Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

moved Amendment No. 1:"Page 1, line 7, after ““as”” insert ““the Commission for””" The noble Lord said: In speaking to this amendment, I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 2 to 224, with the exception of the amendments listed in the subsequent groups up to and preceding Amendment No. 224, as shown on the groupings list. I hope that the Committee and the Deputy Chairman of Committees agree that it would be tedious in the extreme if they were obliged to listen to me more or less counting from two to 224. I beg leave to be absolved of the task. My apologies to the Hansard writers if this causes them any problems. This is a probing amendment. I am immensely grateful to the Public Bill Office and its staff for the help that I was given in putting the group together. I hoped to move a couple of simple amendments to give the Committee the opportunity to consider changing the title ““Natural England””. When I took the amendment to the Public Bill Office, the staff was obliged to tell me that one cannot amend titles in a Bill, but must amend the Bill. We had to amend the Bill all the way through and the Public Bill Office staff very obligingly did the work that resulted in this enormous group of amendments. At base, there are two simple amendments that give the Committee the chance to consider two different titles for what at present is to be titled ““Natural England””. One is the ““Commission for Natural England””, which would match the title of the Commission for Rural Communities, and the other is the ““Natural England Executive””. I considered whether a third title should be suggested, the ““Natural England Agency””, but that would have meant that this group of amendments was 50 per cent larger and would have increased the scale of the problem. The group is a consequence of the debate at Second Reading in which the noble Lord, Lord Carter, and I were in general agreement that ““Natural England”” is not a natural title for a government agency. When the Romans overran Britain, they thought that they saw natural England, but it was not natural even then: Stonehenge and other monuments and many communities were already in existence. The Normans catalogued England as they knew it in the Domesday Book. At the beginning of the 17th century, the field patterns that I knew as a boy were more or less established across the country. Today, almost a lifetime later, they have changed. That is natural England; it is constantly changing and evolving to meet the needs of man. The one thing that natural England is not is a group of people; still less is it a group of people brought together by legislation whose functions and purposes are defined and limited by legislation and are to change or, if one looks at it another way, to limit the change in natural England. That has nothing to do with nature at all except, perhaps, to control it. The two alternative titles would make the Bill more sensible. I hope that the Government will listen to this plea to try to make the title better than it is at the moment. This may seem a trivial matter, but it is serious. I beg to move.