Clause 2 - General Purpose
Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill
4:00 pm
Jim Knight (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Rural Affairs, Landscape and Biodiversity), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; South Dorset, Labour)
Before I resume, Ms Anderson, I should like to welcome you to the Chair. It is a pleasure to see you there and I look forward to working under your direction and guidance. It has always been a pleasure to work with you during the last four years, and I know what interest you take in the matters that we are discussing today. I gather that the last Committee that you chaired considered the Identity Cards Bill; I trust that this Bill will not be quite as controversial as that one may have been, and that you will not be wishing that you had those identity cards as you gaze around a number of new Members on this Committee.
Before lunch, we were discussing amendments Nos. 42 and 43, which are concerned with working with rural communities and businesses. Hon. Members are absolutely right to place such importance on how Natural England engages with its customers. The main way in which it will carry out its business will be to deliver through others, particularly land managers and farmers, and especially via the £250 agri-environment programme.
I should stress that Natural England will not be a large landowner itself. Clauses 3 to 13 give Natural England powers and duties to work with, offer advice to and give grants to any person. It will therefore be well placed to work with farmers, rural communities and businesses, in any way that it chooses. The motivation behind the amendments, working with those elements, concerns things that Natural England will be able to do and that one would expect it to do. The bodies that will make up Natural England have a strong track record of engagement with stakeholders.
Hon. Members may take reassurance from the 2004 Rural Development Service customer survey, which found an 87 per cent. overall satisfaction rate, backed up by ratings of 90 per cent. and above for individual attributes of customer service such as courtesy, helpfulness and professionalism. Like their colleagues in English Nature and the Countryside Agency, RDS staff, many of whom have practical farming experience or backgrounds, have an excellent record in face-to-face work with farmers, providing environmental and scheme-related advice on farms and through workshops. I hope that that is the experience of members of the Committee who have a farming background, and that it demonstrates to the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), who has temporarily vacated his seat, that we want to carry through the notion of partnership into the new agency.
I have been very impressed with the culture that I have seen being established within the three bodies that will make up Natural England. As the Committee will know, since April they have been operating as a confederation of partners, meaning that they are increasingly working as a single body. From the start, the three bodies looked for early gains that could be made in making things simpler and more effective for customers. They are managing the aggregates levy sustainability fund from a customer perspective, as a single scheme. They are progressively transferring sites of special scientific interest wildlife enhancement scheme agreements—I hope that I do not have to say that again—into the higher-level environmental stewardship scheme. They are establishing only one contact point for all agreement holders. They are piloting a single regional voice in the area of the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) in the eastern region, and hope to follow suite with all other regions by the end of the year. Those are just a few examples where the three bodies have already been coming together to try to create a more coherent, simplified interface for the people for whom they work.
I hope that hon. Members will be as impressed as I am with the speed and energy with which the confederation has already gone about making those changes so that they can properly engage with and work in rural communities and businesses. I have mentioned—I may begin to sound like a stuck record in this Committee—that because Natural England will be an independent non-departmental public body, I am strongly of the view that it will be for its board to decide how best to further its purpose. At this stage, requiring Natural England to adopt a certain method of achieving its purpose on the face of the Bill, such as to work with communities and businesses, whether they are rural, urban or coastal areas—we must not forget that the body will not work exclusively in rural areas—would therefore not be appropriate. On that basis, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw those amendments.
That takes me on to the critical issue of conflict resolution. Amendment No. 44, the last one that I need to discuss in this grouping, proposes the introduction of a conflict resolution clause. The issue was discussed in the Government’s response to the Select Committee—I am happy to see my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping) back in his place. That I address the issue here is obviously very important.
Much mention has been made of the Sandford principle. For clarity, I can tell the Committee that the Sandford principle states that every effort should be made to reconcile any conflict between conservation and promotion of access or recreation, but where there is irreconcilable conflict, greater weight should be attached to conservation.
I can reassure the Committee that the Sandford principle will continue to apply to national parks, to areas of outstanding natural beauty and to conservation boards. In those areas the level of importance of biodiversity and landscape has been predetermined. That the Sandford principle should remain, to allow those bodies to protect that predetermined biodiversity and landscape importance, is important. Similarly, in nature reserves and sites of special scientific interest, there is a strong presumption that biodiversity considerations will take precedence. However, I would argue with the Committee that it would be inappropriate to apply Sandford automatically to all land.
The view of the Government and of the affected bodies is that including a conflict resolution clause in Natural England’s purpose, applying to its work outside the designated areas that I have just been talking about, would seriously constrain its independent decision-making ability. For example, that Natural England’s role in managing the environment would automatically take precedence over promoting access and recreation is not intended. The rural strategy made it clear that the objectives are mutually reinforcing.
Natural England will, of course, be operating in our urban green spaces, as well as in our rural areas. It would be difficult to justify tying its hands so that it always had to give nature conservation priority in urban areas. We must bear it in mind that the primary motivation behind the creation of some of those green spaces is to give access to people who live in those areas—to give them some room to pause and reflect and to enjoy a natural environment.
I reiterated that sustainable development will provide Natural England’s decision-making context. Natural England will actively seek long-term economic and social benefits and avoid unnecessary negative economic and social impacts. A conflict resolution clause would effectively be a legislative straitjacket eroding Natural England’s ability to make independent decisions on a case-by-case basis. I put it strongly to the Committee that we should allow Natural England to sit as an independent body with the ability to make those independent decisions.
I shall respond in a little more detail to some of the points that were made in the debate. The hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire talked about the conflict between nature conservation and access rarely being irreconcilable. Conflict can normally be handled through management techniques, but what is far more common is to find conflict between different types of access and recreation, where the Sandford principle does not achieve anything.
This morning we heard about instances of conflict between nature conservation and access, but it may be helpful to point out to the Committee that the Sandford principle applies only to instances of irreconcilable conflict between nature conservation and access; those instances are rare. The hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr. Goodwill) suggested that they might be becoming more and more common, but I can tell him that the latest English Nature figures about access on SSSIs show that more than 55 per cent. of them are on open-access land. They show that there are no SSSIs in access lands in England where preventing access to protect flora and fauna all-year round is necessary. Only 0.3 per cent. of SSSI access land has a partial all-year-round access exclusion, and only 1.06 per cent. of SSSI access land has seasonal exclusion. English Nature’s evidence shows that occasions on which there is any kind of irreconcilable conflict are few.