My Lords, I have added my name to three amendments: Amendments 259 and 260 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and Amendment 260A, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. I have listened carefully to this very interesting debate.
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, put his finger on it when he talked about the need for commercial forestry in this country. I have spoken a lot in the past about forestry. We are not good foresters in this country—we have the ideal climate for growing trees, and we do grow trees, but we are not good foresters, and that is why our timber is in the bad condition that it is. In Amendment 260, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, proposes that the Government introduce a tree strategy. That will be hugely important because whenever we have mentioned trees recently my noble friend Lord Goldsmith has said, “Well, there is plenty of room beside riverbanks and stream-banks and unfarmed bits of land.” Yes, there is, but those are amenity trees and nothing to do with commercial woodland. We are the number two world importer of timber, which is a very bad statistic for the UK to have.
The problem with the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, for commercial woodland was rightly exposed by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, who said that commercial woodland is unprofitable: nobody is growing hardwood timber commercially any more. You cannot, because of pests and diseases. That is why Amendment 260A is so important, as is Amendment 259, which deals with biodiversity.
The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said that there are pests and diseases for every native hardwood. If that is the case, and the Government’s strategy is what it is, commercial hardwoods have seen their day in this country. That is a terrible thing to have to say but, sadly, it is the truth. Not only do we need a tree strategy; for that we need a land strategy, because 20% of agricultural land will come out of production to go into forestry and biodiversity. Where is it going to happen? We do not know; this is all a bit pie in the sky from the Government.
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The amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, adds a duty to set animal damage protection. That is hugely important, and there have been a number of important comments on it. My noble friend Lord Lucas told us of the case in Dorset where the RSPB fenced off a bit of woodland to keep the fallow deer out. That is a hugely irresponsible act of management, because all it does is push elsewhere the problem of excess deer in this country. It does not deal with it. My noble friend Lord Colgrain talked about the increasing numbers of car accidents due to deer and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, talked about how trees and long grasses change biodiversity. All those are very relevant points.
I will talk a bit more about damage to trees. I am very glad that Defra has not lost its sense of humour; I was extremely grateful to receive the other day from my noble friend the “Environment Bill nature and biodiversity factsheets”, on the front of which is a picture of three doe-eyed deer. They are eating the woodland in which they have been photographed. My compliments to Defra on its sense of humour.
I was recently in Dorset looking at some land on which I noticed a lot of self-sown trees last year. Every single leader of those trees has been eaten by deer this spring. Not one single tree that was self-generated will be able to grow into anything like a normal tree. Not only is the eating of leaders detrimental; there is also the rubbing and marking of trees by deer, particularly when cleaning their antlers and marking their territory. I think my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Randall of Uxbridge mentioned the muntjac. Let us not forget that the muntjac can produce three fawns in two years. It is estimated that, if we want to control the present muntjac population as it is, the cull must be at 30% a year. Is that remotely likely? Does that have any support from the Government?
As our development presses out more and more into the countryside, it is getting harder and harder for people to control deer. Those who do will only find that their next-door neighbour is producing an oasis or refuge for deer, and more and more will come on to their land and undo any good being done. We also have the question of rabbits and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, said, hares.
The answer is that, if timber is uncommercial to grow, you cannot put up fences, which are too expensive, so you have to rely on plastic tubes. I foresee that, in 10 years’ time, we will have a pretty good desert of empty plastic tubes, because they will not work. Hopefully, we will get to a less polluting material than plastic, but I fear I am very negative about the future of forestry in this country under the present arrangements the Government have in hand.
The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, is absolutely right in her Amendment 260 that there needs to be a plan for the maintenance of trees and woodlands. It is no good having a target just for planting trees—you can tick that box very easily; it is, as I have said before, maintaining trees and bringing them to maturity that will benefit our country. However, as we know, the ages of 15 to 40 are the time when the abundance of grey squirrels will attack and destroy most of our native hardwoods. The Government really need to get their act together if they are going to fulfil their hopes for forestry in this country.
I turn finally to Amendment 283. Here, after six days of agreement, I part company with a lot of my noble friends, and noble friends opposite, including the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. This is a hugely complex and emotional subject. We can all agree that nobody wants to burn peat and everybody wants to keep it as wet as possible; the science is incomplete and in many cases contradictory. There is a lot more work needed to get the science right.
If the point of this amendment is to stop flooding, I simply say that a saturated peat bog does nothing to stop it at all. I could take your Lordships up to Caithness and Sutherland, to the Flow Country, and when that bog is wet, the water just runs off it. It does not stop flooding in any way. The peat bog will have to be managed to keep the bog just below the water table, so that when there is extra rain, it is the sponge that can absorb it. But if it already fully saturated, it is of no great benefit to anybody.
If the purpose of the amendment is to tackle greenhouse gases, it is possibly true that there is some carbon emitted in a controlled burn, but nothing to that which is emitted in wildfires. One has only to look at the fire in the Flow Country that I mentioned at our debate in March on the burning regulations, which doubled Scotland’s CO2 output. At Saddleworth Moor, they lost 200 years of stored carbon, according to the University of Liverpool, because that was unmanaged. The owners of Saddleworth Moor had turned their back on sensible management of heather and peatland, let it grow too long, and the inevitable happened.
Why do those who tabled this amendment want to go completely the opposite way when the science in Australia and America, and all the rest of the world, is telling us that controlled burning helps biodiversity and helps stop wildfires? Is the point of the amendment to make us have more biodiversity? If only we could communicate with the golden plover, the curlew and the hen harrier, they would all tell us: no, it does not. We need a managed moorland to thrive. All the evidence shows that curlews are greater in numbers on a managed grouse moor than they are on unmanaged heather.
Heather is one of our great resources but it is declining, and we need to keep it going. One of the best ways of doing so is to burn it on a rotational basis.
We must define peatland, as there are something like 25 different categories of peat. It depends on the amount of organic mixture in the soil; some use 35% organic, some use 30%—the Americans—and I think it is Cranfield which uses 20%. So we do not know what we are talking about—a lot more work needs to be done.
I am very much against this amendment. We are all heading in the same direction; the debate is about how we get there. I believe that we must leave every option open, and allow controlled burning which, if done properly, should not touch the mosses or the peat. It is only the nitrogenous foliage above the peat which gets burned, and you are left with what is known as biochar on the stalks. Although biochar has been totally ignored in all previous research, it has increasingly been shown that it is a hugely important source for not only retaining but absorbing carbon.
The scientists disagree. They were all pretty well in agreement until fairly recently, but recent evidence shows that, in the past, scientists were wrong. I hope my noble friend on the Front Bench will turn down this amendment and say that first, we need to do far more research and secondly, we must not do this until we get the definitions right in the first place.