Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

Clause 58 serves to remove an uncertainty in the existing legislation. Section 62(1) of the Environment Act 1995 sets out the duty of national park authorities on socio-economic development. It makes it clear that their socio-economic work should be linked to their purposes and should be carried out in co-operation with other bodies. It also says that they should not incur ““significant expenditure”” on this activity, but the word ““significant”” is nowhere defined. Defra’s 2002 review of NPAs recommended that the uncertainty should be removed by deleting the reference to ““significant expenditure””. We are now implementing that recommendation. We are doing the same for AONBs in paragraph 165 of Schedule 11. The alternative approach would have been to set some specific limit on what national park authorities might spend, but we felt that that would not be reasonable given the different circumstances of national park authorities. By way of example, Northumberland has by far the smallest population and so a small budget. Precisely because it is so sparsely populated it may have a greater proportionate need to spend on socio-economic matters than larger national park authorities. Equally, a limit might have been seen as a target—something that authorities should spend up to—which is not our intention either. Our aim is rather to give the authorities the flexibility they need to support sustainable development in their areas; we believe that removing the financial constraint does that. I want to emphasise that other constraints remain; namely, that national park authorities’ socio-economic work should be linked to their purposes and should be carried out in co-operation with other bodies. That is in our view a neutral measure that simply removes an ambiguity and leaves responsibility for setting socio-economic spending levels with the national park authorities where it best belongs. It certainly does not imply any increase in grant at all and I agree exactly with what my noble friend Lord Judd said.