My Lords, I declare my interests as a farmer/landowner and as chair of UKCEH research.
This Bill is a once-in-a-generation chance to set a course for a better quality of life for all flora and fauna, including humans, that live on our overcrowded island. While a 30-year generation is a mere heartbeat in terms of our environment, the same 30 years is also a very long time in politics. So the passion for the environment which I recognise fully in the current Ministers in both Houses must be as of naught to us during our deliberations. We must ensure that this Bill continues to protect our environment as Secretaries of State and Ministers come and go over the years and decades.
It is a huge Bill with much that is very good in it. I shall not outline that because our traditional 10-minute speaking time for Second Readings seems to have been curtailed, but I support most of what the Bill is trying to do. However, there are two main areas where I think we can improve. First, if you were from outside government and were thinking of setting up a body to oversee the Government’s environmental performance and to replace the European Commission in this respect, you would definitely never put this body with Defra or under the guidance of its Secretary of State. After all, two of the main bodies that the OEP will scrutinise are the Environment Agency and Natural England, both of which have their budgets and activities almost totally controlled by Defra. MHCLG would be another no-no department, because it manages and partly funds local authorities, which are perhaps the other main target for scrutiny.
In the private sector, when shareholders appoint auditors to scrutinise their company, they have by law to appoint outside, independent auditors, not the internal accounts department of their own company, which is what is happening here. The independent auditors are there to check on the internal accounts department, for which read Defra, and not to do their bidding. Anyone—actually, everyone—can see that the currently proposed set-up is completely wrong. The OEP has not only to be independent but to be seen to be independent. As currently set up, it is neither.
The other area is one where a truly independent OEP would of course come down like a ton of bricks: the urgent need for Defra and the Environment Agency to put right the appalling pollution of our rivers. Eighty-six per cent of our rivers are not in good ecological condition. We have once again reverted to being the dirty man of Europe. Something needs to be done and done quickly. Rumour has it—and the Minister mentioned it today—that Defra has its own set of amendments here, but it would be good to know exactly what is proposed as soon as possible. Even then, I would hope to push the Government a little further. For instance, water pollution is as much about what you are taking out of a river as what you are putting in. Abstraction licences and compulsory water metering are on my target list for amendments.
Then there is the major problem of combined sewer overflows and the huge quantities of sewage we put into our rivers. I shall not bore you with statistics but, believe me, what goes on is totally shocking. From talking to scientists it is clear that river pollution is no simple matter. Every catchment is different and has different problems needing different solutions. We should make better use of existing catchment-based partnerships, increasing their number and formalising them within the Bill. Like the inshore fisheries and conservation authorities set up by the 2009 Act, these catchment conservation authorities should be given more powers to monitor and control their own rivers.
Finally, I want to air a nagging doubt that lurks always at the back of my mind. It is not really to do with this Bill, but it is something we should think on. For sure, our generation of farmers has fallen short by overfocusing on the production of cheap food, to the detriment of our biodiversity and possibly even our nation’s nutrition, but we are a very crowded island: England is three times more densely populated than France and four times more than Spain. I worry that, with all our current demands for more habitats, more trees, more forests, more carbon sinks, more rural leisure, more national parks and masses more new housing, all of which I approve of, we will wake up in 40 years’ time, in the middle of a third world war, and say, “Hang on, was it your generation that diminished our ability to feed ourselves, so that now we cannot survive?” I am sure we can fit all the land uses into our landscape, but during the frantic activity we shall all have on this Bill over the next few months, we must never forget that the primary purpose of agricultural land is to produce food for our nation.
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