Environment: Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty

My Lords, I should first declare that I am president of Friends of the Ridgeway and of the CPRE in Oxfordshire and that I live right on the boundary of the Chilterns AONB. I will talk about national trails. These have not been mentioned in the debate so far, but there is work going on to consider their future. They are the long footpaths that traverse much of the AONB land. They are the network that should be at the heart of our strategy to encourage the public at large peacefully to enjoy the countryside. They should be the gateway through which people have access to the countryside and what it has to offer, be it nature, history or healthy recreation. They should represent the best walking routes in the country through a good cross-section of different terrain, to which many noble Lords have referred this afternoon. I will not labour the benefits of national trails—the health benefits, the climate benefits, the educational benefits, the economic benefits and the social benefits. There is a tremendous opportunity to increase the use of these trails. Many noble Lords have referred to the fact that this is a very crowded island. I could lay £5 on the table and say, ““I can take you to a place on the Ridgeway where you can see for miles in any direction and there will be nobody else there””. Why is there nobody else there? Partly because access to that network is extremely difficult. The noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, said that you could take a bus from Brighton and walk four or five miles through the AONB and catch another bus back. I am afraid that the Ridgeway runs through parts of the country where a bus is something of a rarity and certainly does not offer any sort of regular service that people could plan to use. In any long-term strategy, we must look at access. People want to get out of towns but they need to be able to; if they come in a car or on a bike or whatever, there must be somewhere for them to leave it. The threat to the national trails is almost entirely a question of funding. There is a huge body of volunteers. Friends of the Ridgeway is one such body; it does enormous work to publicise the place and improve it. I pay tremendous tribute to the Government and the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, for the work done in this House to rid the Ridgeway of almost all mechanically propelled vehicles, which were almost destroying it. The joint efforts made in that respect were a manifestation of what can be done without spending a huge amount more money; it was a question of changing the law and a bit of enforcement. That was much helped by volunteers. Whatever the amount of money the Government put in, local authorities, trusts and people will put in money to match, and it will grow. We are asking the Government more about putting down the seedcorn than about harvesting the crop. There are national trails officers who effectively manage the trails, but such people are extremely thin on the ground. We have to address how much the existence of national trails and their advantages—and the advantages of the things looked after by English Heritage, the National Trust and the AONBs—are in the tourist literature. Do we encourage the people who come here, or those who live in cities, to know about these areas and visit them? Despite what is said about the island being terribly overcrowded and about pouring concrete over the whole of England, that is not the case in large areas of England. My second point is about noise. Noble Lords have probably seen the maps that the CPRE has produced over the years showing ever shrinking green areas; they are quiet areas or tranquil areas, as I believe it calls them. The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, has already referred to the fact that people in, I believe, Suffolk are concerned about the expansion of Stansted and the rerouteing of aircraft approach paths over Suffolk to Heathrow. The threat of aircraft noise is substantial. It would be devastating in the Chilterns AONB. NATS, in its wisdom and in its efforts to get more aircraft into Heathrow Airport, seems to be almost oblivious to the areas that aircraft are flying over. I have asked Written Questions about the extent to which direction is given to NATS to avoid certain areas. I have more or less been told that NATS has to make the best judgments, that space is limited and so on. I would rather like to see a positive direction given to NATS to try hard to avoid certain areas; flight paths across the country should avoid those areas. I am afraid that some of that loss of tranquillity is due to the growth of recreational aviation taking people on holiday. Both the climate change and noise issues that we face must come smack up against the issue of how much cheap flying we can afford without tremendous detriment to the area around. The question of new runway capacity at Heathrow will be a cause célèbre and it will bring a great deal of protest about noise. I now want to jump to the A30 in Devon. I do not know whether the Minister in his various travels has driven from the Salisbury area to the Exeter area. The noise from that road is horrendous. It is not just the noise that one hears on the road; one can go two or three miles to either side and the noise is continuous and horrendous. There are remedies for that. The surfaces of roads can be treated with what I believe in the trade is called ““whisper asphalt””. In fact, a piece of the A34 north of Oxford, which was also a concrete road like the A30, has been treated with whisper asphalt and the noise has been reduced substantially. If we want tranquillity we have to control the transport. It is certainly possible, as I know, to control the noise on railways and I believe that it should be done, but at least railways do not have the disadvantages of all the things are on the edges of roads—you do not have a McDonalds every few yards or a Little Chef or a garage or whatever. Some railways, such as the Settle to Carlisle line—the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, may or may not agree with me—add to the environment rather than detract from it. I am looking to hear from the Minister about not necessarily generous funding but a steady stream of funding looking to the future. I would particularly like him to say something about supporting the rural community councils. Those are small bodies in the counties that look after things such as rural housing and the generation of businesses in localities. They also give advice on opening rural shops and so on. They do a great deal of work to support the community, but they are thinly funded. They are not well paid and they are not overstaffed. I would like the Minister to say something positive about the possibilities of promoting tourism and access to the many beautiful areas that we have. I am sure that that can be done without destroying them. I am sure that many children, as has been mentioned, would benefit from getting out into the open air and finding their way into these places. I am not pessimistic in that I do not believe that the demand for more housing is necessarily inconsistent with the promotion of areas of outstanding natural beauty. I am sure that, as the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, said, the demand for open space on our island will and should grow. We should be proud of what we have rather than seeing everyone wishing to fly out of the country and disturb everyone else.