My Lords, I am sure my noble friend Lord Harlech agrees with me that the idea behind these amendments is absolutely right and that we all want to see an increase in nature and biodiversity, but I urge him to take a slightly jaundiced view of them. The way they are drafted and the bureaucracy involved is of concern to me. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, made a powerful case for designation, saying that wild belts—whatever wild belts are, because there is no definition, as I will come on to in a moment—will be protected. So were national parks; so are AONBs; so are SSSIs, since the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which I took part in; but that has not stopped nature declining. The problem is that we are focusing too much on designation rather than on management. It is management of land that will increase biodiversity and wildlife.
It should be second nature to farmers to farm in a way that will benefit wildlife. Good commercial farming can work hand in hand with nature. Anyone saw the recent David Attenborough programme “Wild Isles” will have seen that, in the last episode, he gave examples of farmers on hill land and on rich grade 1 land farming for wildlife as well as commercial farming. The farmer on the commercial land has to rotate his crops on a regular basis and will therefore rotate some of the wildlife’s habitat. If a field that he has put down to wildflowers is designated, there will be bureaucracy to change that from one field to another; whether it is a slightly bigger or smaller area will involve a whole lot of bureaucracy and make the farmer’s job a whole lot harder.
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For example, a beetle bank might be considered a wild belt. A beetle bank is two to three metres wide. In theory, it is a very good place for wildlife, but in practice it is also a very good place for predators. It is not the beetle bank that is important per se; it is the at least 15-metre minimum strip on the side of it laid down to wildflowers or bird-food producing plants that saves the wildlife. The birds and creatures that live on the beetle bank get into the strip and away from the foxes, badgers, stoats and other predators that come along. That is management with a holistic approach, which has proved very successful. It was invented some 40 years ago by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, together with Southampton University, and has proved a really good way to improve biodiversity on a farm.
How will we define a wild belt? Unless there is a strict definition of what it actually means, and that the land will not be subject to use change, as under proposed new subsection (4), this will not work in practice. The idea is lovely; it is a good theory but in practice it will not work for the practical, nature-friendly farmer who wants to get on, improve biodiversity and farm commercially. This will be another step in the opposite direction.