Commons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful—and socialist with a small ““s””, no doubt. We have village greens and urban commons, which we recognise as urban commons; and then we have   urban commons—to which the noble Lord, Lord Clark, referred—in the Lake District, which are not urban commons at all but which by happy historical accident were opened up to access some 80   years ago. We have the small rural commons to which the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, referred; and, in my part of the world, apparently arbitrary chunks of very large areas of our uplands are commons—in the Pennines, the north Yorkshire moors and the Lake District. We should recognise that what those areas all have in common—““in common””, sorry about that—is that they are all historical leftovers. They are remains of a time when far more of the country consisted of common land. As the noble Lord, Lord Clark, said, a large number of enclosures resulted in commons becoming to a large extent isolated pieces of land comprising various sizes and various varieties. When we consider the legislation, we shall need to recognise the huge range of commons that exist. However, they all have a resonance. They have almost a mystical resonance with people who have nothing to do with commons and not much directly to do with the countryside any more. It is like a folk memory of the England of centuries past—the world of open fields, pastures, common grazing land, people cutting turves for fuel, going for their firewood, and cutting rushes and reeds and so on. They are part of a much wider sense that the countryside belongs to all of us. That is probably best shown when people who perhaps do not visit the countryside very often nevertheless go out in the summer and the autumn to pick wild berries. I refer to the whinberries of the Pennines near us and to the wild raspberries in the country park just upstream from where we live. I have tremendous childhood memories of going ““blegging”” and of picking blackberries in the Vale of York, where we were fortunate to have country cousins whom we could visit. Commons are a very specific, very technical phenomenon but they have a real resonance with people in the country. That is why it is so important that they are preserved and are not allowed to be taken over by completely private interests and done away with. The Bill is a technical Bill that concerns the registration, management and protection of commons. As such, it involves all kinds of different people who have an interest in commons. Commoners themselves are very   often, although not always, farmers. The future of upland livestock farming is controversial and topical. There is a great fear that under the single farm payment hill farmers will miss out. The average age of hill farmers in the Lake District is approaching retirement age. Many of their children are not going into the business, as it were. There is a real danger that livestock farming may collapse in many of our uplands. There is concern about the future of hill farming land. Those matters do not directly involve commons but commons are of concern to farmers who are in that situation. There is also the whole question of landscape conservation. The National Trust says that it owns 10   per cent of the commons of this country. Many of them are situated in some of the most important and spectacular places. I refer to recreation and access interests. The noble Lord, Lord Clark, mentioned the Open Spaces Society. I refer to the interaction between this legislation and the CROW Act, which many of us have fond memories of discussing five years ago in this House, including during the all-night sitting that finally got it through this House. We do not undertake such sittings nowadays. Conservation interests are involved and the matter has great implications for local authorities. The Local Government Association is rightly concerned about the additional burdens that the legislation might place on local authorities. The Bill will not solve most of those problems. However, our task in considering the Bill in Grand Committee and at other stages is to do what we can to scrutinise it and, where possible, to improve it in such a way as to ensure that it does not interfere with or harm the different interests which have to be reconciled, and which I believe can be reconciled. Ideally, we should try to improve the situation. The Bill has had broad support from an astonishingly wide variety of bodies such as the NFU, the Open Spaces Society, the National Trust, the Local Government Association, the CLA, the RSPB and others. They all have proper concerns about the Bill’s details in view of their different interests. The Bill has been introduced into this House. I believe that we have a huge responsibility to look at it very carefully, to discuss it among ourselves and to send it to the House of Commons in an improved state, and in a state whereby the House of Commons will not have a great deal of trouble in saying, ““Yes, this is a good Bill””.