Environment Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

The amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, would add “ecosystems” in a number of places. Again, we come back to the definition of biodiversity. We can protect plants, animals and fungi—the three kingdoms—and look at them in isolation, but it is the relationship between them that makes up the natural world and the natural environment. It is terribly important that the Bill recognises that. The noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, talked about how rare the wonderful, irreplaceable soils underneath ancient forests are, and how little of that we have left. Adding “ecosystems” would help draw attention to the utter fallacy of biodiversity offsetting and the idea of something that I have seen first-hand: that we can just transplant the bits of an ancient forest, shove them into an arable field and assume that they are going to get back together somehow or other. Adding “ecosystems” here would be very useful.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I support the amendments in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, as well as that in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, about soil, that in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about ecosystems, and that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, about the oceans.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is absolutely right: I did interview the Secretary of State last week, who talked extensively about how the Government saw soil as a key part of future strategy and as being at the heart of both the Agriculture Act and the Environment Bill.

The thing about soil is that it is very small in our eyes, but in the soil’s eyes it is of course a factory and it has been described as a factory. In a tea-spoon of soil, you will probably get some thousands of species, some millions of individuals and about 100 metres of fungal thread. This is a world of major complexity and, every second that we are alive, this factory is performing a function that none of us could do. No scientist could take sunlight, air and all the nutrients in the soil and produce leaves, which produce trees. Look around this Chamber: everything in here, apart from the quarried stone, has come from a plant, has come from the soil. This leather has come from an animal that has fed on a plant; the carpet, probably from Axminster, and some sheep; my clothes; everything. Yet we call it “the dirt beneath our feet” and we stomp on it.

Once I got the image of a factory into my head, and the notion that there are all these people pulling levers and rushing up and down hills, it struck me that it was like being in a city, but a city on a completely different scale to how we live, so of course we ignore it. What has gone so tragically wrong with the soil in recent years is not so much the tinkering around but the deep ploughing and then the addition of heavy chemicals. It strikes me that you could think about it as like living in Homs or somewhere like that. Your buildings get bombed every other day or, in the case of the soil, two or three times a year. We have decided, since the green revolution of the 1950s, that deep ploughing was a really good idea because it let in the air. It was extremely fallacious science that is now completely accepted not to be right.

Look at agroecology. Where I was with the Secretary of State last week, we saw new devices that slice through the soil like pizza cutters, dropping in individual seeds, making minimal disruption and, as a consequence, needing minimal fertilisers and producing strong, healthy plants that also support biodiversity. We have done so many things wrong it is quite impossible to start to count them: the monocrops that kill the culture; the deep ploughing; the addition of chemicals—it is really astonishing—but the soil is truly phenomenal. It is the most amazing stuff. Give it a break, and it will come charging back with great health. I have to say to whichever noble Lord it was who said how long it takes to regrow, it really does not; it is really amazing. It will knit itself together, start co-operating and start not only giving us back the goods and services we want, but at the same time taking down the carbon.

As the noble Lord, Lord Curry, said, it seems quite astonishing that soil is not in the Bill, along with air and water; it should be. History is littered with examples. I do not know whether any noble Lord has been to Leptis Magna. It is a desert, but it is not that long ago, in the big history of things, that the Romans used to get three harvests a year from Leptis Magna. That is why they wanted north Africa. They had the most sophisticated systems for bringing water from the mountains; they had an amazing market with marble and they kept the water in tanks underneath to keep the vegetables cool and then they overfarmed it. But it was fine then, because they just packed their trunks—I do not know whether they had trunks then—and got on their oxen and went somewhere else, because there was always somewhere else. There is not anywhere else now. It is the same as when the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, says, “There is no such place as away.” You throw it away: where is that away? As Greenpeace says, we throw away our plastic and it ends up in Turkey. We throw away something and it ends up in that awful albatross. That makes my heart break too. We have to respect and adore these particular things.

The thing about the soil is that there are a lot of “don’ts”. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, says, “Don’t deep plough”, “Don’t put fertiliser on it”, “Keep cover crops on it.” Soil wants that; soil wants to work. We have to find intelligent ways to pay for this; we cannot just expect people to do it and not get anything back. They will get it back in advanced crops without having to pay for chemicals, but that will take a bit of time. Yes, indeed, people are using earthworms as a measure, but it is still a bit clumsy and a bit inexact. It is kind of fun, but there are some more sophisticated things that we can do.

I want to quickly address the necessity of understanding things as ecosystems. I do not know how many noble Lords know of Dr Suzanne Simard, but she is a Canadian forestry professor at British Columbia University. She grew up in the forest, became a logger and a forestry expert and at the age of 20 she was put to work by a forestry company in the north-west and her job was to clear-fell and then plant pine. After a bit, she looked at it and thought, “Why are these things dying over huge acres?” That was when we thought, “Survival of the fittest: get rid of everything else and everything will grow”, but in fact they died. They did not do well, they sort of struggled and some of them just fell apart. What she realised, and what she has now written about and become the world expert on, is that there is an extraordinary interconnection that goes on underground. We are only just beginning to learn about it. A tree will help out another tree if it is in trouble. It will send extra nutrients. It is quite magical. In the same way that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was moved about the albatross, I am extremely moved about the power of the soil. I feel very strongly that it has to be at the heart of the Bill.

Finally, on the question of the oceans, not only did I see the Secretary of State last week, but the week before I saw the Minister for Food and Farming. We were in the West Country at an event and she was on her way to Brixham. She said to me, “This is going to be tricky, but 80% of the fish that comes in comes from bottom trawling.” Bottom trawling is just like ploughing: it is smashing through someone else’s home with absolutely no regard for those who live there. We would not smash through a field of cattle, just wipe them out and throw them all over the place; that is what we do every day. Some in this Chamber will have seen “Seaspiracy”. It is not a pleasant watch. You get the sense of how many fish get sacrificed in the by-catch. Please, Minister, find a way to put the sense of ecosystems and soil absolutely at the heart of how we assess our environment and take care of it, because we will fail otherwise.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

It is a very real privilege, and I mean it, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. Hers was a splendid speech—one of many we have heard this afternoon—and she was so right in her references to bottom trawling. I may be the only Member of your Lordships’ House who sailed, in the old days, in a deep-sea trawler. I was the candidate for Grimsby at the time, in 1965, and I went up to the north coast of Norway in a trawler. That was proper fishing. It was fascinating, and the men who were there were among the bravest I have ever known. I represented a mining constituency later. That is another tough and appalling job, but at least the miner went home to his bed each night. The trawler-man was out for 18, 21 or 24 days, and it was extraordinary. That was what convinced me, and I have always been convinced, that we must look after our marine environment.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, who has put his name to my noble friend’s amendment and who will be winding up on it for his party, is bound to be sympathetic and enthusiastic. Of course, he chaired that session of the EU Environment Sub-Committee to which my noble friend Lady McIntosh referred in her speech. We heard some fairly disturbing things that day. Anybody who has watched “Blue Planet” knows that the isolated, moving incident of the albatross, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, referred, is just one of a million examples. It was a very graphic and good example, but there are so many—all of them caused by the careless distribution of our detritus across the world.

I am sure many noble Lords will know about Operation Neptune, where the National Trust sought to buy many miles of our coastline. It has been an operation that has lasted for some half a century now and has been extraordinarily successful. It has succeeded in preserving some of the most beautiful of our coastal areas—many of which, incidentally, were rather badly despoiled during the pandemic by careless visitors and worse than careless visitors. If we want to preserve our coastline, we must also preserve our marine environment, so I very much hope that my noble friend Lord Goldsmith will accept this amendment with enthusiastic alacrity or, if not, call a meeting to devise an amendment that he can accept with enthusiastic alacrity, because this, again, will come back on Report and we need to get it right.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I understand that the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, have withdrawn, which brings us to our next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I will be brief. I just want to point out that we have apparently thrown away—I have checked this in lots of sources—3 million face masks every minute across the world. It means, in a way, that we cannot trust ourselves in what we think about plastic. We have to get firm and do something very serious about this, which is why I have put my name to Amendment 139.

I also support Amendment 141A about getting rid of sachets. If we do not legislate, we do not innovate. Unilever, for instance, has come up with a new seaweed-based thing to make sachets out of, which genuinely completely composts or fades away in water without any damage. Right now, the supermarkets have a free rein. Iceland has done its best but voluntary contributions never work. I have spoken about this before, but the relationship of single-use plastic to food waste is massive, because vegetables are wrapped up and you get too many—for example, you get five courgettes in a packet when you wanted one. This is a great way to get you to spend more money and creates waste all the way down the line.

I shall not go on with the statistics; everyone has come up with so many of them. All I want to say is that I once sat next to Liam Donaldson and he said that he did not sleep the night before he announced the smoking ban in Great Britain. He thought he would be the most unpopular man in Britain, but by lunchtime the next day he was the most popular man in Britain because it was what everyone wanted. The truth is, people hate plastic. Everybody moans about it; it does not matter whether you are talking to a reader of the Sun or the Daily Mail. This is a universal dislike and we want the Government to do something serious.

It needs a combination of taxes and a complete ban on single-use plastic. Around the world, 69 countries have done just that: they have banned it. If you ban it, you get innovation. Just before the pandemic, I was in India. The amount of plastic plus waste in India, which is introducing a ban from next year, is quite astonishing. One of the disastrous reasons is that there are no vultures left; they have all died because they have eaten plastic as well as the various antibiotics that were fed into cattle. One of the bizarre consequences is that at the Tower of Silence in Mumbai, a Parsi temple, there are no longer any vultures to eat the dead, so they have to be fried by solar panels. This is a really weird consequence and we are doing this with masks at the moment. Three million a minute are going into our system.

This is why you cannot trust voluntary regulations of any nature and why the Government have to seize this year of COP and the biodiversity conference and do something. We know what plastic does to our nature. We will all be proud—noble Lords will be proud and will all wake up as the most popular men in Britain.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. Since she started on international issues, in speaking to Amendment 140 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, also signed by my noble friend, I will point out that in April Washington state became the seventh US state to ban takeaway polystyrene containers. Australia is planning to be rid of them by mid-2022 and Costa Rica has a ban coming in this year, so I will have to come back to that much loved government phrase “world-leading” as there is some catching up to do here on polystyrene takeaway containers in particular. I will also point out that the National Research Council in the US has found these containers can

“reasonably be anticipated to be a human carcinogen”.

This is a real no-brainer.

In 2016 a group of chefs, including some of the usual celebrity names you might expect, were calling on the London mayor to ban polystyrene as the scourge of Soho. This problem is urban, rural, marine and general—it is truly a problem everywhere. All of plastic is a problem but polystyrene is a particularly pernicious problem and this would be an easy win, as we now all keep offering the Minister.

Finally, to pick up the point of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, he perhaps underestimates the degree to which plastic really is a much-hated material. None the less, I entirely agree with him that when it comes to the waste pyramid, “reduce” is by far the best option. I hope that when we get to Report, he might think about backing my amendment, which I will be revisiting in some form. Rather than talking about resource efficiency, we should be talking about a reduction of resources.