My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 67 and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her support for it. My main interest here is in connection with the broader environmental policies of the Government as they bring these forward in legislation. As I said at Second Reading, I very much welcome the ELMS initiative; it is a major step forward in the use of state aid for the farming industry and how it is to be targeted.
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The Environment Bill is also coming through; I would be very interested to hear from the Minister when it is likely to hit this House. That would be useful for noble Lords all around the House. There are a number of important government initiatives in it which I also very much welcome, one of which is around nature recovery strategies and networks. We often talk about silos between government departments; I am concerned in these two Bills—particularly this Bill and in relation to ELMS—that we do not have silos within Defra between the agricultural side and the Rural Payments Agency, and Natural England and the delivery of a lot of the pure environmental objectives on the other.
My amendment is a probing amendment to understand this from the Minister. Of fundamental importance is how schemes such as nature recovery networks and ELMS will be co-ordinated, so that we can have the double benefit from making sure that they work together rather than, as perhaps in the worst-case scenario, conflicting with each other. I reread the consultation document on ELMS produced by the Government in February and was encouraged by its list of lessons learned, which is an excellent thing to have. One lesson on that list was that there needs to be local input, whether assistance or consultation, into how these schemes work.
I was also a little encouraged by tiers 2 and 3 of ELMS; tier 1 is for single farm measures, which I understand entirely we do not want to make too bureaucratic. Tier 2, which is about land management—probably collaboration between more than two or three farms together—mentions that it needs to coincide or work with some form of spatial planning. Tier 3 refers to peatland restoration and the nature for climate fund. Are the Government still pursuing those objectives, making sure that there is a synergy between these schemes and that local areas are consulted or somehow brought in without—I understand this point entirely—
making this system too bureaucratic? Can the Minister start to explain how this will be approached? This is a fundamental way of ensuring that all our environmental objectives in this are truly delivered.