Queen’s Speech

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests in several environmental charities as listed in the register. I am very glad that the Environment Bill is finally going to be with us in this House, as was announced in the gracious Speech. It was first promised in July 2018, so we have been waiting quite a while. I hope the Minister can assure us that it will receive adequate time in your Lordships’ House, even though the Government are keen to get it onto the statute book before COP 26, because the Bill still needs improvement.

The state of nature amendment, which was well aired in the other place, needs to return to provide for statutory measurable targets and interim targets for biodiversity to match the statutory targets we have for climate change, and to enshrine in law a commitment to a 2030 target to halt and reverse biodiversity decline. The Environment Bill also needs to provide overdue statutory protection for ancient woodland. It is a disgrace that, in reality, ancient woodland has only permissive protection, as provided by planning guidance. We need similar protection at a statutory level, as is currently given to sites of special scientific interest, and I intend to put down an amendment to that effect. We also need a statutory basis for the England tree action plan, the publication of which—as I understand from the Minister, who very kindly saw me last week—is imminent. For the England tree action plan to fulfil its name, we need it to be actioned, and a statutory basis would mean that that would be more likely. I would also like an assurance that the Bill will give proper priority to native woodland and does not end up overfocusing on commercial forestry.

Perhaps the most important thing, as we see the Environment Bill proceed through this House, is to help the Government join up two very important pieces of legislation in the Queen’s Speech. The planning reform Bill is not yet published, and I share the suspicions of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch. Rumours abound that it will designate land in a topdown way as either to be developed or to be protected, and it will leave local communities powerless to do anything to stop inappropriate development, other than making sure the damaging development looks lovely in accord with the local design code. That is not very much; you can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig. If the planning Bill is not to counteract completely the protection provisions of the Environment Bill, we need in statute measures to link and harmonise these two pieces of legislation.

The Environment Bill needs to give a legal status to local nature recovery strategies, for example, so that plans, planners and indeed developers have to take account of them. We need to enshrine this in statute, as I tried to do during the passage of the Agriculture Act. I hope noble Lords who supported me in that will join with me again, in trying to bring forward a land-use framework for England. The planning Bill sounds as if it will have an oversimplistic binary approach to land use: land is either worth protecting or worth developing. The reality is that the demands on land are multiple and growing: biodiversity, conservation, carbon sequest-ration, flood-risk management, other climate change mechanisms, water quality, food production, timber production, physical and mental health to name but a few. Land needs to be multifunctional and deliver a whole range of public and private benefits. We need a land-use framework to help optimise the use of land, which is a very scarce resource. We need to make sure that we recognise that a much more sophisticated and complex set of decisions needs to be made nationally and locally about land—far more complex than the Government’s oversimplistic planning White Paper envisaged.

I hope that the Minister can tell the House what co-ordination measures will be put in place between the Environment Bill and the Planning Bill, and whether the Government will introduce a land-use framework for England.