Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, I am supportive of my noble friend Lord Gascoigne’s amendments, and will speak also to those from my Front Bench. There are a couple of factors in this. The Treasury hates ring-fencing, because, right now, it pretty much controls every penny that leaves the Government’s hands, whether it goes off to local government or similar. Other departments then want to try to control money that is coming out of existing government departments and how that should or should not be done, and so conventions start to happen within government. That frustrates, at times, the very purpose the levy is there for in the first place. There is precedence, as has already been said by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne, in CIL and the Act that brought that in. There are other aspects. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, would make sure that this is additional money. It basically says that Natural England should not become self-financing and that every single penny raised should go to nature restoration. Like my noble friend Lord Gascoigne, I was born in the county of Lancashire and I am very proud of that—don’t worry, I will not start singing the cricket song. There is something to be said, building on the principle of rectification at source, for trying to have that biodiversity as near as possible. Very occasionally, there have been infrastructure projects, such as the Channel Tunnel, for which it has simply not been possible to re-create the relevant habitat for certain displaced species, and it has had to go further away. It is a bit like what HS2 found: there is no point in planting trees at the wrong time of year, not watering them and then finding that—what a surprise—70% of them are dead. More money is spent on fixing the problem, instead of sorting it out in the first place. There is an element of co-ordination involved here, which I think Natural England is reasonably well-placed to do. When we were setting up the BNG pilots, local developers sometimes could not do it, and there was then an opportunity to buy national credits. The department and Natural England were very keen for Natural England to be the only body to have this national pot, but I ensured that a few more bodies were available. It is important to have not necessarily competition but a variety of people who can provide this, as opposed to resource constraints becoming the great determining step or not helping progress. I come back to the Environment Act 2021 and its species abundance target for 2030. There are other examples. It might be surprising to hear that the Treasury regularly holds back over a billion pounds from the collection of the apprenticeship levy, which it will often use to pay for various training here and there. Nature is too important. I thought it was no longer the Cinderella of the climate and nature environment, but I am afraid that it is back in that sad era. We need to ensure that it receives its fair dues, which is why I support the amendments in this group.