My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. He feels passionately about these issues and I enjoyed his speech very much.
I agree with others who have said that this Bill is an enabling Bill. In essence, it gives the Government a lot of power and trusts them to go off and implement what we have decided without many checks and balances. I cannot imagine that there are that many people left in the UK who actually trust the Government any more, so why should members of your Lordships’ House trust them?
The collective theme of the many great amendments in this group is that they would, in one way or another, force the Government to show their working and allow Parliament to mark their homework. I think this is something that we need to take very seriously.
Turning to the amendments to which I have attached my name, Amendments 127, 134 and 137 are important because they will tie the Bill to the Environment Bill and ensure that funding is sufficiently allocated to achieve the environmental aims. There is little written into either the Environment Bill or the Agriculture Bill —two enormous Bills—to create a cohesive framework; both seem rather to create their own stand-alone systems.
It is as if two teams drafted them and they were not allowed to speak to one another but just got on and produced their own Bill. Both Bills are setting up very long-term systems that will spread their tendrils throughout huge parts of our economy, and it makes sense to bring these together now, or we will be back here in a few years’ time, trying to close the gaps.