Contribution
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 100, which is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and to which I and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, have attached our names. In the interests of time, I will chiefly restrain myself to commenting on that, although I note the fortunate congruence of Amendment 99AA, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, appearing right beside it, because they fit together very well in thinking about a one health perspective.
Amendment 100 is about environmental health, but human health is entirely dependent on environmental health. In fitting all those things together, the lack of healthy places is undoubtedly one of our society’s great problems. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has already made a powerful argument for Amendment 100. I commend her on including mycological surveys, because that is all too often left out. That relates to the issue of soil health, which we are starting to recognise is such a crucial issue that we have ignored far too long. It is crucial to our health—human health and environmental health.
The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said that we have a real shortage of education in our highly concentrated education system about ecology and biology. That is undoubtedly true, but our understanding of biology and ecology is moving and changing enormously fast. If you were taught biology and ecology 20 or 30 years ago, what we know now will disavow a great deal of what you were taught as statements of fact 20 or 30 years ago.
To illustrate that, and because I know your Lordships’ House loves a good chalk stream, I refer to a very alarming study out this week of the River Itchen, which is a chalk stream that has been found to have alarming levels of microparticle pollution. Microfibres and fibreglass fibres were sampled throughout the chalk stream. This has been found in samples from spring 2025. The researcher who found this says we have got to work out the sources of this pollution and what to do about them. We need to start thinking about how we stop polluting these wonderful environments and make sure that the built environment is not wrecking that. This is ultimately related to a planning question that we have got to understand.
Tying in with that—I am sorry, this is also alarming—is a study just out this week about tyre wear particles in the Rhine River. Where does the road go? The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, talked about the importance of where roads go in terms of splitting up habitats, but roads also pollute the watercourses. This is a fascinating study that shows that the nature of bacterial biofilms in the river is substantially changed by the presence, absence and nature of these tyre wear particles. Bacterial biofilms are at the base of food chains. They are key parts of aquatic ecosystems. They control nutrient cycles and form the basis of food chains.
All this is news from just the last week. If we are going to ask people to make decisions that are crucial to the biology and health of our environment, I am not saying that everyone has to be spending their time—as I probably spend too much time—focusing on studies such as this, but people need a basic level of understanding of biology or ecology to understand the way in which this knowledge is moving so fast to be able to read these reports and understand them.
My first point was about understanding ecological and biological education. In my second point, I will venture with some tentativeness into the legal side of this, because it is worth noting that the law around biodiversity and the climate emergency is a very fast-changing area. It is crucial that people have at least a basic understanding of these areas if they are going to make planning decisions that, as the noble Baroness said, are both right and will stand up in court.
I point Members to the Law and Climate Atlas, a really useful resource which was developed by the Centre for Climate Engagement in partnership with the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance. It notes that:
“Climate change may be a material consideration in individual planning decisions, and may be a necessarily material consideration, but there is no statutory requirement”,
but it may come up in court. I note that chapter 14 of the National Policy Planning Framework states that the planning system could lead to
“radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions”.
But how are we going to make sure that happens? This is where the training is crucial.
With some trepidation, I will venture briefly into a specific case: the R v Surrey County Council judgment given on 20 June. This was around the scope 3 emissions from fossil fuel extraction. The final judgment given in this case in the Supreme Court stated:
“The only issue is whether the combustion emissions are effects of the project at all. It seems to me plain that they are”.
These are all issues in a fast-moving area and it is crucial that we provide planners with the training to understand what is happening. That training will have to be updated regularly. If we throw people into decision-making positions without this understanding, which we cannot expect their previous experience to have given them, we are setting them up to fail—to fail themselves, their councils and our communities.