Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, I am at risk of losing my carefully nurtured reputation as an environmentalist and a nature lover. This amendment was beautifully presented by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne, but perhaps somewhat extravagantly. We were told that having more trees would improve driving. Does anybody believe that? Just think what experiment you would have to conduct to be able to prove it. Not every tree is as attractive as you might think. Right across the road from my front door, there is a mulberry tree. Most of the year it is survivable, but at the moment it is absolutely fatal. It is dropping its half-formed mulberries on the pavement, causing danger in every direction, as well as being terribly ugly. The householder was out today with a hose trying to sweep it off the pavement, I assume because he was worried about liability. Just around the corner we have some very fine plane trees in Queen’s Gate that must be 150 years old. They are aggressively pollarded. Why? It is because they suck so much water out of the clay that they cause subsidence in the houses adjacent. As it is the council’s liability if the street trees pull the houses down, to protect itself it pollards them aggressively to reduce water demand. There is a right place for trees. Bedford Park in west London, built as a semi-rural extension, would look ridiculous without trees and of course must have them, but other fine Italianate terraces looking like palazzos are made ridiculous if you plant the odd sapling in the carriageway because you cannot fit it on the footway due to the voids under the pavement built to house coal. Everything must be judged very finely and at local level. The idea here is that the source of wisdom on this should be a civil servant in MHCLG, producing guidance which includes, to my horror, “standard designs, and planting palettes”. What will that produce? It will be one ash, one poplar and one oak sapling—box ticked and that is the developer done. You will have the same trees planted in the same configuration in half the developments in the country. There are people who can produce guidance on trees, and I would encourage them to do so. There is a professional body representing local authority arboriculturists. People who really work with trees, know trees and have great affection for them have a great sensitivity to what is appropriate to plant in a particular location. Guidance from that source might be very sensible and valuable. I would encourage that, but not, I hope, box-ticking. Let us have trees in the right places and remember that they are good in some places but bad in others. Let us have variety in the right place and perhaps fewer mulberry trees overhanging the footway, but let us not bureaucratise this with guidance from the ministry with little drawings.