Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

My Lords, I start by declaring that I am a vice-president of the Council for National Parks. It so happens that at the weekend I went back to my original copy of the 1949 Act; that is to say, before Section 5(1), the purposes section, was amended by the 1995 Act. The original Section 5(1) is entirely consistent with the criterion section, Section 5(2). They both refer to ““natural beauty””. It is obvious to me that what happened in 1995 was that either parliamentary counsel thought it was unnecessary to make the words the same in both Sections 5(1) and 5(2), or, dare one say it, Homer nodded. Amendment No. 131 puts us back to what we thought we had done 11 years ago in 1995. I therefore find it difficult to follow noble Lords—I have particularly in mind the noble Earl, Lord Peel, but also the noble Baroness—who think this is a fundamental amendment—I think ““fundamental enlargement”” were the noble Baroness’s words—and that we are rewriting in haste fundamental national park criteria, purposes and so on. Nor do I agree with the CLA’s briefing material on this. It is not true that the Countryside Agency changed its policy for designating national parks in 2000. The judge did not criticise this new policy. What he did was to criticise the definition, or lack of definition, in the 1949 Act. He simply ignored consistent policy from Dower and Hobhouse—in whom I declare a quasi-interest, as my father was a member of the Hobhouse committee—to Sandford and Edwards. I could go on, but others have spoken in the same vein. I strongly support the Government on Amendment No. 131 and not the noble Baroness’s amendment. As the Minister said, all that Amendment No. 132 does is to enshrine Meyrick in the statute book. I can see that there are some who regard the whole concept of national parks as anathema. I do not accuse the noble Baroness of that. However, if that is one’s point of view, then one must regard the judge as something of a saviour, for he effectively torpedoed any new national park. We have already referred to the proposed South Downs national park. What intrigues me is what would have happened if the Hinton estate, the subject of the Meyrick case, had been in the middle of the New Forest. The Minister put his remarks rather better than I have done here in speculating what our existing national parks would have been like if Meyrick had obtained in those days. The Minister mentioned Chatsworth, which is a good example. I immediately think of my part of the world, the Lake District. First, of course, all the towns and villages would be excluded, as would all the parkland, including Muncaster, Dalemain, Lowther and so on, and many other smaller parks. It would not stop there, because almost every major dale consists largely and importantly of farmland that depends entirely on the hand of man for its appearance and beauty. That is the whole basis of Wordsworth’s poetry. One cannot conceivably argue that the typical lakeland dale exhibits a high degree of relative naturalness. How on earth, for example, would you distinguish between the typical parkland at Dalemain and a farm at the head of Langdale? The national park, all national parks, would be like a Swiss cheese, with more holes than substance. Any idea of having co-ordinated planning policies involving the totality of the landscape would be blown sky high. I am sure that that is not what the noble Baroness seeks. It is certainly not what Lord Sandford wanted in his report of 1974. He was not only a member of her party, but he was at the time of his report a member of her government.