Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate. It is one of the best debates in which I have spoken during my five years in this House. I should not be surprised, because every participant has brought expertise—some of the best expertise in this country. I support the Bill. It is a good Bill. In that respect, I go along with the latter points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, who said that he welcomed the Bill with certain reservations—I paraphrase. I think that that, in a sense, is the mood of the House. The Government have done everything correctly. They put the Bill out to a form of pre-legislative scrutiny. The Bill has been before the Select Committee in the other House. There was a full debate in the other House, which I am sure most of us have followed very closely. And there has been a more general debate in the public arena. I support the Bill, I guess, for the simple reason that I believe that it can improve the delivery of services in rural areas and wider. I emphasise ““and wider””, because the Bill is about not only rural areas, but urban areas as well. Natural England will have a remit in the urban area as well as the rural area. I have been encouraged too by the Minister’s announcement—I hope that I am going to be even more encouraged by his announcement later—that Sir Martin Doughty will be chair designate of the new organisation. I think that we all trust Sir Martin. He will be independent in matters of concern on both sides of the House, and he will be a sturdy champion of Natural England. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Haskins. I have known him for 20 or so years. I am very proud of the fact that I brought him into government in 1997. I appointed him as chair of the Better Regulation Task Force. He was superb at that. He brought an incisive, invigorating and reforming approach. Most of all, he came forward with a pragmatic approach to balancing and reducing the number of regulations that we all find so burdensome. So I pay to tribute to the noble Lord. I believe that his report of October 2003 was the genesis of the Bill that we are discussing today. I shall not speak from the notes which I have prepared because this is a debate. I have said how good a debate it has been and it is right and proper to respond to some of the points that have been raised. In declaring an interest as chair of the Forestry Commission, I ought at least to make some initial response to the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, and the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, who both asked why neither the Forestry Commission nor the Environment Agency is in this new quango. There are a number of reasons. It was something that the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, looked at, and he made the recommendation that the Forestry Commission should be either aligned to of part of the new agency. That was something that the Government obviously considered and they came down in favour of alignment for the simple reason that they believed that it was the best way in which to preserve the special qualities of the Forestry Commission and what it had brought to this country over the past 80 years and that it would attain and help the objectives of the new agency. The noble Earl rightly made the point about biomass and wood-fuelled central heating; that is something that we are working on very hard—and indeed, at our headquarters in Kielder we have just established one such wood-fired central heating unit that heats not only our office but the local youth hostel and some of the local community buildings as well. We are working with an organisation called SembCorp, which is establishing and building a full-sized wood-fired power station on Teeside. The critical mass of that wood will come out of our forests. The lesson that I have learnt from the noble Earl this evening is simply this: the one thing that I find difficult in working with foresters—and I do not find much difficulty in doing so—is that they find it a problem to explain to people what they do or, to put it crudely, to sing their own praises. They are naturally people who get on and deliver. Almost the key finding of the report of the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, was just that—that there was a great deal of satisfaction with the Forestry Commission and the way in which it works. Paragraph 6.54 of the noble Lord’s report states:"““If Ministers pursue the option of fully integrating forestry functions in England with the proposed new agency””—" that is the key issue; it is never highlighted but it is in words of one syllable—"““I would advise against transferring the management of the estate (by Forest Enterprise England) as well””." In other words, the noble Lord is saying, no matter what you do with the Forestry Commission, with the regulatory aspect he would advise against transferring the overwhelming majority of the activity of the commission to the new agency. That was his recommendation. When I point out to noble Lords certain things that my foresters would not point out—that there are 350 million visits a year to Forestry Commission land, which is many more visits than to the seaside, and that there are 22,000 kilometres of tracks in forests used for cycling, which is enough to go half the way around the world; and when I say that we have dedicated for access in perpetuity 130,000 hectares in the past 18 months, I am making the point that the Forestry Commission delivers as it is. The figure of 350 million visits to our forests, which are free—gratis, for nothing—for the benefit of the citizens of our country, has been estimated not by us but by independent assessors. It means that we bring in almost £2.5 billion to the local economy. That money does not go to the Forestry Commission; it goes into the local economy. An example that is very dear to my heart is that of the ospreys in Cumbria, which attract more than 100,000 visitors a year, just to watch the two birds. It has been estimated that the amount accruing to the local economy is more than £2 million a year, just for those two birds, which were attracted because some clever foresters saw the ospreys going up to Scotland, chopped the tops of the pine trees, built a platform and a nest, and applied the white paint to make it realistic—and that attracted the ospreys down. That is innovative thinking from the Forestry Commission, and innovative thinking with which I hope the new commission will be affected, by working alongside us, because it is the innovative thinking that is necessary if we are going to improve the delivery in the rural areas, as we need to.