Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 325 in this group but, first, I would like to support the remarks made by my noble friends Lord Roborough and Lord Sandhurst. I echo what has been said about compulsory purchase orders. We live in a country that is meant to have property rights. What can be worse than forcibly removing property that someone rightfully owns? Which one of us would like our property to be compulsorily removed? Generally, in the past, this has been done only for huge infrastructure projects—not that that makes it better for those whose property it affects. It has been rarely done, although we have just heard of a very awful example from the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. However, I am sure that many of your Lordships will have read about the property removed to make way for HS2: the family farms that were taken and the homes that people had to leave. Do the general public really think this is a good thing? Surely, it is a human rights abuse. The Bill incentivises this approach by allowing acquiring agencies to buy the land at agricultural prices and then sell it on for development. We are meant to be making life easier and better for people, not causing utter misery. I thank noble Lords who have allowed me to insert Amendment 325 into the group. Amendment 325 would insert new subsection (2A) into Clause 83 to ensure that fields used by people to graze their animals and high-quality agricultural land that could be used for food production cannot be compulsorily purchased by Natural England as part of its environmental delivery plans. I spoke earlier in the debate about how one of the advantages of living in a democracy is that we have these property rights. In the Bill, there are provisions to make compulsory purchase easier and for local authorities to be able to seize land more cheaply, as I just said, where it is required for new development. I spoke last week about how high-quality agricultural land should be used to produce food, which is in proposed new paragraph (b) of this amendment, so I will not repeat all that we talked about then. I would like to focus on proposed new paragraph (a), which concerns “land … that is in personal use for the grazing of animals”. People who have a few fields, for horses, donkeys or maybe llamas, goats, the odd pet sheep or anything else, need those fields to keep their livestock and pets. These fields are often on the outskirts of villages or towns. They therefore look rather attractive for development but, if this land were removed, what would happen to the animals and livestock? A while ago, the Prime Minister himself purchased a field, so that his mother could care for neglected donkeys. Sadly, she has now died and the field has been sold, but what would have happened if this field had been taken while it was being used for the donkeys? In short, as I have said before, I believe that compulsory purchase—seizing someone’s property—is against human rights and should be used by a Government in only the most extreme of circumstances, and that land that is being utilised for family animals should never be considered.