My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, I have just tossed out more or less everything that I was going to say. I feel the need to respond to what he has just said, which I think is founded on the idea that each patch of land, each farm, is a discrete entity that has no real relationship to the entities around it. As is most obvious when we think about the climate emergency, the fact is that the carbon emitted from or stored on that land has global implications. That is very obvious in relation to flooding. I will not open up that debate, but certain land uses in this country are associated with large amounts of water runoff, and that has literally life-or-death implications for the communities downstream.
The noble Lord also referred to food production. We have to think about the food security of the UK in a world in which food security will become an increasing issue in the coming decades.
We have to think about systems holistically, and indeed we have signed up to do just that. Like all the nations in the world, we are a signatory to the sustainable development goals—a mix of economic, social and environmental goals—although we are not currently on track to deliver any single one of them. The question is: the Government have signed up to these goals, but how will they deliver them? Making sure that land is used well—not in a way that harms other people—surely has to be a foundational measure.
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I pick up on the point about multiple uses that the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, made in so ably introducing this amendment. Here we are talking about agroecology and permaculture approaches. I am no believer in central planning, and we are not talking about directing things: “Do this with this acre or hectare of land.” We are looking at types of land, patterns of land and areas of land that we need to get certain outcomes from. We need to see multiple uses: a permaculture approach, where you can have several layers on the same piece of land. These are the kind of things we are talking about.
Finally, it is worth noting that it is interesting that this amendment arises before Amendment 118 about food strategy. These two are very much related, of course, and on land use we need to think about whether we are producing the kind of food we need and, particularly, whether we have in place government incentives and policies that lead to us producing the
kind of food that is bad for people and the planet, or whether we are putting in place the right policies and incentives to produce a good outcome for both.