My Lords, I am delighted to be part of this group and to be supporting the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, in her Amendment 209. If we are to have nature recovery strategies, they have to be followed. I touched on this in a previous group in relation to biodiversity gain and planning consents. If that great source of nature improvement is done willy-nilly, with no reference at all to the nature recovery strategy, what is the point of the nature recovery strategy? This is one of the main ways in which things are going to improve. Why is it disconnected? Amendment 209 from the noble Baroness would reconnect it and other things in a most useful way.
My own amendments in this group are aimed at seeking remedies to things which seem to me, from my experience locally, not to be working as well as they might be and which could be made to work better,
under the structures proposed in this Bill, with a bit of additional power. First, I observe that, within the land owned by the local council, there are substantial SSSIs which are supposed to be chalk downland and which are actually largely bramble. How has that come about? I think it has come about because the negotiations on what should be done are conducted between a council that is extremely willing but short of money and Natural England, which understands that and does not see the purpose of pushing a long-term relationship harder than it reasonably can. The net result is that things go gently backwards.
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If there was, in that context, a group of informed and interested citizens whose role was to say, “Hang on a bit, this is not the way it should be”, to be activist, outspoken and pushing for things to be better, I think that relationship would be improved and we would get a better result for the maintenance of the environment. It needs a bit of grit in the machine, a bit of salt in the porridge, to make this work well. Others who I have talked to have observed similar difficulties elsewhere. We need something that gives the concerned public real access to what can otherwise become a cosy relationship between the governors and the governed.
Amendment 230 looks at how drainage boards and the Environment Agency should co-operate with a nature recovery strategy. Next to us down the coast, we have the Cuckmere valley and estuary. This is an entirely artificial construct; it is governed by shortcuts and drainage arrangements put in by the Dutch a century ago. One way or another, under a nature recovery strategy, I imagine that we would agree what we want the ecosystem in the estuary and the valley above it to be. However, what happens if the Environment Agency does not play ball, as it has not over the past couple of winters? We have had storms in the winters that have built a gravel bar at the bottom of the river, which has resulted in deep and long-term flooding of the whole river system. If that is not what we are aiming at, if that is not what the nature recovery strategy should be achieving, the Environment Agency, by not being tied into the process, is defeating the whole purpose of the nature recovery strategy. It has to be a partner.
I see that again in the fenlands that form the middle of Eastbourne; we have about 400 hectares of calcareous fens in the middle of the town. We would love to have curlews in it, but the Environment Agency, which is unreachable for us as a mere district authority, has decided that it wants to pump the Langney sewer—which is the main drainage of the fenlands and is actually a pristine chalk stream, despite its name—so low in summer that the fenlands are brick hard, the curlews cannot get their beaks in and their chicks die.
If we have a nature recovery strategy for Eastbourne, and we say, “We want these fenlands full of life and we want that to include curlews”, how do we get the Environment Agency to come on side with that? It must be bound in as part of the strategy, perhaps as part of making the strategy too, but once it is made, it must be part of it. If we want these things to work, we need those big, powerful institutions—local authorities, the Environment Agency, drainage boards and, doubtless,
others—to be part of the process of making them work. I hope these amendments will be a contribution to that.