My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. I offer the Green group’s support for Amendment 2 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will speak on other amendments, so I shall confine myself to this one. Amendment 2 has multiple benefits. As the noble Earl explained, it would improve the clarity of the Bill, with “health and wellbeing” being measurable and quantifiable terms rather than the—if I may say so—rather woolly drafting of “enjoyment”.
This also helps us to come to terms with the rest of the debate and to set out clearly what the Bill is trying to achieve. We need our countryside to provide multiple services for us. In terms of our health and well-being, we need a great improvement from our present diet, to one packed with fruit and vegetables. We also need widespread broadly available leisure opportunities, and we need to look after the health and well-being of the natural world so that it can maintain biodiversity and bio-abundance, store carbon, prevent flooding, provide clean water, et cetera.
The economy is a complete sub-set of the environment, and ours is in a parlous state, as the RSPB reminded us this week with its reflections on our “lost decade for nature”. There is a context to the Bill involving contesting views, summed up as “sparing versus sharing”. The idea behind sparing is that we trash much of the land—the soils, the biodiversity and the waters—but we leave some of it, in its still surviving or restored state, as pristine as possible. Spare some, and the devil—or the agrochemical companies—take the rest.
Sharing involves looking after all our land—the soils, the wildlife, the air and the water. Those are things that everybody needs around them all the time for health and well-being—rural and town residents, visitors, and those who eat the food that comes from them. That is, as the noble Earl’s amendment says, for their health and well-being. An occasional visit to a specially protected treasured area will not deliver health and well-being if the rest of our countryside is trashed.
When we reach Amendment 78 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and consider the damage done by pesticide application, this will all come into acute focus. Amendment 2 gives us a chance, in the early stages of the Bill, at the start of today’s debates, to set out a crucial understanding of how our health and well-being, and our future, depend on looking after every inch of our environment. If we live in a healthy land, we will have a healthy society.