My Lords, in moving this amendment I will also speak to my Amendment 504G, both of which are on land use. A number of noble Lords will have heard me bang on about this interminably, so I shall try not to take too long. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, for putting their names to these amendments. Alas, the vagaries of timing have meant that the noble Baroness cannot be with us.
Land is a finite resource and pressure on it is growing. There are needs for land in a whole variety of areas, not just for traditional uses such as agriculture
and timber production but for carbon sequestration, green energy generation—solar and wind—housing and development, biodiversity recovery, water protection and flood risk management, infrastructure, transport, energy transmission, recreation, mental health and access to the countryside. Recent research has shown that, if you put all these competing needs together, we will require a third more land than we possess. I do not know whether noble Lords have recognised this, but we are not making any more land at the moment.
These competing demands are already being felt by landowners, farmers, communities and leaders in local authorities and other areas, but we do not have any framework in this country within which those who make that multitude of decisions on land use priorities at a national and local scale can work. This means that decisions on how to make the best use of this scarce, pressurised resource are being made on a piecemeal basis and often in silos.
For example, good agricultural land can be used inappropriately for solar arrays and land important for biodiversity recovery can be threatened by inappropriately routed infrastructure development. Everybody says that we need to plant more trees, but they need to be planted in the right place, which is not always the case as a result of the current dash for carbon; we see investors with very deep pockets buying up good agricultural land to plant it with trees that will attract for them carbon payments. Land that could deliver for biodiversity and carbon is being planted just for carbon, which is not the most efficient way of using land in a multifunctional way. All these pressures are adding to the price of land. If you are looking at buying land in any way, for whatever use, it is a bit like the wild west out there.
There is a real and growing pressure on land, and therefore a real and growing need for a land use framework which would consider how increasingly scarce land resources can deliver for multiple objectives at the same time and deliver a range of outcomes across several policy areas in a co-ordinated and optimised way which makes the best use of that scarce resource. A framework would harness the rapidly accruing wealth of data on land use and use modern mapping techniques to provide principles and tools about land use for decision-makers, ranging from national government to individual, small-scale landowners and farmers to enable them to make the best decisions on the competing priorities that they face day in, day out. It was good to see the national Geospatial Commission release a report on this issue yesterday, demonstrating the power of modern, accessible open-access data.
There is also growing support for a land use framework. Two House of Lords Select Committees have commented on it; the Rural Economy Committee, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and the Land Use in England Committee, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, both called for a land use framework—as have the Climate Change Committee in its report Land Use: Policies for a Net Zero UK and Henry Dimbleby in the national food strategy.
Other organisations are recommending such an approach. They include such august bodies as the Royal Society. I should declare several interests, having
sat on both the Select Committees I mentioned and having helped to produce the Royal Society’s recent report on multifunctional land use. Others that I have not laid a hand on are the Royal Town Planning Institute, Green Alliance, the RSPB, CPRE, the County Councils Network, Chatham House and the Government’s Geospatial Commission. The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, which I also sit on, is piloting a couple of multifunctional land use frameworks in two counties, Cambridgeshire and Devon. So a lot of folk out there are saying that a land use framework is the right way forward.
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Delight upon delight, in 2022, the Government, seeing the rightness of the case—but perhaps just because they were being pestered by everybody in sight—announced that they would develop a land use framework for England by the end of 2023. However, it is unclear how much progress has been made because there has been no real external consultation on either the process for setting the land use framework or the content.
In evidence to the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee—I should also declare an interest that I sit on that committee; noble Lords might detect a pattern of gradual infiltration of every body under the sun that I can get to talk about land use—the Defra Minister, Trudy Harrison, indicated that although there would be consultation with other government departments, including DLUHC, the framework would be restricted to Defra issues of carbon, climate change, agriculture and biodiversity. That is not in line with the multifunctional approach across the full range of key land use pressures recommended by the Select Committees and others. Simply restraining the focus to Defra issues would mean that key issues of planning and development, housing, infrastructure, energy and transport would be omitted. It really would not join up the silos in the way that is required.
However, two weeks later, on Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, in answering an excellent Question from the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, said that the framework would operate across a number of departments. It seems that even Defra Ministers do not have a shared understanding of what the framework will cover. It would be good if the Minister could clarify this evening exactly what policy areas the framework will cover.
The Government’s response to the Select Committee on land use was a bit short, dismissive and did not really systematically address the committee’s proposals. It was not very encouraging about the issue being taken forward in an integrated way and with vigour. In the absence of more positive progress from the Government, I tabled Amendment 504F, on a duty to produce a land use framework, and Amendment 504G, on the establishment of a land use commission for England, which would put into statute two of the key recommendations of the Select Committee on land use.
Briefly, I will finish with the content of these two amendments. Amendment 504F would require the Secretary of State to produce a land use framework for England within a year of the passing of the Bill. It outlines the key principles that a framework should
cover, based on this principle of multifunctional land use, covering a wide range of the key land use needs. It also states that it should involve a range of government departments and statutory bodies, and be consulted on fairly widely and publicly, as land is a key resource and there are many people whose interests will be impacted.
The amendment also says that the land use framework should provide accessible data and tools for decision-makers at all levels, as I have already talked about. I assure noble Lords that it would not take decisions that are quite rightly for individual landowners and land managers to make, but it would provide a framework, and the data and tools, for those who influence land use decisions and those who make them on a day-to-day basis, whether local authorities, national government or an individual farmer deciding what he is going to do with his land for the next few years.
It is clear that the Government are now committed to a joined-up framework for land use, one that I hope will bridge the current departmental silos, as the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, stated on Monday. If that is indeed the case, I hope that the amendment can simply be accepted. If that is what the Government are intending to do, why not just accept the amendment? It would not be pressing them further than they already intend to go.
The Minister may well say, as Ministers before her have said, that the local nature recovery strategies that local authorities have now been tasked with undertaking would be a basis for land use frameworks locally. But the clue is in the title. They are what they say on the tin: local nature recovery strategies are strategies all about nature recovery, not necessarily about all the other pressures that I have outlined that need to be rationalised in a joined-up way.
Amendment 504G requires the Secretary of State to establish an independent land use commission for England. That draws very much from the Scottish Land Commission, which has operated in Scotland since 2017. The amendment outlines a range of functions for a land use commission for England, including oversight of the preparation, and reporting on progress in implementation, of the land use framework. It would also ensure co-ordination of accessible and comprehensive land use data for decision makers at all levels, which is vital to reaching proper, rational decisions; build on initiatives such as yesterday’s report by the Geospatial Commission, and the recent data-mapping exercise; encourage integration and collaboration on land use issues across government departments and policy areas that currently have a distressing habit of retreating into silos; and conduct deep dives into particularly tricky land use issues. It would be subject to an annual report to Parliament and would report good practice to help to support good decision making on conflicting land use pressures at national, regional and local levels.
To encourage the Minster to not believe that this is just another quango that will consume resources, the sort of scale envisaged is simply in line with that of the Scottish Land Commission or the Climate Change Committee: their scale and resources are pretty modest, but they have a hugely important function.
On Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, in his response to a Question by the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, said that he was not yet persuaded by the case for a land use commission. I was rather encouraged by that: “not yet” made it sound as if he might be persuaded shortly. The reason he gave for not yet being persuaded was that he was concerned that it would need legislation—well, here it is. He said that Ministers wanted to continue to lead the drive in land use policy. Well, Ministers come and go, and it may be that Governments come and go, too. I believe that a land use commission would provide persistence and a longevity, and a focus on behalf of Ministers, who may be distracted by turbulent times.
I believe that the time has come for some sort of national organisation for the taskforce expert group, preferably a commission, to look at these issues and to help government to take them forward. I beg to move.