Environment: Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty

My Lords, like others here, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Renton, for initiating this debate. I shall speak about the Isle of Wight, the South Downs National Park and then three issues that relate to this debate: the place of the churches, which relates to it directly, and then transport and new housing development. I shall be brief. A considerable portion of the Isle of Wight is made up of AONBs. It is easy, if you know the island, to demarcate where they are: you just take certain bits out where lots of people live, and the rest is a beautiful and delightful AONB. Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of taking part in a conference in the yacht haven in Cowes organised by the Island Strategic Partnership to promote the eco-island project. The speakers included John Owen, the chairman of the strategic partnership, David Pugh, the leader of the council, Bill Wakeham, the vice-chancellor of Southampton University, Sir Ghillean Prance and others. In my view the eco-island project is the most ambitious and laudable that the island has undertaken in its history and deserves a great deal of support, for a number of reasons. It highlights the relationship between AONBs, other initiatives and areas near at hand. We cannot divide the world up into different bits; we are all related. The dream of the eco-island project is that the island will be self-sustaining by the year 2020, with, one hopes, the lowest carbon imprint in England and becoming a world-renowned eco-island. I shall give two examples. First, Vestas Blades promotes electricity and is the largest producer of blades in the UK. Secondly, there is the project, which I have mentioned on a previous occasion, to use manure from 500 cows—spelt without an ““e”” this time—to fuel buses. The eco-island project is about education, health and safety for the whole island and the AONBs play an important part in this. The symbiosis between the eco-island project and AONBs is unique. There are so many AONBs and they are part of the project. If the project goes ahead, there will be a chance to test out ideas that could be used elsewhere, which makes it even more important. I am not talking just about Europe, but the rest of the world. Therefore my question is about money. I understand that AONB funding by the Government has recently been cut. I should like gently to prod the Minister on that point because the eco-island project, which is related to the AONB initiatives, would attract funding from elsewhere. Everything is related to everything else. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, obviously knows much more about the South Downs national park than I do. However, noble Lords may care to be reminded of the fact that it starts just east of Winchester and ends just west of Eastbourne. It is a very large area, but there is a proposed reduction, about which I understand there is a certain amount of division of opinion, with a minority in favour of a reduction but the majority on the ground in favour of things staying as they are. NP status would remove some county responsibilities. Here we are touching on an area which has already been raised in the debate and which may well come up again later—the issue of complementary responsibility, which is so frustrating when you want to start something and get it going. Clearly a large national park is going to be more powerful than a number of AONBs. I believe that I speak for many people when I say that this issue needs to be resolved. Natural England rejects the alternative boundary wholeheartedly. AONB offices are constantly complaining that cuts in funding are a major problem. They say that government funding has a huge, multiplier effect. I turn now to three other issues. Your Lordships will not be surprised if I speak on behalf of the churches. I am sure that I speak on behalf of AONBs elsewhere in the country. They are a vital part of every AONB. One example is the often visited church at Brighstone on the Isle of Wight. The South Downs includes that wonderful church at Idsworth which is so much looked at as a landmark by commuters on the train—and of course by others, as well. If I may be forgiven for blowing the ecclesiastical trumpet, the churches in this country are in better condition than they every have been in their history, without any doubt at all. If I may sing an ecclesiastical mantra, I am not sure what the VAT situation is at the moment. I think it has been gently looked at, but certainly until recently, the churches paid more in VAT on church repairs than they received from English Heritage. That is a surprising fact which is much ignored, or not even known about. In the diocese of Portsmouth we are assessing how we use our buildings and how they can be more friendly to visitors and tourists. We are looking at this project, not just in the beauty spots but in the more brutalist areas of our cities. I now move on to transport and the Hindhead tunnel which is a controversial saga that has been going on for a long time. One of the reasons for the length of time it has taken to get the thing going has been money rather than local and national discussion. However, the local and national discussion has slowed it up. Can the Minister say—this is not directly related to the debate, but abuts it—whether there are ways in which these processes can be speeded up? One of the consequences of the tunnel is that the local AONB office has received, I hope, a promise—although it is yet to be confirmed—of funding for project officers to assist with landscaping issues on Hindhead common and in the regeneration of Hindhead. I have known of this for 20 years because before I came to Portsmouth I lived in Guildford and I have watched the area become more depressingly carbonised with traffic fumes, making the place less attractive as we drive through it. If we are going to have a national park or a number of AONBs, people will still have to move around the country. I am sure that the quality of landscaping planned for Hindhead is one of the results of AONBs and the national park project near it. The question of housing developments brings in the South East Plan, which I suspect is behind strong feelings about the threatened reduction in size of the South Downs national park. I recognise fully the need for affordable housing. When I look around my own patch, as I am sure will my colleagues theirs, I see where housing can be built and where it perhaps should not be built. However, it needs to be built. I know that the Planning Bill is producing a new system of infrastructure whereby the Secretary of State does not have the final say, which may or may not be a mixed blessing. Near where I live, in the development of Whiteley, a rather soulless shopping centre is going to be destroyed—fortunately, as far as many people are concerned—and rebuilt. There is an example of where developers and planners get it wrong. I shall not name names, but the sense that I get from conversations with people around the diocese is that, where there is to be a new housing development, the local authorities are very much—perhaps too much—in the hands of the developers, who because of their experience and their money hold the strings of power. There is an area which needs to be checked. I repeat what I said earlier. We are looking at AONBs—the Isle of Wight and the national park of the South Downs—in relation to many other issues. This debate is timely, because, in the past few months, the world’s population of city dwellers has moved from being in a minority to being in a majority. We are not quite sure when the change was made, but it is probably about now. Perhaps that is why we turned our clocks forward an hour last Sunday. That makes me think of the Bible, which begins in a garden of lost innocence, where responsibility is avoided—surprise, surprise: that is very much a local and national government issue. We have to play God, whether it is in planting trees or initiating stem cell research. But it ends in a city, which is landscaped, lavishly irrigated and a place of space, peace and justice. It is not quite an AONB, but perhaps an aspiration in that direction. It is a place of play. In conclusion, I pick up the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, about the Lake District. He will know that in the north-west of England and Yorkshire, ““lake”” is a Norse dialect word for ““play””. ““Legoland”” is a ““playland””, which my Viking forebears brought to this land with their culture. Here we have a vision of a community that is at ease with itself, where urban and rural live and work together and where we can play. AONBs are a place of play for children of all ages.