Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

moved Amendment No. 118A:"Page 14, line 5, leave out from ““functions,”” to end of line 7 and insert ““further the conservation of biodiversity so far as is consistent with the proper exercise of those functions””" The noble Lord said: My Lords, I declare the interest that I declared at previous stages of the Bill. In Committee, at col. 763 of Hansard, the Minister said that he expected us to return to this important issue. I said at col. 766 that I would read what he had said. I read the whole debate. I suggested in closing that the issue seemed to have caught the interest of the Committee without the Minister being able immediately to extinguish the fire. On reflection, the quick-fire exchanges at cols. 759 and 762-63, which comprised 17 or 18 different exchanges and snatches of speech, implied what I think the Americans would call a fire-fight. I apologise if I any way provoked it at that late hour. Having read the whole 45-minute debate, I would summarise it as the Minister thinking my amendment was a bridge too far and my thinking that the Bill, which I agreed promotes this issue, was a bridge not as far as it might have been. I did appreciate better, in retrospect, the points that the Minister made, yet I was still left feeling that the noble Countess, Lady Mar, who only intervened briefly, articulated my point succinctly when she said:"““‘Having regard to’ and ‘considering’ can be just paper exercises””.—[Official Report, 8/2/06; col. 762.]" That is another more vivid version of my own expression that ““having regard to”” is, inter alia, an ““amulet against judicial review””. I realise that I am simply repeating the amendment that I deployed in Committee, but let me try again to bridge the gap between the Minister and myself, since I believe that he acknowledges the importance of biodiversity. The Wildlife and Countryside Link, which I defined and quoted in Committee—and which supports this amendment—wants public bodies to think about biodiversity. Government have an important role in sending strong signals to these bodies that they too have an important role. The Bill is one way of doing that but it is not just about, as the Minister also said in Committee, preventing biodiversity from being ““inadvertently damaged””, which was in col. 760, nor about choosing between different projects, one of which might be good for diversity but bad for other issues, or vice versa, as he indicated in col. 761. It is much more about considering biodiversity from the outset, thinking positively about it and maximising opportunities for it. An example of that might be a proposal to build housing: that is a particular issue in some parts of the country. Yet once the decision for a housing development has gone ahead, how it is designed can contribute to furthering biodiversity. To give a specific example, a new village called Cambourne has been developed near Cambridge. The Wildlife Trust there worked closely with the local authority to ensure that biodiversity was incorporated into the design of the development from the outset. That was due to pressure from the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Peterborough and from South Cambridgeshire District Council. The developers themselves employed a team of ecologists on site before the building work started. The new development is interlinked with green space and is now managed by that Wildlife Trust. The area is now rich in wildlife, which can be enjoyed by residents of the development. I shall not spell out, at this hour, the lessons that can be learned from this experience but I pay your Lordships’ House the compliment of assuming that noble Lords can infer and imagine them, especially the involvement of local people with wildlife in as many ways as possible. Of course I appreciate that the Minister may say that nothing in the Bill prevents that from happening, but I can reasonably say that little in the Bill encourages that to become standard or habitual practice. I realise that there could be other ways of achieving the same ends; a comprehensive performance assessment framework is an important incentive for local authority performance. The Wildlife and Countryside Link would welcome biodiversity being incorporated into that, but the Bill is an important opportunity to send a strong signal—I emphasise ““strong””—to local authorities and other public bodies that biodiversity is important. I appreciate that Rome was not built in a day; its building took time. Yet each monitoring point on progress in this area, like this Bill, is important. If the Minister believes that the Government have gone as far as they can—I must inform your Lordships’ House that I am not responsible for that noise that has just been occurring—it would help if he could spell out more than he was able to, in Committee, what difference the wording in the Bill will make to progress in this field. It would help even more if he could allow a change by Third Reading to progress further in the direction that your Lordships demonstrated in Committee that they wished to see accomplished. I have sought to avoid the Minister feeling a provocation toward rebuttal, but in the same spirit I would welcome a more positive ministerial response, however brief. I beg to move.