Lord Lucas (Con)

The prospect of spending weekends with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, seems well worth some ragwort pulling. I also sound a note of caution in respect of the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Roborough, as they are drafted, particularly Amendment 296. Animals such as the grey squirrel and the muntjac come and go as they please; you cannot eradicate them from an area. You can try pushing them back, but we are stuck with them until we develop a national solution. You should not penalise an EDP because it happens to be infected by them. Also, are we referring to the list that is generated by retained EU regulation 1143/2014 when we are referring to invasive non-native species? This list consists mostly of things that are troublesome in much warmer climates. A lot of things that cause problems for us, such as sycamore, would not be included at all. I am cautious. It is hard to eliminate invasive species from waterways. Unless you control the whole waterway and have a really integrated, careful and expensive campaign over several years, it is very difficult to do more than just reduce. By and large, we should learn to live with these invaders. I say this as a lifelong botanist. We have; we enjoy and celebrate the thousands of plants which have come to live here, mostly courtesy of gardeners, and which play a small part in the native flora. There are very few plants that cause a huge problem in terms of invasiveness. Animals can be difficult. Insects are difficult but really hard to control. Anyway, when it comes to the flora of this country, we should recognise what we mean by “native”. If we go back to the ice ages, you are talking just about birch and a bit of Scots pine. The ice ages crushed the European temperate flora against the Alps. As a result, we have a really depleted flora in Europe compared with China or North America, which both had southern refuges that their flora could get to. You really see that in the case of forestry; we have 30 woody species in this country. Every year or two, a disease threatens another of them. I am starting to lose my mature oak trees to acute oak decline, having lost a lot of ash and all the elm. A healthy temperate woodland has hundreds of species in it. That a few are finding their way back from gardens, diversifying and getting us back to a level of diversity that we ought to have is to be celebrated. Instead of this fuss about what is non-native, let us celebrate the immigrants. Surely the party opposite agrees with that.