Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

I have the strangest sensation. It is said that when one is drowning, past life emerges in front of one’s eyes. My past life at the Dispatch Box has included European beaver, boar, Japanese knotweed, mink, and the problems of what to do in Scotland if things are introduced over the border. One of my senior right honourable friends got into great trouble on this question of likening a colleague to a mitten crab, so I am not going down that route. What I can say—I hope it will come as good news to all noble Lords and to many Members of the other place—is that in response to the wide interest that has been shown as this Bill has gone through the other place and has been debated in your Lordships’ House, we have decided to bring forward a consultation on detailed provisions on the control of non-native species. It is quite clearly an extremely important area and it is our intention to go out to wide consultation in the next 12 to 15 months. In our view, a comprehensive package of legislation and policy is necessary. We have already committed ourselves to considering and developing the proposals contained within the consultation on Part 1 of the 1981 Act over the coming months. There have been a number of attempts—this is one of them and there are further amendments today—to introduce new clauses to deal with a variety of issues relating to the control of non-native species. We believe that the measures that have been proposed in amendments have raised a number of difficult issues, responsibility for which crosses between a number of government departments, and that these have to be resolved in a proportionate way. The noble Earl, Lord Peel, made clear that it is possible inadvertently to interfere with one normal, natural part of country life in attempting to solve a different problem. I am confident that the noble Earl will be pleased to take part in a consultation on how to get that right. The development of effective policy depends on securing full stakeholder engagement and support, and it would be wrong to rush into legislation because this apparently convenient opportunity has arisen. We need to take all the implications and concerns into account. We understand the concerns that Amendment No. 293 seeks to address, and we recognise the need for legislation. One of the issues discussed in the consultation paper that I referred to on Part 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was the definition of native and non-native. Although the amendment seems to provide an answer to that question, there is a difficulty. It proposes that the existing Section 14(1) of that Act is substituted with a new subsection that would make it an offence for anyone to release or allow to escape into the wild any animal that is native; non-native; included in Part 1 of Schedule 9; or is a hybrid of any animal included in that schedule. That list includes almost every species on the planet. We are into that sort of difficulty. We are most sympathetic to the concerns that have been raised, and I am pleased to say that we will conduct the fullest possible proper consultation on this issue. We share the concerns that noble Lords have referred to, and I have no doubt that they will refer to them again in further amendments covering this area. I hope that noble Lords, on calm reflection, will consider that the approach that we have decided to take will be the most effective and is one that they can fully support.