My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and to support this amendment. She set out the issues clearly, so I will be brief.
In Committee, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has already mentioned, the Government sought to reassure noble Lords that they were committed to achieving their aim of leaving the environment in a better state than they found it and that the environmental improvement plans involved in this strategy would be covered in the Environment Bill. We were also told that the office for environmental protection will monitor progress and make recommendations to the Government for further action. We do not yet know what sort of teeth the OEP will have and whether or not the Government will follow its recommendations.
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How are the Government doing in their aim of leaving the environment in a better state than they found it? The 2019-20 government report on progress with the 25-year plan lists 17 indicators, of which seven are going in the right direction, seven are neutral and only
three are going downhill. Noble Lords might think that this sounds quite good, but the September 2019 report from the Natural Capital Committee is more concerning. The committee was asked by the then Secretary of State for Defra to provide detailed advice on how the state of nature is being measured to ensure the delivery of the 25-year plan. The Natural Capital Committee concludes that its assessment
“reveals a distinct lack of robust baseline against which to assess changes in the environment.”
So according to the Government’s own independent advisers, we simply do not know whether the state of the environment is improving or getting worse.
If we are to be sure that support for farmers will also support nature, we need not only a proper system of measurement but to ensure that, when farmers are paid to enhance the natural environment, the payments are targeted at the right things. To quote the management guru Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Otherwise, the Government will not achieve their great ambition and future generations will wonder why we got it so badly wrong.