My Lords, the Bill offers lots of opportunities and I certainly look forward to hearing more about them. Due to the slightly fragile nature of my voice today, I will cut my points short. However, what I would like my noble friend the Minister to consider concerns the proposed new road company. The Bill suggests that existing environmental duties would apply to the new company. However, we have learnt that whenever there is a
major new road scheme, the real difficulty comes when it is faced with environmental issues. The Bill offers us an opportunity to do more than simply apply the existing environmental duties to the new company. We could be requiring the new company to apply much more sophisticated new measures, such as whether or not a new road scheme would dramatically reduce total carbon emissions. This is now as important as whether there is a colony of great crested newts in the road’s path.
I am sure that your Lordships would not expect me to make a case for lesser environmental protection, and I am certainly not doing so. It is a tragedy when a road drives through an ancient woodland or SSSI. However, we must now balance all sorts of things in a much more sophisticated way. Just transferring existing duties is insufficient. I note the interesting suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about our view of such a road and whether it would incorporate, for example, a cycle path. That is an opportunity that is offered and might add further environmental pluses and carbon reductions. I would be disappointed if we simply transferred duties without using what we now know about carbon emission measurements, for example, to further the balance when we come to look at these things—my noble friend used the word “balance” in the context of housing, but I use it here.
On Part 2, the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked “What species?”. My question is simply: what is “non-native”? I know that some of the NGOs are concerned that things that have been non-native for a long time, like the great bustard, the giant crane and even beavers and all sorts of things that fly and swim, could be caught by this. I do not suppose that anyone is going to say that they are invasive, but defining “non-native” more rigorously would be useful. Otherwise, we could be setting the status quo in law as a one-way system for biodiversity loss: if an animal, insect or any living creature ceases to appear in the wild, it ceases to be native.
Of course, I imagine that Part 2 applies mainly to plants, because that is where we have mainly seen the problem. I praise the Government for tackling the issue of landowners who will not allow measures to be taken on their land; that is positive. I simply echo the comments on ballast waster of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron. Ballast water can import all sorts of things that you would not want to see, including things that damage our very infrastructure, such as our sewerage outlets and drainage systems. It is not so severe in this country, but in some parts of the world various crustaceans have really wrecked the water infrastructure of various cities.
My final point in this short contribution is about how much I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, on affordable housing. I join him in hoping that nothing in the Bill will in any way jeopardise the ability of rural communities and local authorities in rural areas to make an affordable housing requirement.
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