol-engined car—the only type available in those days—and potter around in the shed for about half an hour before the fumes became a bit much. When one went into the tractor shed and started up a diesel tractor, one was overcome by noxious fumes in about 30 seconds flat. We all knew that diesel engines were filthy things and that they were only good for lorries, combine harvesters and tractors, where one wanted good traction and incredible pulling power at low engine revs. The poisonous fumes did not matter because the vehicles were out in the countryside in the open air.

So when Gordon Brown in the last socialist Government started to give huge incentives to people to buy diesel cars, I was astonished. I assumed that somehow the experts had cleaned up diesel and I was not aware of it. But they had not cleaned it up at all. It was typical in my experience of Parliament of single-issue pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth demonising one issue such as carbon and then blackmailing the Government—all Governments—into promoting diesel, even though it was a killer in other respects. So, before we hear too many demands that this Government must do more to deal with diesel pollution, can we have at least one word of apology from Gordon Brown, other socialist politicians and the lobby groups for the evils they inflicted upon us, all in the name of saving the planet?

Now we are stuck with far too many diesel vehicles, including all the criminal Volkswagens for which British drivers have not received one penny of compensation—I believe that Porsche vehicles are equally guilty. However, that is a matter for the Minister for Transport and not for my noble friend.

In London, the problem is even more severe, for two reasons: an over-preponderance of filthy London buses and unprecedented congestion caused by cycle lanes. Last Saturday afternoon, traffic around Westminster was completely snarled up—I suspect that it may have been some of Mr McDonnell’s anti-democratic henchmen marching to try to bring down the Government. On Horseferry Road, I counted eight open-topped tour buses with a total of six passengers between them, each bus belching out a mass of diesel fumes. Add to that the five ordinary buses, which had about 12 passengers between them, and then the half-dozen tour coaches, and the air in Horseferry Road was positively toxic.

We hear demands to penalise diesel car drivers—but they are not the main problem. The average MPG of a diesel car is 40 to 50—some are now even up to 70—whereas the MPG of a bus is six, with a 10 to 13-litre engine. When we get more hybrid and electric buses, buses will cease to be a problem—but all older buses will then most likely be converted to open-topped tour buses. I can accept that commuter buses, carrying passengers to and from work, should access bus lanes and have a favourable tax regime, but I can see no justification whatever for tour buses to carry on blocking London streets, not paying considerably more for the privilege and causing incredible pollution. I challenge any noble Lord tomorrow, even if it is a wet day, to find a single tour bus that is even half-full. There are too many of them and they are killing Londoners.

From January next year, I understand that all new London cabs will have to be battery powered. That is a noble aim, but I fear that TfL is not nearly ready; there are not sufficient charge points and the battery distance of 100 miles is not good enough. A trip to Heathrow and back will put cabbies out of action for an hour, even if they can find a charge point to recharge their batteries. I suspect that we will see a large drop in the number of taxis. They will be replaced by—I am quite happy to use these words—the rotten and corrupt Uber company, whose drivers will face no penalty for driving diesel cars. TfL may end up putting decent London cabbies out of business and letting them be replaced by unqualified, uninspected drivers who have no clue where they are going.

I also feel strongly because, if Uber succeeds in putting London cabbies out of business, people like me and others in wheelchairs will never get a taxi again, since Uber does not have to provide a single wheelchair-accessible taxi. It is not allowed to discriminate if you book such a taxi, but it does not have to provide any, whereas all London cabs—current diesel ones and the new electric ones—are wheelchair accessible. I am conscious that I am treading on dangerous ground in talking about taxis in the presence of my noble friend Lord Borwick, who is an expert, but I hope that my remarks are not too wide of the mark.

I have the great privilege to serve on the Council of Europe. I missed all the Queen’s Speech debates last week because I was attending the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. There, as in Paris, I saw tens of thousands of cyclists and not a single one in Lycra and a racing helmet—except for tiny little toddlers wearing a helmet in a sort of wheelbarrow attachment on a bicycle, and they were quite cute. It was a pleasure to watch those cyclists: men and women of all ages, in normal clothes, riding elegantly with their heads held high. It was almost reminiscent of those pictures one saw of people riding penny farthings in the old days.

In France, they can ride on the pavement, and I have never felt so safe in my life—as opposed to taking my life in my hands when trying to cross to 1 Millbank and encountering some of the thugs on bikes mowing me down on the pedestrian crossing. How have we got it so wrong in this country and the French so right? I did not see a single racing bike handlebar in Paris or Strasbourg. Everyone rode with their head held high and their head much higher up than their bottom—there is nothing more repulsive than the sight of the Lycra-clad louts in London with their bum in the air and their head between the handlebars. That is not an air pollution problem, but it leads to an attitude whereby some cyclists regard London and other parts of the country as a racing track.

I have lived and worked in London since 1979 and have always considered it the greatest capital city in the world. Now our dedicated cycle lanes are destroying it and completely jamming up traffic. A former 20-minute taxi ride from here to Euston station now takes 45 minutes. To go to London City Airport, I instruct the driver to go south of the river and use the Rotherhithe Tunnel. It is many more miles and costs me more, but at least I get there in half the time it takes trying to use the Embankment, which is now a no-go zone. Most of the time, the cycle lanes are empty. Vehicles cannot use them because they have huge kerbstone barriers.

There are also red lines everywhere. Wheelchair users cannot flag down a taxi on the Embankment because it is down to one lane either way, with red lines. If a cabbie breaks the law to stop, they will jam up the traffic for ages as wheelchair users get into the taxi. Why in the name of goodness did TfL not do with cycle lanes what it did with bus lanes, with a big white line separating the cycle lane from the rest of the road and a requirement that cyclists have priority from 7 am to 10 am and from 4 pm to 7 pm? That would have worked perfectly. Instead, London has created dedicated racing tracks for cyclists who ignore red lights and pedestrian crossings, while tens of thousands of motor vehicles—buses, lorries and cars—sit jammed in traffic and belching out petrol and diesel fumes. It is probably too late to change the system now. We cannot adopt the French system because our cycling culture is now so ingrained. It seems to me, as a victim on various pedestrian crossings, that cyclists feel that they have a God-given right to cycle as fast as they can on dedicated tracks, and to hell with pedestrians and other road users.

It is not often—if ever—that I have praised the French in the past, but I envy them their cycling and pedestrian culture, where we all share the same space and respect each other’s right to use the road. Thus I am afraid that air quality in London will not improve until we tackle polluting London buses and change our cycle-lanes policy. But can we hold our breath that long?

Equine Welfare Standards

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, when I served as a junior Minister in MAFF under my noble friend Lord Deben, I had responsibility for horses on farms. My noble friend Lady Trumpington had responsibility for racehorses—a duty which required her to make weekly inspections of Newmarket Racecourse, or so she said.

The one big gap in policing welfare standards was that horses kept in livery yards or stables were not inspected by any government or local government department. I think that that is still the case today and I suggest that is where we have a welfare problem. My concern is based on the evidence of my own eyes, which I see from the train window every week. I see scruffy bits of land alongside the railway tracks which have been carved up into little “pony paddocks” with a couple of horses in each. I am appalled at the state of these paddocks. I was born and brought up on a farm, and I do not have a townie’s misplaced view of fields of knee-high, flowering meadow grass. But I know that horses cannot survive on bare mud and patches of grass half an inch long. The stabling may be an old portakabin or container, with some bales of hay scattered about. The supplementary food is grossly inadequate. I see horses standing ankle-deep in freezing mud, with a tatty bit of canvas as a warming rug. The conditions I see fall way below the welfare standards Defra would tolerate in farm animals.

It is left to the RSPCA to enforce welfare, but I think it is a politically motivated organisation and I do not trust it to conduct impartial prosecutions. Therefore, I urge my noble friend that either Defra or local government should take responsibility for this gap.

I turn now to the slaughter of horses at the end of life. I cannot find accurate statistics on the numbers slaughtered in UK slaughterhouses—they seem to range from 3,000 to 8,000. There are demands for CCTV in all horse slaughterhouses, and I support that demand. However, let us be clear that, whatever abuses may occur in UK slaughterhouses, they pale into insignificance in comparison to Europe, where standards of transport and slaughter are not a patch on those in the UK. We used to have the wonderful minimum value rule in the UK, whereby no horse or pony could be transported to Europe unless it was valued at more than £300. That rule permitted valuable racehorses to be moved, with owners knowing full well that horses would receive excellent welfare treatment because they were valuable.

On the other hand, the rule also stopped end-of-life horses and past-it ponies being treated cruelly, since they could not be transported for days on end from England to Italy and Spain for slaughter. But the rule fell foul of the EU, where horses are just another trading commodity. Will the Minister therefore investigate putting a complete ban on the live movement of end-of-life, low-value horses so that we can stop cruelty of movement and slaughter on the continent when we leave the EU? There is absolutely nothing we can do to enforce the animal transport laws in Europe, as lorries drive for days on end to Italy and Spain, the main consumers of live horsemeat. I conclude that the only way we can save our horses from cruelty is not to export them live.

I suspect it is the case, however, that we have now lost the capacity to deal with all end-of-life horses ourselves. The knackers’ yards that we used to have could utilise horse carcasses, but they are largely gone. If end-of-life horses and ponies are not sent for meat, there is a disposal cost of anything from £200 to £1,000, which horse owners may not be willing to pay. It is no good saying that we should slaughter them here and export the meat, because the Italians and the Spanish want them killed locally, irrespective of where the horses came from originally. Will my noble friend tell me whether we could, theoretically, bring back the minimum value scheme when we leave the EU? Do we have the capacity to slaughter all our end-of-life horses here, and, if we do, would we be able to export the meat so that there is no disposal cost to horse owners at the end of life?