Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon). She talked about free lunches. I seem to remember that on a recent Inter-Parliamentary Union trip to Albania she and I had a lot of very long free lunches, but I am not sure as yet what the payback has been. I share her concern about biodiversity, as surely we all do. The previous Conservative Government had an extremely good record in introducing legislation to help to protect this country's environment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) played a leading part in that. It is impossible to measure the effort that a Government make by the amount of legislation that they pass. This Government have passed a vast volume of legislation on the countryside that has placed considerable burdens on many in the farming community, as well as wasting a lot of time. Natural England, or English Nature as it was then, spent a great deal of time chasing the old socialist policy of right to roam and spent untold millions that could have been better invested in a proper footpath network than in covering the countryside with areas with the right to roam. That is certainly the case in my constituency, which has previously been roamed on quite happily by local people. All that we have had is a lot of gates put up with labels on them, and nobody much uses the facility anyway. That was a wasted opportunity.