My Lords, once again, I declare my interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership, which is rather relevant to a couple of my amendments.
I want to go back to the basic argument of what the Bill is about. There is a real issue—an emergency, as I and many others would describe it, in biodiversity and the quantum of nature in England. Because of that we have this Bill. It is about doing something—and we have to do something. However, while we all welcome nature recovery networks as a great initiative in the Bill for which I congratulate the Government, when we have that emergency and we have seen how the Aichi targets over the past 10 years mean that we have gone backwards in this area, we need those nature recovery networks actually to work. Exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, if we do not do that, what is the point?
This group is about the rubber hitting the road, if you like. This is “make your mind up” time. Are Nature Recovery Networks and biodiversity targets going to be something we can all feel good about because they are in legislation, or will they make sure there is change over the next decade? That is the choice that the Government have in these amendments. I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s response.
There is a great deal going on, as we have heard from noble Lords. If the biodiversity targets that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, described so well, are not implemented and joined up with the fundamental area of planning, we are throwing away this opportunity. We must tie it up with land use and farming, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and the noble Lord, Earl Caithness, have mentioned. Roughly 75% of England is agricultural, and if we get that right we can move forward in terms of biodiversity.
Farming is crucial to making nature recovery networks and biodiversity work. We have to tie that up with the organisations that have these responsibilities already, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said: drainage
boards and the Environment Agency. That is true as well. I believe that it is essential, and I think the Committee does, that there should not just be “regard” for these nature recovery networks. They have to be embedded, planted, and statutorily mandated to comply with them. Otherwise, they will not have strength.
Down in Cornwall, as the Minister is probably well aware, we have a lot of beaver introductions—we were talking about those earlier on—and have gone through one of five nature recovery pilots. I have been very much involved, as chair of the local nature partnership. It is a great exercise to go through. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, talked about consultation with local communities. We have to get that buy-in, and I am pleased to say that some 700 people were involved in consultation with our pilot in Cornwall. We have a really good scheme there, but, coming back to one of my amendments, how the heck are these going to be resourced?
There are two necessities here: one is tying and mandating their use with other machinery, whether it is the Planning Act or agriculture—we will come onto ELMS in the next group—but there also have to be the resources. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said local authorities do not have ecologists at the moment. We have to have them so they can work on nature recovery networks as well as net gain. If we do not have the resources to develop nature recovery networks and get them to work, how will it happen?
The Government might say that we have the environmental land management scheme, with £2.5 billion worth of state aid to buy public goods, but I do not see that necessarily fulfilling the needs of nature recovery networks entirely. We have net gain; I hope most of that net gain will be done onsite, and there are potentially ways of having resources there, but those two together are not enough to make nature recovery networks work. How are we going to resource the implementation of these strategies? Those are the fundamental points.
In terms of my other two amendments, local nature partnerships were, I was sad to see, not even mentioned in the Bill. They came about through The Natural Choice: Securing the Value of Nature, the natural environment White Paper of June 2011. They were never put on a statutory basis, but they exist throughout England, full of people from all walks of life. In Cornwall and Scilly, we have local authorities, the Environment Agency, Natural England, farmers, ecologists and ordinary independent directors to make nature work in our region.
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I put this amendment down purely as a probing amendment to understand the Government’s view of these organisations. I have always felt, politically, that if we have something that does not work, we should abolish it. So I put down a challenge to the Government: make these things work as they can—some work very well, others not so well—but they need to have some resource to be able to do that. The White Paper on which they were based said they should be the equivalent of local enterprise partnerships. Now LEPs are well funded generally: they have power, they are important partners of local authorities and they make economic
growth and development work in a good way, often in the regions. But the LNPs are not able to do that: they do not have that clout, they do not have that resource. So I am very interested to understand from the Minister how the Government see the future of these organisations. Again, I provocatively say, if we are not going to make them work, why do we not just get rid of them? That would be a great shame, because they are a tremendous forum for bringing various parties together to make these agendas work. My last point would be that they should also be an integral part of how nature recovery networks are designed and delivered.
To sum up, we really come to a choice here. Are nature recovery networks and biodiversity targets purely there as comfort or are they there to change our natural environment? That is the question I pose to the Minister.