My Lords, I have to admit that I was quite favourable to the White Paper that came out about a year ago. I thought it was absolutely honest: when you read it through, you looked at all the objectives, missions and everything else, and thought, “Yeah, absolutely—these are the sorts of things that need to be done and, frankly, it will take at least two decades to get back to where we needed to be.” The 2030 date suggested by that White Paper was maybe rather optimistic.
However, there was an area I was particularly disappointed by, and on which the White Paper was quite up-front. It rightly went through the different types of capital this nation has, and which needs to be spread evenly and developed across the country: physical, intangible, financial, institutional, social and human. But the one it left out, as many Members will have noticed, was natural capital. The irony of this Bill is that that is still effectively forgotten in the practical application. It is even more ironic because the Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, was Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Treasury published the Dasgupta review. That review was one of the most fantastic in describing the importance of natural capital, particularly for this nation, which, as we have already heard, is more nature-depleted than almost any other in the developed world. I want to concentrate on that issue.
Outside this House, one of my roles is chair of the Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership. I am very proud to do this as part of the regional nature recovery process, and we were very pleased to be chosen by Defra as one of five pilot studies for local nature recovery strategies. When we went through the Environment Bill at some length in this House, real congratulations were due to the Government for including local nature recovery strategies in that legislation. We put down an amendment saying that, for this to really work, it has to tie up with a planning system; otherwise, it will be meaningless.
I say to the Minister—I know she is not a Defra Minister—that, when putting that plan together for the Cornwall pilot, there was a strong response from the community. In fact, Defra congratulated us on our community engagement. As my noble friend Lady Parminter said, the local nature partnership and Cornwall Council put the map together, and we felt we had a document that was really important for the future of biodiversity and nature recovery.
The pilot was completed almost a year ago now, yet Defra has not put out the guidelines so that the rest of England’s communities can roll out their own strategies. It is really important to make those strategies meaningful to those communities, so that they know that something will follow from them. The way to do that, exactly as my noble friend Lady Parminter said, is to make it a statutory document that has to be taken into consideration in planning decisions and local plans. That is my one
big ask of the Minister: take advantage of something that has been a government success, and that can really make a big difference, and tie the two together. If we can do that, perhaps the Dasgupta review—which the then Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, has perhaps conveniently forgotten—can deliver and be a success for all our regions in England.
7.59pm