Member

On wild belt, I am rather loath to support another statutory protected landscape designation. We had the national parks and the AONBs; now we have protected landscapes. I say to the noble Baroness that it is not as easy as it was in 1945, when John Dower was driven round by his wife and within a month picked, I think, 10 national parks: “Oh, I like that area, that’s the Lake District, we’ll make that a national park. There’s another, that’s the Peak District National Park. That is it”. I can tell the Committee that it is impossible now for Natural England to increase the size of a national park by five square metres without consultation after consultation and fulfilling different statutory duties. It is just impossible, I think, to do what the noble Baroness wants in this amendment without a huge bureaucratic and costly exercise.