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

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of Brineflow Ltd and a director of farming company Sentry Ltd. I have spent over 30 years in the fertiliser industry. In the last 12 months, I have participated in some of the highest-rated fertiliser-related videos on YouTube. They are not mucky videos; they are very educational. I encourage noble Lords to look at them.

I congratulate the committee on this valuable report and note the Government’s response. It has been nearly 40 years since your Lordships published the Nitrate in Water report. It was the 16th report in 1989. I will not go further as I know the Companion says that I should not use visual aids, but I remember the report well, as I was an agriculture student at Reading whose dissertation was on nitrogen. The report featured on “The Week in Westminster”, so I wrote to the chairman, Lord Middleton, and he kindly sent me a copy.

I tell the story because it demonstrates the historical as well as the current importance of this issue. It shows how little has changed in some respects, but in others plenty has—including the media’s interest in this subject. As we heard earlier in this debate, life without nitrogen is not just unsustainable; it is impossible. It comprises 80% of the air we breathe. It is almost paradoxical that we need to reduce, recycle and reuse something that is so ubiquitous and abundant. That is why the committee was wise to use the term “reactive nitrogen” rather than risk confusion with the somewhat inert gaseous form.

Looking back to 1989, that report came at a time when the applications of nitrogen fertilisers were coming off record usage peaks. More than 1.5 million tonnes of elemental nitrogen were applied, much of it from four UK-based factories, before set-aside and other modulations such as nitrate vulnerable zones had been introduced. Back then, noble Lords were concerned about levels of nitrates in water; the consequences of ploughing up grassland or ploughing in vegetables; the use of winter cover crops; and limiting applications of fertilisers and manures with controls on livestock. Forty years on, the team of the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, is now familiar with all of these issues.

Back then, it was natural that artificial fertilisers were looked at. The fertiliser regulations that we use even today date from 1990, the year after Lord Middleton’s report was published. This new report highlights the same issues but they are joined by other concerns around, for example, diffuse pollution. This is implicated in eutrophication, which is when algae combine nitrogen with phosphates to bloom into impenetrable blanket weed. If I may say so, it is this important interaction with phosphates from detergents that causes the greening of the rivers that causes so much concern. The report might have made more of that because it is not just about animal waste, important though that is.

NOx in the air is also highlighted, although it comes mainly from exhaust pollution and intensive livestock production—something that the Government’s response accepts. We welcome the recommendation to cover slurry lagoons even though this Government have cancelled the grants that would have made doing so easier. I will return to the release of ammonia from urea fertilisers later. The adverse consequences of the application of sewage sludges to land are now appreciated much more fully.

I have declared my interest but—unfairly, in my view—artificial fertilisers often cop the blame for this. The truth is more complicated than it seems. The industry of which I am a part has made great strides in getting its house in order; indeed, the fertiliser industry is totally committed to increasing nutrient use efficiency by 1% a year for each of the next 20 years by using better husbandry techniques and emerging technologies to keep crops greener for longer and using things such as urease inhibitors, biological signalling compounds, new application practices and new technologies including abatement.

There is an increase in the use of liquid fertiliser, with lower emission profiles and nothing rattling in the hedges, combined with better advisory training and prescription-based approaches—that is, focusing much less on what father and grandad did. There is a system of industry-led FACTS advisers with a level 5 qualification. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Trees, about precision application. There is a FIAS scheme. There are also detonation resistance rests and, yes, the Fertilisers Regulations 1990. We hear that those regulations will be reviewed to bring organics, slurries, sludges and digestates into scope, which is to be welcomed.

I am pleased that the committee recognised that the use of artificial fertiliser has fallen by 33% since 1989 to less than 1 million tonnes of elemental nitrogen. Land taken out of production is one explanation for that, but it is only part of the story. Our four domestic fertiliser factories have all closed and we no longer have a domestic primary production industry at all. The report correctly tells us that this has reduced the industrial emissions of NOx gasses here in the UK. However, without the Haber-Bosch process, which captures the nitrogen from the air we breathe, the world could sustain perhaps only 3 billion or 4 billion people—and there are 10 billion of us currently. The reality and trade-off is that, without mineral nitrogen, six or seven people in 10—the equivalent of 16 people in this Room—would have to go if we did not have artificial fertilisers. That is a sobering thought.

The report enumerates well the problems of excess nitrogen but, if I may say so, it might have missed an opportunity to tell the positive story: in aggregate, nitrogen makes cultivated land work harder, driving food security and sustaining the population. So you do not need as much land under the plough, leaving much more of it for amenity and nature uses. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that that is why RB209 is still largely correct, because it optimises the economic response while allowing more land to be left for nature.

One big change since 1988-89 is that there are many more sources of organic manures, aggravated by the time of year their nutrients are released to the environment. In contrast with the 1 million tonnes of elemental nitrogen used today, there are 4 million tonnes of sewage sludge, over 200 million tonnes of farmyard manure and slurries applied to land and, increasingly, 20 million tonnes of new nitrogen and phosphate-rich digestates. This is rocket fuel for algae, with the paradox that these anaerobic digestion plants—so-called green energy—are turning our rivers green with unmanageable volumes of slop. The report could have said a little more about this shift—not necessarily about the absolute quantities of organic manure, slurries, digestates and sewage waste, but about the consequences of getting it wrong in terms of timing and seasonality.

Many of these organic manures are applied to the soil by regulation at a time when, on account of cold soils, mostly at field capacity in the winter, there are no growing crops to absorb the excess nutrients so they go through the soil profile like a hot knife through butter into the groundwater and run off into rivers. If ever there was an example of unintended consequence, this is it.

I welcome the committee’s recognition that having too many environmental advisers from so many departments and agencies, parroting ever more complex and conflicting advice, makes the situation worse and makes it harder to extract value from these products, which are a resource and not waste. The committee has correctly highlighted the complicated “piecemeal and fragmented” policy and regulatory landscape, which has contributed to creating more perverse incentives that go against the Environment Act objectives of purer water, cleaner air and less waste. It is no wonder that the regulations need to be reformed and the committee has done a valuable service in highlighting this in a most timely manner, as the Government accepted in their response.

Time prevents me going down the rabbit hole of nutrient neutrality—one of my specialist subjects—but, in a slight change of tack, now is probably a good moment to warn of the ultimate perverse incentive that threatens materially to undo the progress that has been made, and which the committee seeks to make use of, in the pursuit of cleaner air to breathe. We have the prospect of a misdirected introduction of new carbon border adjustment mechanism taxes on 1 January next year, ostensibly to “reduce carbon leakage” in the UK. There is no UK fertiliser production any more so it will do nothing to reduce global carbon emissions.

These taxes, driven by the Treasury—which did not feature in the committee’s regulator list in paragraph 180 on page 76, but should now do so—and DESNZ, have constructed an unmanageable scheme that creates a bizarre fiscal incentive to use the most polluting urea fertilisers, which are restricted by Defra’s option 4 on account of their adverse effects on NOx and ammonia. It is madness. Not only will they make the farmer’s most expensive input about a quarter more expensive but they will push up the price of food that every family consumes every day in an inflationary spiral, in a direct assault on the cost of living by a Prime Minister who says that that is what he wants to focus on.

No wonder farmers cannot make sense of the rules when even the Government cannot get their story straight. On the one hand they are trying to reduce NOx emissions while on the other making it more fiscally attractive to use the most polluting kind of fertilisers that drive particulates and respiratory problems. I am bound to say that the good work done by this report will be undone if the astonishing failure of His Majesty’s Treasury, Defra, DESNZ and, to a lesser extent, MHCLG to talk to each other on this point is not addressed. It is the classic case of the Government’s left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Worst of all, they are penalising the greenest producers such as Proman in Trinidad, which captures all the CO₂ from the steam reformation of natural gas—the precursor to the Haber-Bosch process—and turns it into valuable economic products including clean-burning methanol to power the latest generation of cargo ships. No CO₂ is released there. None of this is the fault of the committee, because CBAM is so new, but I wonder whether, with its new-found expertise, the committee might be minded to reconvene to cover this narrow point before we make a terrible mistake that takes our environmental air quality backwards through perverse taxes. It could do the economy and the environment a valuable service by looking at these consequences before it is too late.

In conclusion, this is one of my specialist subjects and, possibly with a few minor changes in emphasis, the committee has masterfully collated the various technical, environmental, commercial and regulatory issues that transcend so many different specialisms. I congratulate the committee and am only disappointed that its important report did not feature on “The Week in Westminster” as its forebears’ did nearly 40 years ago.