Environment: Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty

My Lords, I am very glad to have the chance to follow my noble friend and neighbour in speaking on this subject and I take this occasion to pay a heartfelt tribute to his late wife, Rachel Bridges, who did an enormous amount to conserve and protect the Suffolk countryside. I have been involved with AONBs for many years. First I was a member of the Countryside Commission for 12 years from 1980 to 1992, and then I was chairman of CPRE from 1993 to 1998. Since 1997, I have been president of the Suffolk Preservation Society. I am also a farmer in Suffolk in a special landscape area adjacent to one of Suffolk’s two AONBs. I am therefore delighted that my noble friend Lord Renton has secured this debate. It has enabled us to have the esteemed presence of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is one of the most valued Members of the Government to the Government and of this House to this House. The importance of the subject is obvious. We live on a small, crowded, but still very beautiful island. This means that we have to protect and, where possible, enhance the beauty of the countryside by every means that we can. With the growth of population, the pressures become ever greater. Our Select Committee on Economic Affairs in its excellent report, The Economic Impact of Immigration, published this week, states at paragraph 181: "““For example, the English countryside is an environmental amenity of great value and a substantial rise in population, however caused, is likely to diminish it. Rising population density will also increase the demand for infrastructure including roads and airports, decrease the … living space available … for public parks and green fields … Different people will have different views about whether or not an increasingly crowded environment is desirable””." I suspect that most of us here are of one view on that question. The committee points out that the present UK population of 61 million is now projected to grow to 71 million by 2031. There can be few greater obligations on our generation than to hand on a beautiful countryside to our children and grandchildren. We cannot protect everything, which is why it has been crucial to have a hierarchy of landscape. Such a hierarchy, combined with the new planning system, the need for which had become so apparent between the wars, was established by the post-war Attlee Government. Together with the National Health Service, it was one of their two great legacies. Today that hierarchy encompasses national parks, AONBs, heritage coasts, special landscape areas and conservation areas. All of these are crucial. In addition to the planning arrangements, one great bulwark for conservation is of course the National Trust which, with its gigantic 3.6 million membership, owns more than 600 miles of England’s most special coastline. It is attempting to acquire another 300 miles, because, frankly, the coastline is perhaps the most vulnerable of all parts of our island, and once it is gone, it is gone forever. I would not trust any owners in the way that I would trust the National Trust. At this stage, I should remember a former colleague of ours, Nick Ridley, who—ex cathedra, when he was Secretary of State for the Environment—made a very important statement that it was government policy to protect the countryside for its own sake. Perhaps the most urgent question on which I hope the Minister will shed some light is whether the planning Bill, which I assume will reach us in the summer, will invalidate in any way that crucial PPS 7 on sustainable development in rural areas or Section 85 of the CROW Act, to which my noble friend Lord Selborne referred. We cannot allow the protection given by that earlier legislation to be trumped by new planning Bill measures. The funding of AONBs has been mentioned by several noble Lords, particularly by my noble friend Lord Plumb. We must not forget that the funding provided for national parks includes an element to cope with the recreational role of the parks. That was one of the functions for which the parks were created. The noble Lord, Lord Bragg, spoke very beautifully about that most beautiful of all areas. Only this morning I was listening to a lecture from him on Newtonian physics. I understood his speech better than I understood the Newtonian physics. AONBs, however, were created solely on their landscape merit. There are now increasing recreational demands on AONBs and this certainly applies to Dedham Vale in Suffolk—Constable country. These demands must be welcomed, but their management must be funded. At present, some 75 per cent of AONB funding comes from Natural England. As the Minister knows, DEFRA has cut the Natural England budget. Europe also has a part to play. I am glad that the Government last year ratified the European Landscape Convention. I hope that one day it will be converted into a directive, given the great contribution that the habitats directive has played in conservation. We in the United Kingdom have a great deal to teach our European neighbours about the protection and conservation of the countryside. Of course, the United States was at the forefront, inventing national parks in 1908 or even earlier, about 50 years before we did. Americans look after their national parks wonderfully well, but unfortunately seem to regard the rest of the landscape as largely expendable and are doing some pretty awful things to it. On this relatively small globe, no landscape is expendable. I mention a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, about the threat to our coastline. The view of the Environment Agency seems to be that everything should be abandoned to the sea. It is out of touch and out of date. First, we are moving into a period of world food shortage, which is being greatly exacerbated by turning over much agricultural land to the production of biofuels. This is separate from the threat of global warming, which I discount quite heavily. Secondly, some of our most precious landscape would be lost without coastal defences, which need a much longer planning horizon. This is nothing to do with global warming or climate change, which of course does exist. Coastal defences need a much longer time horizon than any political or planning timescale. Somebody told me today, when I was discussing this debate, that we should think in terms of 100 years when planning coastal defences. Certainly, some of our continental neighbours do that. This applies particularly to our Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB. Suffolk is aiming to be England’s greenest county. Apart from protecting our wonderful countryside—and I join in the tributes to the Suffolk County Council—I hope that our particular contribution will be to welcome two new nuclear power stations at Sizewell. I am at one with the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, in recognising and welcoming the huge importance of nuclear power in filling a gap that will otherwise turn out the lights. I am afraid that playing around with renewables such as wind power is, to a significant extent, political tokenism that cannot begin to deal with the problem. The Government have left the launch of a new nuclear programme almost too late. Others, especially China, are making great demands on a limited nuclear construction capability and Britain must book a place in the queue. A special quality of our AONBs should be tranquillity. Noise, like light, can be immensely polluting. Neither is as long term—and certainly not as irreversible—as pollution by concrete. None the less, they counter quiet enjoyment, which is one of the aims of AONB designation. We all recognise that the military has to have low-flying training for war operations and we should play our part in that with pride. However, civil aviation is another matter. We in Suffolk worry about the expanded air-stacking area that is expected to be part of the expansion of Stansted. I ask the Minister to consider the possibility of stacking aircraft over the sea, rather than over land—in our case, that would be the North Sea. Finally, I should like to add to what my noble friend Lord Selborne said about the crucial contribution made to AONBs by the world of volunteering. Many of them, for example, have volunteer wardens, and the Government should demonstrate their appreciation of this by supporting AONBs in every way they can. Those of us who are very privileged to be lifetime stewards to small pieces of England’s countryside have an obligation, through hedge-planting, tree-planting, digging ponds, the sensitive conversion of redundant farm buildings and housing and so on, to see that when we depart from our patch, it is more beautiful than when we arrived. As I said at the start, the Labour Party can claim proud parentage of much of our conservation legislation. It would be sad indeed if during the last couple of years of its present period in office, it were to renege on our national heritage. However, that is a subject for wider debate and I have a lot of confidence in the Minister.