My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, 163 and 172, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for having put his name to them. Since this is the first time I have spoken in Committee on this Bill, I probably need to draw your Lordships’ attention to my entry on the register of interests. More significantly for my noble friend, he will be glad to hear that, though this is the first time I have spoken, it will also be the last time I am going to speak. Bearing in mind the stately progress that is being made, I shall not be holding up proceedings any further.
The amendments in this group discussed so far are about the frequency of reports. I have no particular dog in that fight, but I offer one word of caution, which is that if these reports are going to mean something, they need to be relatively infrequent. If they are too frequent, they lose their impact. I suggest to those who are seeking too frequent reports that these may pass by too easily and quickly. A report wants to be an event when it happens.
My amendments go to another part of this clause and try to give it some teeth. Clause 17, as drafted, could result in some pretty anodyne, platitudinous reports—general statements of principle without any detail. When we talk about food security, detail will be very important. My noble friend on the Front Bench will say, “Absolutely, I understand that, and I will ensure there is going to be detail, and the reports will have plenty of focus.” But we have been here before, and we have been here recently. A Green Future contained similarly impressive objectives and an impressive monitoring procedure. This was to be under the Natural Capital Committee chaired by Professor Dieter Helm, who was the subject of some adverse comments by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, about five minutes ago. Professor Helm was to monitor performance under
the green future proposals. The last annual report from Professor Helm’s committee, which was in September last year, read as follows:
“Unfortunately, the Progress Report does not in fact tell us very much about whether and to what extent there has been progress. On the contrary, the Progress Report provides a long list of actions, and presents very little evidence of improvements in the state of our natural capital.”
If we do not strengthen the wording in this clause, we will get a long list of actions and very little evidence of improvement. We need to build in some specific teeth.
The second weakness of the clause, as presently drafted, is that it could be a snapshot, whereas what we should be looking for is a continuous look—a cine film in the old-fashioned way—at the process of our food security. Perhaps I could explain further by analogy. When you go to your annual medical, the doctor looks at your heart and lungs, he sees whether your weight has gone up or down, and he tells you what the results are. That is, of course, very important. If you have a poorly performing heart, you want it treated quickly. But what is really important is how you compare with the previous year. Are you getting heavier? Are you getting lighter? Are you losing weight? Has a new mole emerged? Has your blood pressure gone up? All those sorts of things give you an idea, over a period of time, of how your health and physiology are changing. From that, the doctor can prescribe more exercise, less food, pills or whatever.
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That is what we should try to do with this report. It needs to look at the continuum and see where we have come from, where we are now and where we should be going. Unless we get that, this will not really be any use for informing the public and making important policy decisions.
That is why, in Amendments 163 and 172, I introduce the terms “anticipated strategic developments”, defined as major changes over the subsequent 10 years—that is the period I think we should look at—and, secondly, “consequent policy changes”. That is the doctors advising you to have some pills or exercise more in the way we look at food security. That sets the framework for examining our food security in a way that I argue would be more focused, give greater clarity and lead to a more informed public discussion and understanding of the challenges involved.
What about the specific teeth? Let me deal briefly with the four mentioned in Amendment 172. The first is availability of water. We always think of the UK as being a rainy country, but we each use an average of 140 litres of water a day to wash, wash our clothes in, drink, cook in and no doubt also water the garden and wash the car—and there are a lot of us. Surprisingly, London receives less average rainfall than Barcelona, Rome, Miami or Sydney, and on a per capita basis London is drier than Morocco or Turkey. That is before we have to find the water to support our agricultural production.
Sir James Bevan, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, depicts the existing water policy in pretty stark terms. He describes the water situation as entering
“the jaws of death”, as within 20 years Britain will not have sufficient water supplies. Various scenarios suggest that, by 2050, some regions of the UK will have a demand for water one and a half times higher than available supplies.
When my noble friend comes to reply, he will no doubt say that the Government are aware of this and are trying to start a programme of development of reservoirs and better storage facilities. That is true, but they are exceptionally unpopular. A large row is going on in South Oxfordshire over the construction of a reservoir at Abingdon—and, of course, the more reservoirs we build, the more agricultural land to grow our food on we lose.
The second key issue is the loss of land to urban development. We must expect to have to build 2 million to 3 million houses over the next 20 years. Of course, it is not just the land for the houses but the roads and railways to connect them, the factories and offices, the shops and restaurants, the schools and hospitals and the support network that goes to make up our modern society. This is continuing a trend. Danny Dorling, professor of geography at Oxford, has said about the last decade:
“In absolute terms this is very likely to be the largest increase in the number of square miles that have been tarmacked or paved over in any decade in British history.”
The best estimate for the next 20 years is that we will build over an area the size of Bedfordshire. If, as seems likely, quite a high proportion of this will be in the south of England, we need to remember that that is where some of our most fertile agricultural land is located.
The third element is the percentage of food consumed in this country that will be grown here. At this point, I note that Clause 17 as drafted goes some way to meet these points. I am also picking up on some of the points made by my noble friend Lady McIntosh. We have heard a lot about the 50% level of food self-sufficiency, but I argue that this is not good enough. We need to be a great deal more granular than that and to see what our self-sufficiency is—or our vulnerability, if you look at it the other way around—analysed by major food categories. That is because of developments on the world scene.
It is not just that the world population will go up by 1.9 billion between now and 2055—a 25% increase—or that it is increasing by 200,000 a day. More importantly, it is that there are more people already on the planet who want to be fed better. Therefore, in order to avoid the scarcities, malnutrition and all the other things that disfigure our planet, we will need better food for the people who are already here. The World Resources Institute suggests that we will need an extra 7,400 trillion more calories by 2050—more than 50% above the 2010 figure of 13,100 trillion calories. It will therefore be important for this food security report to look ahead and see what types of food are likely to make up this large increase in demand across the world. If they seem likely to be in areas where we are weak and vulnerable, we need to take steps to improve our domestic production of those categories.
As noble Lords have already said, it is not just about growing the food but transporting it to the UK. Food logisticians have a concept called choke points:
areas of congestion for transhipment. The South China Seas, the Malacca Strait, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal—noble Lords can go around the globe and pick out the geographical points for themselves. Climatic conditions, which we know are getting worse, will have an impact; political action, with an aggressive China in the South China Sea; military action, such as a flare-up in the Middle East, which would affect the Red Sea and the Suez Canal—all these could mean that our ability to tranship food here is very much reduced. Therefore, into that report will need to go a pattern of how the food is getting here and what are our vulnerabilities on the various routes that bring it here.
That takes me to the very last point: the requirement to look ahead to the number of mouths that we will have to provide food and water for. I congratulate my noble friend on his honesty, and I am sincere: for the very first time, a government Minister was prepared to write and say, “We expect the population of the country to be 6 million higher in 2041”. Admittedly, he said, “It is nothing to do with us; it is to do with the ONS projection”, but he said that on the record as a government Minister. A Green Future said:
“Population growth and economic development will mean more demand for housing and this Government is committed to building many more homes.”
That was all it said about the impact of population on the environment. What does 6 million people look like? The population of Manchester is 2.5 million, so we are looking at building two to two and a half Manchesters by 2040. Some people would argue that the projections the ONS have are on a fairly heroic basis, and the number could be closer to 8 million, but that, as they say, is a story for another day.
In conclusion, the concerns and issues that underlie Clause 17 need to be put squarely and candidly before the British people. The first duty of the state is to protect its citizens, and that certainly includes providing them with food and water. General statements of good intent are simply not good enough, hence my tabling these amendments to give greater rigour and focus to future reports on our food security.
There is nothing controversial about these amendments, because if future reports on food security are to have any value, they will inevitably include detailed figures on water, loss of agricultural land, urban development, expected changes in domestic population levels, and on shifts in world food consumption and transportation. I accept that my drafting is unlikely to be good enough, so I invite my noble friend to take these amendments away and bring them back in a redrafted form for debate on Report. I hope that it may be possible for me and other interested parties to meet my noble friend and his officials for a moment to discuss these matters in depth.