My Lords, what I am hearing around the House is that everybody is feeling rather anxious about a lack of join-up between a whole load of mechanisms that are being invented or pre-exist, so that they run the risk of nullifying each other, or at least making life very difficult for each other. So I feel justified in speaking to my Amendment 293, and I thank the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, for his support. Some noble Lords will recognise that this is a revamp of an amendment to require the Government to draw up a land-use framework which I raised during debates on the Agriculture Bill. The Government indicated that the Environment Bill would be a much more appropriate place to deal with it, so here it is. The Government may possibly now say that the planning Bill would be a more appropriate place, in which case I shall raise it there too, because the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, is right that I have been banging on about this for a long time, and I intend to continue banging on about it until I get it.
There are huge pressures on land, and they are growing. There is pressure for increased food security, carbon storage, biodiversity, flood management, trees, increased timber for self-sufficiency, recreation, health, built development, housing and infrastructure—there are multiple pressures on land. The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership conducted demand and supply analysis and found that, to meet a growing UK population’s food space and energy needs while increasing the area needed to protect and enhance the nation’s natural capital, the UK would need to free up an additional 7 million hectares. The land for that is simply not there. The UK as a whole is only 24.25 million hectares, so about one-third more land would be needed to meet imminent pressures, and we simply have not got it.
As we tackle these multiple pressures for land, we are hampered by the lack of a common framework within which to reconcile these competing needs. I have been going around trying to prompt a debate on the need for a land-use framework for England, because Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland already have such frameworks and are using them, with greater or lesser effect, to guide policy on these competing areas of need. Many countries across the globe have land-use strategies—even China, as we heard at our Select Committee last week—so, it is long overdue that England should develop and use such a framework. This issue was identified by the Select Committee on the Rural Economy two years ago: it recommended that there should be an England land-use framework. The Commission on the Future of Food, Farming and the Countryside—I declare an interest as a member—has identified this as a major issue and is conducting a pilot land-use framework for Devon, which may encourage the Government to see whether they could adopt it on a national basis.
Since we debated this issue during the passage of the Agriculture Bill, several other spatial planning issues have arisen. The Government have made a commitment, in the England Trees Action Plan, to
major expansion of woodland. Where are the best places for trees to go that do not undermine the other valuable land uses, such as agriculture? What is the answer to that? We need a land-use framework to tell us. The new farming support regime, as the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, outlined, will result in substantial land-use change. Local nature recovery strategies already have a quasi-land-use planning role but could well raise major challenges to local development plans, as has already been outlined. The changes to the planning system heralded in the Government’s White Paper will impact on the use of land, but traditionally, the planning system does not cover, in any real way, rural agricultural land. Net biodiversity gain will require land to achieve that gain. Can the Minister clarify how all these mechanisms are to be integrated and not bang into each other?
Land is a finite resource—we are not making any more—and we desperately need a strategic land-use framework to maximise the value to wildlife, development, the economy and people. If the Minister disagrees, will he outline how the Government intend to reconcile the increasing competition for land? The risk is that these separate systems will encourage particular land uses in particular places, with decisions taken in silos without a more strategic view on how to get the right use in the right place and maximise the benefit of the precious resource that land represents.
I also support Amendments 209 and 210. I have put my name to Amendment 209 in the name the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. It makes the vital link between local nature recovery strategies and other land use decisions by public authorities. It was put vividly by the noble Baroness. The Knepp example is being replicated over the country. Our local version in Bedfordshire is that the local native recovery strategy is beginning to identify, from rigorous scrutiny of the data, that the North Bedfordshire Wolds is probably the most important area of open countryside left in Bedfordshire, but the local plan has been developing new town proposals to put new settlements of 6,000 to 10,000 inhabitants right in the middle of the North Bedfordshire Wolds—so not much join-up there then. I therefore support the need for local nature recovery strategies to have legal status, so that planners and developers have to take account of them. Amendment 210, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, aims to make a statutory link between local planning decisions and biodiversity in all the decisions that public authorities make.
My last point is a practical one. Local authorities have, almost universally, reduced the number of ecologists they employ; two out of three local authorities do not have an ecologist on their staff. We need proper integration of all these new and existing mechanisms for land use, and ecologists will be vital to that task, so we need to ensure that local authorities are properly funded to be able to do this job.