Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter, with whose wise words of wisdom of warning I most heartily agree, on an excellent maiden speech. I have considered the Bill, and some parts worry me. I declare an interest as I am married to a farmer, and in my spare time I end up getting dragged in to help with the paperwork, so I would welcome anything that smacked of simplifying the current arrangements for telling those who manage the countryside and the land what to do. I am not sure that the Bill has achieved that. We seem to be getting a new body that will have lots of powers—in some cases greater powers than those of the police when it comes to entry and search—and I am not sure that checks and balances are there, so it does not look too good on those bounds. I also looked at Clause 2 on ““General purpose”” and there are lots of things about the Clause 7 ““Management agreements”” imposing their will on people managing the land. They are binding on the person who has an interest in the land. It does not say that it is binding on the agency as well and they cannot just get out of their agreement on one side. There is another problem with these binding management agreements driven from the centre. What if they get it wrong? The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, at the start of his speech were particularly important. It made me think of the Communications Act, which may seem completely different, but Ofcom has been successful in many ways. As the Communications Act stated in respect of Ofcom, so might this Bill state in respect of Natural England:"““It shall be the principal duty . . . in carrying out their functions . . . to further the interests of citizens””." The second part might be ““to further the interests of land managers in ensuring that the natural environment is conserved””. At the end of the day, it is not the agency that will be carrying it out; it is the people who manage the land. You need to worry about that. Then there are the general purposes of protecting biodiversity and so on. The Communications Act has another provision which this Bill should have—because all agencies should be transparent. Section 3(3) of the Act states:"““In performing their duties under subsection (1) , OFCOM must have regard, in all cases, to . . . the principles under which regulatory activities should be transparent, accountable, proportionate, consistent and targeted only at cases in which action is needed; and . . . any other principles appearing . . . to represent the best regulatory practice””." Those are good safeguards to have in such a Bill, where we are putting all our eggs in one basket. I am also worried about the powers. Clause 8 covers compulsory purchase to carry out experiments. How about returning the land to the people who owned it previously if the experiment has failed or the land is no longer needed afterwards? The Government did that after the Second World War when they had to appropriate land, and it would be fair in this instance to do the same. We have seen compulsory purchases, and we have seen some of the letters that local authorities are sending out already when you have problems with builders trying to repair your houses, which you may have tenanted normally. Local authorities may threaten compulsorily to purchase them—under the Housing Act that was recently passed. They are already sending out rude letters, and you cannot help it if the builders do not perform. We must be careful about powers being misused. The Bill is supposed to result in fewer inspections. I am delighted with that idea, but will there be fewer inspections? Will there be fewer inspectors? I doubt it, because Natural England is taking on some of the jobs of the RDS; presumably some of the issues under the Countryside Stewardship and Environmentally Sensitive Area Schemes. But presumably the mapping functions—the RPA and RLR functions—will stay with Defra, which means that all the measuring and that part of the inspection will stay over there. I do not think that the agency will take on all the farming cross-compliance under the single farm payment, probably only the environmental part of it. In that case, Defra will still be doing that work, which means that NVZs and pollution inspections will still be done there. You must watch out for inspectors coming along with other powers. I have seen an NVZ inspection take place where a chap took away computer printouts on the amount of nitrogen, which is what he should have been there to worry about. He then went and inspected the farmyards and when he looked at the diesel bunds he did not happen to like the way that they had been built—up to insurance company specifications two years earlier—and he said that he wanted electric motors and all sorts of different things. Ten thousand pounds later, someone said, ““But if you’d been across the border, next door in Cambridgeshire, they don’t insist on that at all. They just point out that it’s an insurance risk and that you could get fined and locked up””. You will still have those problems. The health and safety inspectors will still come along. If you run a medium-sized arable farm, you will have 150 tonnes of fertiliser, so you will still have the fire brigade and police inspections. If you have animals, you will still have all those inspections as well. I am not sure how the Bill will reduce the number of inspectorates. It is the land managers who will have to pay for all this biodiversity and everything like that. What worries me is the cost, because we need to get money out to the sharp end—to the coal face. How many employees will this agency inflate itself to? How many employees are already in Defra and all the other agencies and departments that will be there behind it? Someone has to pay for all this biodiversity. In the CAP funding debate, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said that nowadays to farm or manage land you must have an outside source of income. That was perfectly true; I heartily agree and have always believed that such income has to be necessary and has been throughout the ages. But people do not realise that, and think there is a bottomless pit of money that they can drain to fund their wildest schemes. We have to be careful of that. I hope that the agency will have a lot of balance and common sense, and will take into account the financial needs and sustainability of its proposals for the rural environment in future.