Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I will chiefly offer support to Amendment 46A from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. In response to the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who said that of course the Government would not do this, I am afraid that we hear that very often in your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord may be speaking for his own Government, but we are making law for potential future Governments, and we cannot know how they will behave. That is a reason to put Amendment 46A in the Bill. I respond to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Hunt, with a little reminder that we are one of the most nature-depleted corners of this battered planet. If our regulators have not succeeded in doing the job they should have done in protecting nature, the answer is not to take away more power from the regulators. By all means, make them work better. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, said, we will undoubtedly discuss this at great length in relation to Part 3, but the Bill currently takes away an enormous amount of protection for nature, which is a huge problem. In talking about Amendments 46 and 46A, I will refer to Defra’s own words from a blog post in 2025 that, we can assume, represents the Government’s view. It starts with a statement with which I can only agree: “Nature is the bedrock of our entire way of life”. As I often put it, the economy is a complete subset of the environment; none of the economy exists without a healthy environment. That blog seeks to defend the nature restoration fund, the environment delivery plans and all the other steps that this Government are introducing. You might say that the blog post is a little too vehement for its own good and that its tone sounds extremely defensive. None the less, we can all think of examples of where the Government have, on the one hand, done something for nature, but, on the other, done enormous damage with other policies. One of the obvious examples that comes to mind here is peat. Peatland is terribly important for nature and for climate. Large amounts of money are spent on restoring peatlands. We also have continued use of the land for driven grouse shooting and the burning of large amounts of peat causing great damage—and continual horticultural use of peat. So we have the Government trying to expensively restore something while continuing to allow the destruction of it. That is why this needs to be in the Bill. I could give many more examples, but given the hour I will not, of where the Government are, in essence, facing in two directions at once and nature is torn down the middle as a result.