Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. In a way, I am sorry that you did not allow the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) to continue. I suspect that he was about to fall into yet another difficulty. If he waits approximately a minute and a half, I shall give him a blissful example of the sort of confusion and disharmony that the Bill will generate, from the mouth of somebody whose evidence he will find it difficult to resist. The Bill offers clarity about nothing and a lack of clarity and delineation of roles with respect to DEFRA, the Environment Agency, the commission for rural communities, the regional development agencies, local authorities, other environmental bodies and natural England.Let me give the example that the hon. Gentleman seeks. It concerns the relationship between natural England and the Environment Agency. There is a theoretical way in which one can express this, before I come to the quotations that I promised the hon. Gentleman. One can ask whether the Sandford principle—the principle of putting the environment first—really applies to natural England. The answer on page 16 of the Government’s response to the Select Committee is very interesting. There the Minister states that"““where the level of importance of biodiversity and landscape has been predetermined, the Sandford principle should . . . apply””." I do not know what that means. I do not suppose that anyone listening to it was intended to know what it meant, but it leaves us with a clear question: does the Sandford principle apply to natural England? If it does, how will it avoid overlap with the Environment Agency? If it does not, how will it avoid conflict with the Environment Agency, unless of course the answer is that, through ministerial directive, DEFRA will constantly be holding the ring? In that case, what is the point of the bodies? That is not just my view; it is brought out beautifully in one of the classic expositions of what goes wrong in government, despite good intentions, by no one other than Baroness Young, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, who was asked in the Select Committee a series of questions about the relationship between the two bodies. I shall read at some length the observations of Baroness Young, which deserve to be taken seriously. She said:"““I think there is a potential for confusion. For example, if we””—" that is, the Environment Agency—"““are all to do with air, land and water, the primary role of the Environment Agency is the protection of air, land and water, and the new land management agency, the Integrated Agency, will have a clear role in air, land and water, but it must not be its primary role, its primary role is bio-diversity, landscape, access, recreation. Our primary role is air, land and water. We will work very closely together because without clean air, land or water they cannot have decent bio-diversity, access, landscape and recreation. We, likewise, have got a responsibility for things that the Integrated Agency delivers, in that we have to give them the building blocks of clean air, land and water. I hope that has not confused you completely.””" Illuminatingly, she continued:"““I think there is a clarity and it is there to be got, but it needs to be written down very carefully otherwise we could tread on each other’s corns.””" That relationship will be very rich. If one has ever heard a senior bureaucrat—if I can describe Baroness Young in that way—identifying a problem of overlap and confusion, that is it. Her exposition of the problem is beautiful.