Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

I beg to move, To leave out from ““That”” to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:"““this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill because, whilst making welcome amendments to wildlife protection and rights of way legislation, it nevertheless creates a new public body with far-reaching powers affecting the landscape of England and Wales and rural communities without setting the protection of the natural environment as the priority, without creating a simplified scheme of support for either the environment or rural communities and without any accountability at local or national level; and because it also creates a second public body with no function that cannot be effectively delivered by existing local authorities and by other elected bodies and gives the Secretary of State powers to abolish existing public bodies and to create new public bodies, endowing them with significant powers.””" Let me begin with the good news: we can welcome many parts of the Bill. First, the provisions in part 6 that relate to byways open to all traffic are welcome. However, by contrast to the plea from Labour Back Benchers, we would like to tease out a concern in Committee about the fact that the forthcoming announcement of those measures has stimulated a large number of applications by those who are concerned with increasing access for off-roaders and trail bikes. That issue stretches from my constituency to that of my hon. Friend the Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin). In fact, a rudimentary check by my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice), who is the shadow Minister, suggests that more than 200 such applications are in process around the country, and extrapolating from my local knowledge, I expect that there may be many more in the pipeline between now and the commencement date. I doubt whether it is the Government’s intention—certainly, we would not wish it to be the case—that those applications should have a smooth passage simply because people have been stirred into action by the Bill. I hope that we can find some means to resolve that with the Minister in Committee.