I admit that, before I sat on this committee, I had considerable cynicism about the need for a land use framework. I was aware that Scotland and Wales already had them, but I felt that we did not need yet another body to tell farmers and landowners how to conduct their operations. I thought we did not need another quango, or a body that might well impose national targets without taking into account local conditions or views, and that might well be at the mercy of powerful lobby groups in the way that the strong environmental lobby, in my view, has had its hands around the throats of government during some recent legislation. Having heard a great deal of evidence on some of those things, I have changed my mind.
Thirty-two million acres sounds like a lot of land, but England is a small country and the brutal reality is that it simply does not have enough land to meet the demands of all those who wish to use it in the ways they wish to use it. This Government have already made commitments, as future ones no doubt will—some of them even statutory, such as those on nature recovery and net zero—and they have set targets to apportion a frankly inadequate cake. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has already reminded us of some of these, but among them are the promises to maintain our current self-sufficiency in food at over 60%, to increase woodland by 1 million acres, to build 300,000 new houses every year and to enlarge our national parks by 1.8 million acres—not to mention the solar farms and wind turbines necessary to obtain net zero, plus major transport infrastructure and the need to increase nature provision and access to the countryside. It is all very well, but each of those things needs land, and land is finite.
If ever there was an orchestra of different and completely incompatible demands in need of a conductor, it is England’s land use at present. Some body needs to monitor and keep tabs on what is going on, and alert government and local authorities if the balance is moving dangerously out of kilter in one direction, or to give information, encouragement and advice, especially on innovation and to landowners and farmers, and to collate and broadcast that data.
It cannot just be Defra that devises and maintains such a framework; it must involve the other major government departments that need access to land to fulfil their remits. Some have already been mentioned: the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which has housing, local government and some industrial and commercial infrastructure within its remit; DCMS, which deals with access to nature and tourism; the Department for Transport, which deals with infrastructure; and the departments dealing with business, energy self-sufficiency and so on. Defra is only one part of government which needs to be involved in the creation and work of an effective land use framework.
While I give the Government full marks for recognising and accepting the need for such a framework, I am afraid I have to give them nul points for their response to this report so far. In paragraph 1 of their response, they said that
“it may be necessary to assemble a group of experts to oversee the application of the Land Use Framework once published”.
Surely you need the expertise first, before the framework is published, and not after Defra officials have drawn it up alone. If this framework is to be effective, it must be cross-departmental. It needs to be independent and set up in a way that reflects the concerns of each government department that needs to use land to fulfil its role. The Government have so far turned their face against creating a commission, as the report recommended. If it is seen merely as a small part of the portfolio of one Defra Minister, it will not be able properly to fulfil a much-needed role.
As I have said, I readily understand the reluctance to create another quango, but the evidence we heard about how well the Scottish Land Commission works and how well received it is by landowners, who readily seek its advice, shows that a cumbersome and costly body is not necessary to fulfil this important function.
Another of my fears was that a land use framework might dictate. I am pleased that the Government accept—I think they do; I hope for reassurance from the Minister on this—that it will not prescribe or tell people what must be done or not done and where, unlike Natural England does too often. I want it to be about gathering and publishing existing data, promulgating best practice, giving advice in an open and user-friendly way, and working closely with stakeholders—if it is to be effective, not just with landowners and managers and not just in a Defra silo but across departments—local authorities and the relevant public bodies, taking account of and responding to local conditions.
When changes are needed—they could well be needed urgently, for example in relation to food security; we have seen some of that already—that body must be ready to advise Governments and land managers on what needs to be done to encourage greater production. Where trees are being planted on highly productive farmland—for example, as unhappily I know, down in the West Country by the National Trust, and in Wales, as those who listened to “Farming Today” would have heard—if future adjustments need to be made to the ELM scheme to ensure the survival of small family farms, which I suspect will have to be done, an effective land use framework has a vital job to do in monitoring the trends, and on occasion, advising government on the incentives needed to meet changing needs, not to mention the encouragement of innovation. Could the Minister please give us reassurance that this framework will be truly cross-departmental? If not, I fear it will be a missed opportunity.
]]>I have just one ask of the Minister when she comes to reply. Can she give an assurance that this legislation will apply equally to urban areas of deprivation and to what is arguably the area where levelling up is most needed and has historically been neglected: England’s deprived rural communities?
The noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, has said some of it; I will add a little. Average earnings from rural jobs are 7% lower than those in urban areas, excluding London. Rural residents pay on average nearly a fifth more in council tax than urban residents. Urban areas receive over 60% more per head in settlement funding assessment grants. Those in rural areas pay more, receive fewer services and on average earn less. Rural poverty, as many of us know, is easily overlooked because the village looks idyllic, but rural homelessness, which is less visible, means a rusty caravan hidden behind the farm buildings while the second homes and holiday lets stand empty. There are fewer services, limited jobs that are often seasonal, limited transport and training opportunities and limited social and affordable housing to rent or buy, if there is any at all, and there are food banks, just as in urban areas. Because of this, it is not just those who live in rural areas who currently miss out. We all do, because rural areas are 18% less productive than the national average. However, if that gap was closed by levelling up and regeneration, £43 billion would be added to England’s earnings alone and we would all benefit.
The overwhelming case for rural regeneration has so far been missed, historically and politically. I suspect that the party opposite has often taken rural votes for granted, while on our side of the House we have focused on our urban heartlands. However, in the past, when money has been given to a region, too often it has been sucked into the urban part of it and away from the rural, which is my fear for the Bill. Yet much of what needs to be done does not require huge tranches of government money. It requires the will to encourage innovation and enterprise, and to encourage more private money to go into such developments.
The Government have been given a whole range of templates about how to do this. The Rural Economy Select Committee, which the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, chaired although he modestly did not mention that, the report published last year from the all-party group chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, and Mr Julian Sturdy, Levelling Up the Rural Economy, and the work of the Rural Coalition, headed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, also last year, all did the preparation and the research and gave the blueprint for what needs doing.
Ironically, the timing is right because the opportunity for people to live good and productive lives in the countryside is possible and could be made a reality because of the digital revolution. Again, I say that it needs innovation and enterprise to be encouraged and for rural areas not to be allowed to fall behind. That means that 5G, when it comes, must go into the rural areas and not be left behind. If it is, businesses will decide to go elsewhere because they will not be adequately connected. It needs changes to the planning rules to increase homes both to rent and to buy. It needs workplaces close to where people live, and above all it needs a Government to focus on the needs of those left-behind areas. The danger in the Bill as currently drafted is that these areas are very likely to be yet again overlooked. I ask for an assurance from the Minister that this will not happen if she can help it.
]]>Dying is surely an issue of general public importance as it concerns every single one of us. Yet this subject is consistently and currently being starved of the oxygen of time in Parliament in order for the Government to avoid a controversial topic. This amendment does not require the Government to take sides or promote a Bill themselves; it merely requires them to prepare and lay a draft to enable Parliament to consider any possible change properly. I shall support this amendment, and I would hope that noble Lords, whatever their views on assisted dying, do the same, because this amendment is essentially about democracy.
]]>It gives me no pleasure to support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, but I must. I cannot understand how a Government who were elected in no small part promising to reduce bureaucracy, especially that which came from Europe, can have taken the wholly uncontroversial subject of putting animal sentience on the statute book, something which nobody would disagree with, and now seem bent on turning it into a textbook bureaucratic nightmare.
When the former Master of the Rolls, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, told us during the passage of the Bill that it creates a magnet for judicial review; when the foremost vet in this House, the noble Lord, Lord Trees, who supports the Bill, tells us that its scope needs definition and its focus sharpened on to future policy decisions; when the former Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, the former leader of the party opposite, the noble Lord, Lord Howard, and many others, tell the Government that they need to think again, yet they resist and reject all amendments, save for a small number of government ones, it makes me wonder whether this House has actual value as a scrutinising House when they have the comfort of a large majority in another place and know that they are able to push defective Bills through almost unamended there.
The Bill stirs up trouble for the future, not just for this Government but for future Governments. I hope that those who come to consider it in another place will have more flexibility to knock it into shape, because it surely needs it.
]]>There is a very significant body of scientific evidence that fish feel pain and are sentient animals. Individuals are capable of experiencing pain and feeling emotions such as fear. Under the Animal Welfare Act 2006, a fish may be a protected animal if it is under the control of man, but the Explanatory Notes on Section 59 read as follows:
“This section provides that anything which occurs in the normal course of fishing is not covered by this Act … The term ‘fishing’ should be understood as applying to ordinary activities of fishermen and anglers, and also the ordinary activities of those who own and run stocked ponds in allowing fishing activities to take place on their ponds.”
My amendment proposes that precisely the same provision be placed in this Act as was put in the Animal Welfare Act 2006. It would give reassurance to a great many people who enjoy fishing.
]]>Amendment 7 withdrawn.
Amendment 8 not moved.
]]>However, I would like to say, literally in a sentence, that one of the reasons for widespread disquiet about the Bill is concern about who may or may not find places on the committee. I come from an area where the animal rights movement has been particularly virulent, especially during the badger cull, with people with balaclavas damaging farm property, threatening people, letting livestock out and so on, and, more recently, damaging all the tents at the local country fair by painting Animal Liberation Front logos on everything. As a result of that, a lot of us are concerned that some well-known public figures who purport to be friends of animals and campaign on their behalf do not condemn this terrorism. We are concerned that, whoever comes on to this committee, they should be, as the Government have indicated is their intention, people with proper scientific experience and knowledge who can contribute—not from a neutral point of view, because that is impossible, but whose judgement can be relied on—rather than people who are merely from pressure groups. I beg to move.
]]>I have one query about the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Trees, which I will come to in relation to my Amendment 16. The first two, Amendments 12 and 14, underline the requirement in those amendments for the committee to deal with only future policy and when it is being formulated. Surely the value of this committee if it is to have any real effect is to perform a role not already covered by other committees, to draw attention to failures of consideration if it finds them when policy is being formulated or has just been formulated and before implementation, so that the defects can if necessary and possible be remedied before the policy is enacted.
In the Bill at present there is no limit as to how far back the committee can go. The draft terms of reference, which the Minister kindly sent us, express a hope—no more—that it will concentrate on more recent policies, but there is nothing to stop the committee going back as far as it chooses. Ministers come and go—so do civil servants. An examination of whether a past Secretary of State gave all due regard to the effect of a policy on animal welfare, possibly long enacted, will be difficult if not impossible in many cases. The additional cost of this committee, according to the terms of reference, is to be no more than half a million pounds from Defra’s budget. However, there is no calculation of how much time will be needed to be spent by other departments trying to answer the inevitable investigation into how decisions were made. It must take time from the work of those departments in each case, and of course be at public expense too. This committee surely cannot be intended to be a quasi post-legislative scrutiny committee, yet the Bill is without any limit as to its remit.
My Amendment 16 removes implementation from the committee’s remit. After Committee I looked forward to seeing the draft terms of reference because, as it stands, the purpose, remit, scope and any limits on the powers of the committee are not clear in the Bill. I hoped they would be remedied, at the very least, in guidance. Sadly, they are not. Instead, in a number of respects, the Bill and the terms of the reference are in direct conflict.
Amendment 16 removes policy that has been implemented from the committee’s remit. In this, it differs from the way in which Amendment 1 from the noble Lord, Lord Trees, is drafted. In giving all due regard to the ways in which a policy might adversely affect animal welfare, a Minister will have to balance those considerations against the effect of the policy on many other considerations. These may be transport needs, housing needs or public health needs, perhaps. In other words, is the rail link necessary despite the bats that are on the route?
Those other considerations cannot sensibly be part of this committee’s remit. It would be unlikely to have the material unless it is to rerun the Minister’s policy-making role in all its aspects, and it would almost inevitably lack the expertise to do so. The terms of reference support my view that implementation should not concern this committee, unlike Clause 2(1). The terms of reference say that the committee is not expected to consider individual operational decisions nor to consider matters of fiscal policy. Individual operational decisions are then defined as decisions for which no bespoke ministerial direction is sought or required. For example, a policy that sets up a licensing scheme would constitute policy which the committee could consider, but the granting of an individual licence under the scheme and the effects of doing so would not fall within that remit.
In Clause 2(2), the question that the committee has to answer in its report speaks of having regard to the ways in which the policy
“might have an adverse effect”
on animal welfare—not, I note, “has had” an adverse effect. Policy which has been put into effect—in other words, implemented—needs to be outside the remit. As it stands, there is confusion both within Clause 2 and between the Bill and the terms of reference.
I am sorry to say it, but the Bill is a dog’s breakfast and that has not been improved by these terms of reference. I am sorry that the Opposition, on whose Benches I sit, have not seen fit to raise the objections to what are, one would have thought, fundamental defects in legislation. If the Bill is not clarified and amended to indicate its limits and its purpose, then a great deal of public money and public time is going to be wasted on it. I still marvel at how a Government who were elected in part on a promise to reduce bureaucracy, especially that emanating from Europe, have taken the wholly uncontroversial issue of animal sentience, which no one would have argued with, and are trying to turn it into a textbook bureaucratic nightmare.
]]>“My uncle, a foreman toolmaker and a strapping six-footer who played football for the works team, developed cancer of the spine. He screamed until all his strength was gone, then he whimpered like a puppy. Twenty-four hours before he died his wife implored their GP to stop his pain. The GP replied: ‘I dare not give him any more morphine. It would kill him’. Twenty-four hours later the cancer had killed him”.—[Official Report, 18/7/14; col. 884.]
Intolerable and inexcusable suffering have continued ever since, because Parliament has so far failed to grasp this nettle. If the figures on the number of people affected given in the report from the Office of Health Economics are right, something like 6,000 people die unsatisfactorily or having had inadequate pain relief every year in the United Kingdom. By my calculation, that means that some 36,000 people have suffered since we failed to pass a Bill of this nature around six years ago.
To those who oppose the Bill for fear that the vulnerable, disabled, elderly or infirm will feel under pressure, either internal or external, to take this step, I say that the fears they express are precisely those which two separate doctors and experienced High Court judges will have in mind when examining each case individually. However strong your personal view, whether based on religious belief, personal experience or strong convictions about the sanctity of human life, is it right for you as an individual to insist that your view prevails when it will prolong intolerable suffering for someone else who happens to hold a different view?
The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has done this House and the country a great service by introducing this Bill, but it should not be a Private Member’s Bill. It should be a free-vote issue debated in Government time and I hope that on all sides of this House and in the other place pressure will be brought to bear to see that this happens.
]]>If this Bill proceeds in its present form, I have a strong premonition that future Governments will look back on it and ask, “Why on earth did we do this?” As the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, has just indicated, for 200 years animal sentience has been accepted by all—or all other than complete nutters—and the result has been animal welfare legislation enacted on that basis. I have no objection at all to it being explicitly stated in legislation or to future legislation being animal-proofed, although I hope that it would work better than rural-proofing—but it is strictly unnecessary. What I am not clear about is why it is being done in the way in which it has.
Like the first Bill, which Michael Gove, the then Environment Minister, wisely withdrew, it is likely to benefit lawyers, at the taxpayers’ expense, and to be a bureaucratic nightmare with no limit to its remit, unlike the EU animal sentience provision, no provision for adequate funding for such wide scope, and a real danger of a committee composition dictated by animal rights pressure groups. Why do the Government not simply insert their animal sentience clause by a simple amendment of the Animal Welfare Act? If they want a committee to look at legislation, they already have one in the Animal Welfare Committee, whose remit could easily be expanded, as it has been in the past.
Gesture politics, which I fear is some little part of the motivation of this Bill, to enable the Government to say to the electorate, “This is what we did for animals”, is sadly not just a waste of parliamentary time when real animal welfare proposals just cannot get time but, as history has shown, often does little or nothing for the animals directly affected. I will give two short examples. The first is fairly recent: the Wild Animals in Circuses Act, which is proudly trumpeted by the present Secretary of State as being one of the party’s animal welfare achievements, actually worsened the position of the only animals involved. As I recall, there were under 20 of them, and no new licences were going to be granted in any event; they were not lions or tigers, as you might imagine, but a few zebra, an African cow and several others that I think I remember were some kind of llama. All had been born in captivity, licensed and regularly inspected, and it was agreed that all were superbly looked after and much loved by their owners, with whom they travelled in state of the art horseboxes to prearranged extensive grazing at sites. They did not perform degrading tricks; they were, effectively, pets. That Act forced their owners to leave them behind when they travelled to perform. There was no animal welfare gain to them or any other animal, and a good routine of care and affection was destroyed.
My party spent more than 200 hours of parliamentary time on the Hunting Act, which brought no benefit at all to the fox population—quite the contrary. A method of control that was selective, with a closed breeding season, and left no wounded, was replaced with snaring and night shooting with none of those features, which killed and wounded far more. So was it good electorally for Labour? I suspect that that is part of the Government’s motivation behind this Bill. If so, Labour should have won general election after general election after all that effort—and the result we know. Of 100 rural seats that Labour held under Tony Blair, only 17 remain now.
Yet under successive Governments, nothing has been done about the elephant in the room—and I am sorry to say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, that I do not agree. In this country, every year, 40 million farm animals are slaughtered without pre-stunning. The expert view is that many of them suffer unnecessarily. We are not world leaders here: other countries in Europe and around the world have stopped this practice and more are doing so. I pay special tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Trees, who will speak later, and to those working with him, who are looking at ways of pre-stunning that are acceptable to the religious communities for whom it is important. I also pay tribute to the Muslim community, which is working with them, and I hope the Jewish community will follow. There are ways in which religious sensitivities and stopping unnecessary suffering at slaughter can be combined. So I ask the Minister for a commitment that there will be real and urgent progress on this, because that would be a real advance in animal welfare, and not just a gesture.
We rightly call ourselves a nation of animal lovers and we feel strongly about animal suffering, but the Government need to recognise that the majority of people own no animal, and those who do in the main have a cat or dog which they regard as a member of the family. For most, the experience of farm animals or wild animals is drawn largely from television, and it is too often sentimental, anthropomorphic and presented by animal rights activists. That is their template for expressing their views about what they feel is right or wrong in the treatment of animals. Yet too often, some who would say that they were the greatest of animal lovers do not recognise that, by keeping a lone rabbit in a small cage or a dog with deformed facial features because it looks more appealing, or leaving one alone in a small flat with inadequate exercise, they are themselves denying a much-loved pet its natural needs.
The Government have to be alerted to the dangers of campaigns with apparent public support that is often uninformed or misinformed, and to distinguish real animal welfare measures from the priorities of some of the vocal and well-funded animal rights groups. If there is to be a committee, as others have said, it must be independent and also be composed of qualified experts from the field of animal welfare and animal behaviour—not pressure groups or popular TV presenters—and it must make its findings on the basis of evidence and science, not emotion.
The Minister has come to this Bill at a late stage. I ask him to look very carefully at what has been said today. It is not an uncontroversial Bill, and there must be better ways of putting animal sentience on the statute book without the dangers that are clear for all to see here.
]]>As we know, farming, which of course manages and maintains our landscapes which we all revere, faces a seismic change with a reduction in farm support, the need to find new markets, new overseas competition, potential additional cost burdens imposed by climate change and animal welfare legislation. All of that is against a background of reduced profitability and an ageing population. The threat to the future of the traditional family farm, especially in the uplands, has never been greater and without a government focus to help keep them in business, and help with increasing productivity and diversification, we are going to end up with industrial-scale farming in their place.
We are getting a planning Bill. More houses are clearly needed and some of them have to be built in rural areas. But if we are not to destroy rural communities and their different, special way of life, then that Bill has to show sensitivity to local decisions. New housing in small communities can work well when local people have the final say on where it is to go, how it looks, and if it has a meaningful, affordable element—but not when 200 executive homes are tacked on to a village with no additional infrastructure, adequate transport or suitable roads.
Almost exactly two years ago, a Select Committee of this House, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, and containing a number of others, including myself, who have spoken today or are about to speak, published a report on the rural economy. That report recognised the changes and challenges, which are now a reality, but also the opportunities by which the digital revolution, properly encouraged, could transform the rural economy, reverse years of underperformance under successive Governments and improve the quality of life for the nation as a whole. We saw how that could happen ourselves in places where local authorities, planners and a number of rural-minded LEPs—of which there were, sadly, few—could help bring about dynamic new enterprises with locals and newcomers working together yet retain that special and different sense of community.
Our central recommendation was for an urgent, effective rural strategy underpinned by better rural proofing of legislation and delivered through a locally based approach. Two years have gone by and the response so far has been disappointing, to put it very gently. I will give four examples.
In late 2019, the government promised £5 billion for full-fibre broadband everywhere by 2025. In spring 2020, those figures were cut to £1.2 billion and 85%, with no commitment to bring rural areas up to urban standards.
Fourteen recommendations related to the much-hyped UK shared prosperity fund, which was promised way back in 2017. A full consultation was promised in 2018, but no full open consultation has yet taken place.
The first report by Defra on rural proofing has been published, but it deserves no more than three out of 10. In a number of Bills, no such exercise appears to have been performed at all. In others, simply adding the words “and rural” seems to have been considered enough. This was clearly set out in a letter dated
Above all, our most central and urgent recommendation for a comprehensive rural strategy was rejected by the Government. Instead, they said that they would be producing their own vision. Two years later, we are still waiting, and I cannot see any sign of it in the gracious Speech. Can the Minister tell us when rural Britain can expect to see that vision become a reality?
]]>The underlying purposes of sentencing are said to be punishment, deterrence and reform. Deliberate, calculated, sadistic behaviour involving the inflicting of unnecessary suffering on an animal is deeply repellent, and I see some of those results through the Horse Trust. It appears in only a very small number of cases in the panoply of animal cruelty cases that I am afraid are likely to come within the ambit of the maximum penalties, but it has a place on the statute book.
The majority of animal welfare cases are the result not of sadists but of ignorance, greed or the limited or diminished mental or physical capacity of the owner, of changed personal circumstances, and even of misplaced sentimentality, which so often leads to neglect, mistreatment and abandonment. In reality, education has a huge role to play in reducing animal suffering, probably more than any prison sentence.
For example, it is clear that a large number of people have chosen to get a dog during lockdown and some, as I know, to get a horse because they have the time. The prices for both those animals have risen to absurdly high levels—I heard of £2,000 for a Jack Russell puppy—providing an incentive for future irresponsible breeding and, too often, for deformed dogs bred specifically with facial defects to look appealing, but consequently unable to breathe properly. People need to know all this, and to remember that a dog is for life and not just for lockdown or until it has ceased to entertain the children. The Horse Trust has received a phenomenal number of calls from people wanting to get rid of a horse for which they no longer have time or money. I expect that dog rescue centres can expect to be very busy in the near future.
Lastly, with prosecutions in mind, I would like specifically to praise the current leadership of the RSPCA under its chief executive, Chris Sherwood. They have got that most important of our animal charities back on the right track. Having had an official warning and special measures from the Charity Commission, and after too many years of bad running and shrinking membership, it is now back on track—let go, as it were, by the Charity Commission to carry on doing its superb work, which is done by nobody else. I am very pleased about the decision it made and announced in January: that it will in future hand over its investigations for prosecution to the CPS and not do them itself. After all, that was what the EFRA Committee in the other place recommended four years ago.
Let us hope that once this Bill reaches the statute book, as I very much hope it will soon, it will be needed less and less in the future.
]]>Those who advised that decision, those who made it and those who subsequently supported it were doing their best as they saw it to protect the population from a highly infectious, deeply unpleasant and sometimes fatal disease. How did they persuade us to comply? How did we so readily and swiftly surrender our freedom? First, we were told that, if we did, we would beat the virus and, in the Prime Minister’s words, put it “back in its box”. Then, this nation’s affection for our National Health Service was employed mercilessly. The fact is that successive Governments have underfunded and mismanaged the NHS, so we have the lowest critical care capacity in Europe.
Fear and guilt were part of the Government’s strategy: Don’t kill your granny”, and the advertisement with the old man pictured in a mask, asking “Can you look him in the eye?” There were swingeing fines for trivial breaches and even a government Minister urging people to report their neighbours for any rule infringements, which was presented as some sort of praiseworthy, patriotic act. All this was set against a background of relentless media coverage of hospital crises and deaths. Of course we all wanted to help to beat this virus, but a great many people were also very frightened, many unnecessarily, and many still are.
The full consequences of that decision are now much clearer. I hope that it reduced the death toll, but ours is still one of the largest in the world. However, as a result of that decision, a health crisis has been supplemented by both an economic and a social one. Massive damage has been done to the education of our children and to our businesses, industry, court system, arts and culture. There is a massive backlog of people who are in urgent need of treatment for serious, often fatal, conditions, some of whom have died or will die for lack of it. Basic human needs and civilised rights were prohibited: the need to be with a dying relative, to hold a mother’s hand in a care home, to hug grandchildren. The toll on mental health is incalculable.
We were told then, and at each successive lockdown, that this would be temporary, until a vaccine came along. I am afraid that that has proved unrealistic. Now we are being told that the virus is endemic and we will have to learn to live with it. The vaccine has been brilliantly created in record time and is being superbly administered through the NHS. It may protect the vaccinated against the worst aspects. More and better treatments will also, hopefully, be found, but this virus is going to continue indefinitely.
Against that background, we must surely resolve never again to use lockdown in this way in a health emergency such as this. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, was right. Parliament, too, must not allow itself to be sidelined again. We have had legislation with virtually no debate; we have had ex post facto debate on legislation already in force. We have had guidelines that have been accorded the status of law, with constant changes and uncertainty, so that, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, the public, police and even parliamentarians find it impossible to keep track of the latest rules and timetables.
The police, too, have been put in an impossible position, not just in policing lawful, dignified, peaceful protests but in trying to enforce legislation, some of it so petty in its application as to be laughable. I cannot forget the image of the elderly couple with their sticks, sitting together alone on a park bench, resting briefly during their one hour of permitted exercise, being made to move on by police. It is still going on: last week, an 83 year-old woman in Cheltenham was visited by two policemen at night, having been reported for having a cup of tea with two friends in the garden of her sheltered home. She was told that she would be fined if she did it again. If you enact bad law, people lose respect for it. Look out on the streets on any fine day, or at the beaches when it is hot, and you can see it. People are making their own decisions about the level of risk that they are prepared to take for themselves, their families and their friends. If those who have never broken any rule since March were asked to put their hands up, I do not believe that there would be many in the air.
Here we are again today, doing it all again, taking a few regulations away, adding more and changing the ever-moving goalposts. These provisions go through because there are not enough people in Parliament—too few like the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes—who will stand up and say, “Enough is enough”.
]]>I will offer a caution: living in Exmoor national park, I have seen the adverse consequences of the over-restriction of rotational burning. Swaling, as we call it, has been used since medieval times over large areas of moorland to encourage the growth of young heather and grasses to the benefit of grazing animals, both domestic and wild, and evidence shows that curlews and golden plover benefit from it too—not grouse, because there are none. In the 1980s, SSSIs and stricter controls on both the timing and extent of the burns were introduced. It is now clear that the amount of burning that took place afterwards was wholly insufficient.
Heather needs to be cleared, ideally every 20 years or so. If not, as we have seen, there are large expanses of over-mature plants, a lot of them dead or dying. Heather and mosses have now dramatically declined in some areas, and instead Molinia grass, bracken, gorse and scrub have taken over. So have ticks, Lyme disease and tick-borne diseases of livestock. There have also been damaging wildfires, which, unlike carefully controlled and limited swaling, are not superficial but burn hot and deep, with very serious carbon-loss consequences. The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, pointed to the major one in Scotland.
There is plenty of peat on Exmoor but no blanket bog, so these regulations will not affect us, but calls for further restrictions may well. On the evidence I have seen, the consequences would not be good for wildlife, carbon capture or those who love the heather-clad moors.
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