My Lords, it is a great pleasure to reopen this debate in the confident conviction that the entire nation of England is glued to our deliberations this evening. As a reminder, we are covering the group comprising Amendments 205A, 253 and 257D, all in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who did a very clear job of introducing them before the break.
However, I am not quite as convinced as the noble Lord about the ease of plant reintroduction. I think about tree planting on the edge of the moors outside Sheffield, hacking through thigh-high bracken and its accompanying roots. I have not yet been back to see how those new trees are, but we are talking about animals here and these amendments, particularly Amendments 205A and 257D, address the exciting development of what is being called “recovery through reintroduction”. This excites individuals and communities. The focus is often on larger, charismatic species, such as large herbivores and some carnivores, but excellent work has also been done on red squirrels and pine martens in an interrelated way. Perhaps, however, these two amendments are most relevant to the smaller and the more local, such as insects and maybe small mammals—recovery and reintroduction efforts that might be taken up by a small local group. In Sheffield, when we were deep in the controversy over felling street trees and a great deal of time and effort went into preserving the Chelsea Road elm—on its own terms and for one of the UK’s most threatened butterflies, the white-letter hairstreak—many people came up to me seeking schemes to see how they might be able to preserve it.
There have been so many success stories of reintroduction over the past 30 years: the red kite, the bittern, the pool frog, the natterjack toad, the sand lizard, the smooth snake, the chequered skipper butterfly, the enigmatic ladybird spider and, of course, the beaver, about which I spoke previously. However, to truly restore our ecosystems, our biodiversity, our nature—as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, prefers—we need much more. We live in one of the most nature-depleted states on this planet. From the Tudor age onwards, when a war on so-called vermin was launched, there has been a war on wildlife in these islands, which was then explosively accelerated through the destruction of the 20th century. Turning it around requires enlisting the support of what is also a nation of animal lovers.
I am interested to hear the Minister’s response to the sentiment behind these amendments, which certainly deserves to be supported and encouraged. Again, this is not something that can be centrally controlled by Westminster. It needs local initiatives and local and regional action. A sentence in Amendment 253 optimistically looks forward to a partially rewilded island, where nature can be allowed to operate its natural cycles of energy and resources. This also raises an important issue.