My Lords, because I do not want to detain the House, this is the only amendment that I am speaking on today.
I strongly support Amendment 79 and have personal reasons for doing so, so I need to tell a story. It is about the late Dr Bill Fakes, an old friend of mine, a former GP in my former Workington constituency who I met nearly 50 years ago. He was a brilliant man—yes, a bit eccentric, but that is often the case with gifted people. He was a biologist with an intense interest in entomology. He had been brought up in the Fenlands in the small rural community of Willingham. It was a market garden, an arable area, and with his love of nature he took a particular interest in the ditches and characteristics of the land where, with
other children and friends, he would gather beetles and other insects, carefully logging their every characteristic. As a bright boy inspired by these activities as a child, he went on to study medicine at UCL in London, ultimately ending up in Workington as a young—yes, rather eccentric but brilliant—general practitioner.
In 1995 Dr Fakes was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and ended up, via West Cumberland Hospital, at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, where a fellow medic and consultant took a particular interest in his condition. What they were not to know at that stage was that a number of his relatives and friends were subsequently to be stricken down with similar or associated conditions. They included his sister, his mother and one of his best young friends, Brian Haddon, all within a few years of each other and all from within the vicinity of the Fakes’ home in the Fens.
Dr Fakes’ response was to research his condition in detail, taking up much of his own time. Part of the research was to arrange for his pituitary gland, I think it was, to be removed from his body on death and sent for autopsy assessment at a special unit in Glasgow. Bill Fakes had been assiduous in making these arrangements as he believed that such an assessment would expose the danger of underregulated spraying arrangements. However, somewhere along the line the gland disappeared and was lost, and all the preparation came to nothing. Dr Fakes was convinced that his condition and that of his family and friends related directly to the use of pesticides in the vicinity of buildings and installations to which the public had access next to his home. He wanted all deaths in pesticide spray areas to be reviewed with a view to amendments to legislation dealing with pesticides, which brings me to Amendment 78 in the name of my noble friend.
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I am told by Nick Mole of Pesticides Action Network that farmers can spray right up to the boundary—yes, right up to your garden boundary, bush, fence or wall. I am also told that not only can you use Roundup when doing so but you can spray with even potentially more hazardous and dangerous pesticides. I have to confess that when he told me this, I simply could not believe it and had to ask him to repeat what he had said. Furthermore, I am told that it is permissible under EU pesticide regimes, which have been described to me as not perfect but some of the best in the world. So, we now have climate change, plastic pollution and pesticides all destroying the planet while we stand and bicker over whether environmental protection is too high a price to pay.
This brings me to the national action plan, the consultation, the proposed review and the price we now need to pay. In my mind, the whole debate comes down to the risk approach versus the precautionary approach. We need to reject any risk approach that dilutes our pesticide regimes. We need far clearer pesticide reduction targets. We need a levy on farmers based on levels of toxicity. We need a chemicals regulatory regime with far tougher enforcement, which probably means splitting up the existing regime. We need a
review of both the voluntary initiative and the immunity forum, both of which have been described to me as inadequate.
With Dr Bill Fakes in mind—sadly, he died from pesticide poisoning in 2003—we need a complete review of the spraying of pesticides near buildings used for human habitation and for work. We also need new law specifying minimum distances during the application of pesticides—all in Amendment 78, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Whitty. That is what Dr Fakes wanted. It would be a suitable epitaph to his lifetime’s work on occupational diseases and their cancer-related conditions if the amendment were to pass today. If Amendment 78 had been mine, I would have liked to have called it to “the Fakes amendment” in recognition of the work he did in this area, but of course it is not mine. Still, I hope my noble friend Lord Whitty, who is equally passionate on these matters, does not mind and understands the position I have taken.