My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his responses to my amendments in Committee, and for his kind words in the last group. I am equally grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, for bringing back this subject and for his equally kind words.
To my mind, this matter of advice is absolutely at the core of what is needed in the new system. We need it to be advice based, not rule based. We need it to have expertise, to be capable of being local and to be trusted. The adviser corps needs to be trusted by both Government and by farmers. We need to run the system so that it is objective based, not action based.
For instance, one of the objectives local to me should be restoring chalk grassland. No one has any real idea how to do that successfully in a modern agricultural system; we will have to try lots of different things, and a lot of people are going to fail. They need to be supported in that failure, and we need a system that helps us as a nation to learn from that failure and take people forward. That is what an advice-based system should be doing. It is a learning system, not a static system from some tablets of stone handed down but a system that learns from everything that is going on around the country and shares that learning. It is not centralised; centralised is utterly impossible, given the variety of the countryside and different agricultural situations.
We have had enough centralisation. I do not want the Environment Agency letting the Cuckmere flood disastrously because it is too small for it to be bothered with. I want once again to have curlews in the middle of Eastbourne—to have a local solution and not one imposed by the Environment Agency, such as what the water levels should be in the Langney Sewer, which, despite its name, is a pure chalk stream. I want the system to let us have a go at doing things differently—for instance, to have grass sledging on sheep walks. We need
to have some way in which to raise money from our countryside to restore our SSSIs. Our local SSSIs are going back to bramble and scrub. We do not have the finance to bring them back as they should be—we need some greater way in which to earn money from the chalk uplands. We need to experiment and try things, and we need an environment where that is encouraged and supported. Trust, support and advice is what I hope we will get from the new system.