My Lords, it is very strange idea, us trying to bring a Bill to the House that is, if anything else, about looking at how we can improve the way that we make laws in this country.
As I came into the House of Lords today, I saw over in the corner of the station many destitute people—10 or 12 of them. If you analyse the reasons why they are destitute, you will probably find that it is because, at some time, some law or some government intervention removed their well-being and reduced their ability to function in society, so they ended up there as a result of the law of unintended consequences. I will give a few examples of such former laws because I would like this to lead to a change in the law. I am of the opinion that, over the past 40 years, every side of House—left, right, centre—has, through the law of unintended consequences, created Bills and Acts that have added to many of the problems we now face.
I will not pick on anyone in particular—I am a Cross-Bencher but not a gloating one. I have made many mistakes; not in this House at least, but before I came here I spent 25 years trying to help the homeless to help themselves. I spent 25 years trying to lift people up who were in crisis. It was only three or four years ago that I realised what I should have been doing was preventing them falling in the first instance. One of the reasons I petitioned to join this House was so that I could begin the process of preventing people falling down and ending up in places like Westminster tube station.
I am not unguilty; I do not have the moral high ground. I have spent 25 years on this and, by the laws of unintended consequences, I should have spent 10 years doing that and then the next 15 years working very hard on preventing the clocks breaking rather than repairing them. I am not alone.
In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Government—I am not here to slag off Margaret Thatcher, by the way; I know a lot of people are for or against her, but as a Cross-Bencher I have no opinion—decided, they thought wisely, to close down our mental institutions because they were not working very well. Our asylums were not working well, because there was not a lot of science or psychological help there. I went into these places to see members of my family, and they were horrible.
In 1987 the asylums were removed; they were very primitive and Victorian but had a number of advantages. Instead, the Government came up with this very nice-sounding thing called “care in the community”. I was one of those saying, “This is ridiculous.” The reason I was saying that as a member of the public—I had not even started the Big Issue then; at the time I was a Marxist-Engelist-Leninist-Trotskyist, trying to prove that capitalism was not working—was that this was a clear sign of that, because I and a number of others said that if you close down the mental institutions, the streets, prisons and A&E departments will fill up. Lo and behold, 40 years later we have the unfortunate situation where some of the most wretched people are on our streets—an extension of A&E.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to welcome this Bill, and it is a pleasure to give up a Friday in such a good cause. I cannot possibly match the rhetoric of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, but I will focus on the reference that he made to the model provided by the Welsh Bill and all its ambition for this very welcome Bill in this House. I have one question to put not least to the Minister. How can this Bill be more effective than the one that it is modelled on? How can we learn the lessons from Wales?
The noble Lord spoke brilliantly and graphically about the law of unintended consequences. One lesson that we must learn is to have the courage to abandon the way that we have done things for 200 years. We are still wedded in this country to the notion of the inevitability of progress yet, as the review of the Marmot report showed, 10 years on, when we learn that progress has stopped in reducing inequalities, for example, we tend to resort to the old, failed policies and live with the unintended consequences. That, as he more or less implied, is due in part to the fact that the Government are still in thrall to a Victorian Treasury whose only belief is in cost-benefit, and to manners of government that are basically geared to nothing but a tradition of ad hocery and time-limited behaviour.
The Welsh Act rejected that whole way of doing things—that was its courage—and brought the concept of well-being from the margins and from the implausible to be front and centre of policy-making. It has drawn on decades of thinking about sustainability as a way of working, not as an end in itself, to put forward a framework based on collaboration, integration and foresight as the only way to meet the challenges of the future, whether that is the climate emergency or ageing. Quite simply, it has taken the “too difficult” box and taken stuff out of it.
Essentially, in the words of the Welsh future generations commissioner, the Welsh Act gave public bodies permission to “unsettle the status quo”; it is disruptive, and it is meant to be. The question is: did it give equivalent power to do that? The answer is not really, and that has been a recommendation of the Welsh commissioner herself: she has shown in her many reports what has changed, for example, in the planning of transport and the environment but she does not have the powers to do many of the things that she wants. She agrees that setting broad national objectives, however challenging, such as resilience or prosperity, is the easy part. The difficult thing is to change ways of behaviour and to change culture. That is the only way of meeting the objectives that are set.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on his vision in bringing this to us. I echo all that has already been said by my noble friend Lady Andrews; I must call her my friend.
The term “future generations” often implies generations that are not yet born yet current children are also the future generation, their voice often unheard and their experiences not always at the centre of government policy. Laws send social messages; they frame our values and alter our behaviours. Wales has led on this approach of considering the next generation in every aspect of government policy. As someone who lives and works in Wales—I declare my role as chair of the board of governors of Cardiff Metropolitan University—I say that this legislation acts as an internal checklist for decision-making across all areas and provides a moral compass in our deliberations. For us, it is in line with our strategy of EDGE: ethical, digital, global and entrepreneurial. It runs as a thread through our thinking.
In my short time I want to focus on the huge societal problem of alcohol abuse, and declare my role chairing the Commission on Alcohol Harm. More than 40% of women in the UK continue to drink during pregnancy and four times more children suffer alcohol-related birth defects than the global average. Foetal alcohol spectrum disorders blight their lives before they are born. Children tell us about alcohol harms. Children know alcohol can be physically and emotionally unhealthy; it makes their parents sick, forgetful, unpredictable, unreliable and unavailable emotionally. They see the link between alcohol, the arguments at home, and financial difficulties. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology reported recently on the damage from parents’ drinking on children’s overall development. Children themselves recognise that some become dependent on alcohol and at risk of
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on getting this debate and on the Bill. It is the beginning of a long process. We are getting to grips with, and trying to define, a whole new way of looking at society. An undoubted truth is that there is a lot of short-termism in society. That is largely because the generation that takes decisions frequently lets the next generation pay for its consequences. On occasions we are a bit too happy to take decisions based on our emotional view of the world, rather than a practical one. One of the most interesting points in yesterday’s debate was the admission by my noble friend Lord Tugendhat that austerity might not have been the best way of tackling the problems we have had in the last 10 years. That is quite a fundamental confession, because many in our party—I am guilty to an extent myself—accepted that the best way forward was reining in, cutting our cloth, and all the rest of the old sayings. We saw a complete change of direction in the Budget this week. If that had been taken some years ago, we might not have spent any more money, but we might have spent it slightly more wisely.
One of my hopes for the well-being objectives and the commissioner—if we get that far—is that we will have a more nuanced view of the future and that we will look at the way society can get better. Society has got better. I do not intend to turn this into a great personal thing, but I grew up as the child of alcoholics. Nobody cared. That is my overwhelming memory of growing up in the 1950s in that sort of family. People turned the other way, and the well-being of future generations has to mean us helping future generations—I was very struck by what the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said—to come to terms with and to give a fair life chance to people as they mature, grow up and face the future. According to the recent survey, 200,000-odd children are unhappy. It is no good rubbishing that unhappiness and the way it is measured; we have to accept that they are unhappy. A child defines its own unhappiness. It does not need someone else to do it for it.
My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as set out in the register. Before becoming one of the latest non-hereditary recruits to this House, I ran a city council in Wales, so I am very familiar with the Bill’s principles. It was very interesting to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, who lives and works in Wales and is a prominent member of its public service community, and to my noble friend Lady Andrews, who made some apposite remarks about learning from what we have done.
What did Wales do? The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 received Royal Assent in April 2015 and came into force from 1 April 2016. It was concerned with improving the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of Wales. It has seven goals: a prosperous, resilient, healthier, more equal, globally responsible Wales, of cohesive communities, with a thriving culture and a developing Welsh language. It placed a well-being duty on public bodies to set and publish objectives to show how that vision will be achieved for Wales as set out in the goals. They were expected to take action to ensure that those objectives were met.
There were five things that public bodies needed to consider. They became known as the five ways of working: long term, prevention, integration, collaboration and involvement. The Act established public services boards for each local authority area in Wales to address cross-cutting issues requiring a multiagency approach. Each PSB publishes a local well-being plan setting out its objectives and the steps it will take to meet them. It must set out why it considered that those objectives will maximise the contribution to the well-being goals.
As the leader—I am now the former leader—of Newport City Council, I chaired the One Newport Public Service Board and in this Second Reading debate I would like to share some of that practical working context of using the future generations Act in the public realm. The city of Newport is a very different place from the town it was a generation back, which was searching for a new identity following the decline of steel and other traditional employers. Since then, as my noble friend Lord Howarth will agree, the city has undergone a radical transformation, with entire new communities on former industrial sites, new landmark buildings, award-winning developments and modern infrastructure. There is much reason to be optimistic for the future, but we also needed to recognise that Newport faced significant challenges which affected the well-being of local people.
It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and to have her first-hand experience—you can see why she was a leader. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on bringing this. I had the great privilege of giving this Bill its first ever reading in the Lords on his behalf. As he said—I am paraphrasing because I do not want to swear in your Lordships’ House—the world of tomorrow should not simply be an accumulation of half-baked hopes and the short-term governmental thinking of days gone by.
I am sad to say that short-term thinking still dominates everything Parliament discusses—particularly with this Government, who seem to want simply to maintain the status quo without any imaginative thinking. We are still building new homes that in a few years will have their gas boilers taken out and have to be retrofitted with heat pumps, solar panels and space for electric vehicle charging. We are still expanding airports that we will not be able to use because of the carbon emissions from aircraft. We are still building waste incinerators that local authorities expect to be operating in 30 years, when the UK is meant to be zero carbon.
Interestingly, this is the third debate in two days that has covered this general policy area—a different way of seeing our future and how we should measure our current aims and objectives as fit for purpose. Yesterday we had the debate on well-being as a key indicator from the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, and the debate on embracing a green economy from the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, which I was delighted to speak in.
I am of Welsh origins, and it is lovely to know that Wales has not only adopted these measures but put them into practice. The current emphasis on economic well-being above all else is extremely damaging for future generations. Of course, Greens such as me will always argue for coherent planning to deal with our climate emergency. We want a planet fit for children and grandchildren, whether ours or someone else’s. We might also indulge in a bit of “I told you so”, because we did. I realise that is unhelpful, but I carry on doing it anyway. We have always tried to explain that environmental, social, economic and cultural well-being are all part of the same solution. You cannot have economic well-being if you do not have environmental well-being. That is absolutely the base we should all work on.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for introducing this Bill with such vigour. It is most welcome. I think it has shortcomings, but we can debate and overcome them. What concerns me most is the lack of emphasis on the participation of future generations in guiding policy and practice—child participation, and the right to participate. Let us consider the example of children.
Children are defined, of course, as being under 18. There is sometimes talk in organisations, in government, of “consultation with” and “representation of” children and young people. I do not mean that; I mean participation, in decisions about future developments. The UK ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991. It has 54 articles, which set out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of children, including the right to be heard, and the right to express themselves, as well as the rights to family life, protection and education. Why is child participation so important? Because it works. It is valuable to children and young people, who feel listened to and respected. Participation must include that of children and young people with fewer opportunities, those who are vulnerable or affected by disability or discrimination and, yes, the dispossessed.
Child participation is valuable to organisations, which benefit from the views of children and young people. The impact of child policy implementation is felt by children; they have the right to comment. I cannot think of a single voluntary sector organisation that does not have a panel of young people to guide its policy, many schools have school councils and the NHS long-term plan had a panel of young people. I remember holding seminars on child mental health and childhood injustice, in which half the participants were children and half adults. Two Ministers attended and said how much they had gained. In fact, some important legal changes were made due to those seminars. One girl said it all: “We are experts by experience.” We need that experience in our decision-making. We need to enable children to express themselves, and to learn about systems and structures, rights and responsibilities, how to debate respectfully, and how to put forward ideas with confidence.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak in my noble friend Lord Bird’s debate. I have had many adventures with him over my life and I am a great fan. I want to talk briefly today about the importance of nature and wildlife to us all and about how our current lifestyle is eroding it.
When I was a child I lived in the country. My father was a great naturalist, with a great respect for the natural world. In the meadows next to our house, we had so many cowslips we would add them to pancakes at this time of year. In the hedges in our garden were the nests of thrushes, blackbirds, wrens, blue tits, great tits and hedge sparrows. We could count the robins’ eggs just by looking at them. Now those things are mostly memories. Insects are in such short supply in our country now that if you tell a child that you once had to scrape them off your windscreen on a summer’s night, they think you are making it up. It must be as foreign to them as the dodo is to me and some of us.
There is one culprit: our industrial farming system. Right from the publication of Silent Springin September 1962, the world has known about the deadly consequences of indiscriminately pouring chemicals on to the soil in the quest for higher food yields. Our country is a farmed country: 75% of the land is given over to agriculture, compared to only 45% in the USA, for instance. It defines what our country is like—the fields, villages and farms. After the privations of the war we joined a continent-wide push to banish hunger. It was an honourable pursuit and between 1935 and 1998, we more or less tripled the outputs of wheat, oats and barley and doubled milk production. The amount of chicken meat we produced increased by a factor of 25, but the cost was immense. It was much too high. Semi-natural habitats were drained. An estimated 97% of hay meadows were lost. Between 1990 and 2010, the area of crops treated with pesticides increased by 50%—this is almost yesterday.
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We have all these problems because of the laws of unintended consequences. I do not think Margaret Thatcher and all the other Conservative Members at the time were thinking, “You know what we’ll do? We’ll turn the United Kingdom into a place where the most wretched are offered nothing.” I do not think that they intended that. I think they thought, “Tell you what, we’ll modernise it, save a few bob and have this ‘care in the community’”, which did not even happen.
That was thinking translated into laws. Why do I want a Bill where there is a commissioner looking at the laws of unintended consequences and the well-being of future generations and people yet to be born, preventing people becoming Big Issue vendors or sleeping in the streets? Because, actually, we do not have a very sustainable situation. If we go to JPMorgan or somewhere similar—those places that fiddle around with figures and statistics—and say, “Could you tell us how much of the time of both Houses is spent repairing the damage created by previous laws which have been a bit here and a bit there?”, we might come up with some interesting statistics. I have been told by local authorities that 70% of their time is spent on making up for the problems that are caused by poverty.
When you look at the law of unintended consequences, if there had been a commission looking at the well-being of future generations at the time, it would have said, “Hang on, you can’t do this, because if you do, you will be condemning people.” We need to look at the mental health provision and create therapeutic communities so that when people go in with illnesses that are curable, they come out at the other end feeling a lot better because they have had the psychological and social help they needed.
We have got a Conservative Government giving us many of the problems of today. Last year I spoke in this House about what I considered to be one of the problems of social housing. This is now my chance to have a go at the left. I have had a go at the right, so now I am going to have a go at the left. I was born in the slums of Notting Hill and about 10 years after I left, a guy called Rachman moved in and bought the houses. He took people’s doors off and did all sorts of things. Previously, the Conservative Government had said that when someone leaves the lease, the property could go on to the open market, so Rachman was driving people out. He would then divide the apartments into two and all sorts of things like that. This caused consternation. A threepenny bus ride away from where that was happening, here in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, people were really upset about it.
After the minority Government of Mr Harold Wilson came in in 1964, he cleverly brought in the Rent Act 1965. It said that from then on the protection of the tenant was paramount and above the protection or the interests of the landlord. That was absolutely brilliant because rent tribunals were brought in. As a 19 year-old young father, I could go to the tribunal and say, “I dispute this rent.” Nine months later they would settle, by which time I would have moved on. That led to a real problem for social housing with people living in poverty and in the most need. The landlords removed most of their property from providing accommodation to people who were poor and it started to be sold. That is when the middle classes started to buy a house in Fulham for £5,000 and sell it two years later for £50,000. Then in the late 1960s there was an enormous rush into social housing. I witnessed that. Then the bar was raised. You could no longer get social housing unless you could prove some local connection or the fact that you were prepared to pay the rent. Suddenly, you had to be the most desperate of people to get into social housing.
Housing estates used to be sociable housing—the sort of housing that I moved into when I was 10 after we got out of the slums—where there were all sorts of people such as police officers, trainee teachers, the old and infirm and the long-term unemployed, and there was a great social mix. It was sociable housing. It was not a house where the local authority and housing associations had to raise the bar so much that you had to be desperate to get in, and then put you with a lot more desperate people. What was actually happening was that we were breaking something. The laws of unintended consequences had led some very well-intentioned people to stop the slum landlords knocking their tenants around, unfortunately, left right and centre.
We can look at what Mr Clegg did in 2010 when he jumped in with our friends from the Lib Dems and put together the coalition. I bet he has often thought, “Maybe I should have stuck with the students. Maybe I should have been more critical of austerity.” The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, said yesterday in the debate that I took part in, “If only in 2010 the coalition had realised the damage caused by austerity was not simply a question of saving money but that the effect would go on and on.” I am trying to give examples—and including myself—of where you do something and you screw it up for the future.
The Bill that I propose is based very much on the Welsh Bill. In my opinion, it looks much more grown-up, together and thoughtful than anything we do now. We have to put up with all sorts of things. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, alerted me to this problem 10 years ago. She said that she had spent the early part of her life as a young lawyer campaigning to protect the rights of the accused, only to find 20 years later that people who were accused of rape were using all those defences so that in the United Kingdom to get a rape case through the courts is like pulling teeth. She said in the Observer, “I am so sorry that I did that.” That is bravery. That is someone saying that we have to change the laws of unintended consequences.
I cannot think of a way in which we can tackle this issue any better. I going to refer to my notes at this point. I have written down what I must ask for because I am not very good at that. We should have a UK commissioner for future generations; preventive spending; working towards well-being goals for future generations; and tests for new proposals. I would also love to thank all noble Lords who have come along and given up their Friday for participating in this debate. I would like to find a way of getting the Government to wake up to the need. We cannot leave this unsustainable thing where laws are created and then the damage is passed on to other generations. We cannot leave the damage and the despoliation that that socially and environmentally leaves to the well-being of the generations of people who are not yet born. I beg to move.
The Bill is at the start of a very long journey. It is worth noting—I am sure the noble Lord knows this already—that there is resistance to change. There will be the temptation to simply audit what is happening and say “We’re doing it”, or look for an improved impact assessment rather than driving innovation directly through this Act. That is what the Welsh Auditor-General is now asking for and it is what we must ask of the Bill. That is the great test.
Are there elements in the Bill that will really empower the public bodies and the commission more effectively to drive change through the system? I believe that there are, not simply through process and asking the public to set the goals but by holding the public bodies’ feet to the fire—taking away the test of reasonableness, for example, in the way that they approach their duty; putting a duty on government departments, holding them all up to the light; and involving the private sector because that is so fundamental to future change. The most radical change of all would be to give the commissioner teeth like Gnasher in theBeano to go to law, investigate and then follow that up with legal remedies, and give that right to the public as well.
I am expecting the Minister to say very elegantly, “I fully accept the Bill in principle but I am in a slightly difficult situation as to whether in fact it is necessary”. I say to him: listen to what Welsh Ministers are saying. It is giving them a framework to do things better and more effectively and coherently, and to have the courage to think ahead. I would have thought that any confident Government would simply embrace that.
“losing money, their job and their house”,
but for others responsible drinking by the adult does not impact in a negative way, and children themselves recognise this.
However, even at low-level drinking by a parent, one-third of children report at least one negative outcome. Those who are children of alcoholics suffer in silence, at risk of abuse and neglect; three in five care applications involve alcohol or drug misuse. These children are at higher risk of mental illness and suicide themselves. Alcohol abuse is linked to early or unsafe sexual activity and sexual abuse. If bereaved through alcohol, these children can experience stigma and disenfranchised grief.
The greatest impacts of familial drinking fall on children—on the next generation. In England, there are probably almost 200,000 children living with at least one alcohol-dependent parent. Sadly, many more have both parents who are alcohol dependent. Most of these families are hidden from sight; they do not seek support. As harm is passed from generation to generation, policies seem to ignore the evidence. The economics of ongoing harms must be considered. The lives of children would be improved if there was adequate care for adults with alcohol dependence. The next generation could be spared some of the harms that blight its future.
The Welsh Government have recognised the evidence and have, like Scotland, adopted minimum unit pricing of alcohol. This measure is an example of one step in adopting a national policy to protect the well-being of future generations. We need many more.
My hope is that we will look at the French commission mentioned in the Library briefing—the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission—and the work of Thomas Piketty. I do not think he has necessarily got everything on his side, but it is a different way of looking at welfare economics and the way we can build society. I greatly welcome the initiative of my friend the noble Lord, Lord Bird—I do not mind calling people in other parties friends. I hope that this can be built upon to get us to a much better place than where we are now. He is great pioneer in bringing this forward.
The task of the One Newport Public Service Board was to ensure that, for generations to come, Newport will be an even better city in which to live, work and invest. The benefits of regeneration, growth and the use of our considerable assets had to be felt by all our citizens and more widely by the communities of the wider city area. The well-being plan was the first step in taking the theoretical to the practical steps of implementation. It set out the PSB’s priorities and actions for five years to improve the economic, social, cultural and environmental well-being of Newport. To give our children and grandchildren a good quality of life, we need to think about how the decisions we make now will impact on them in the future.
We had five interventions for the PSB to work on: the Newport offer; strong, resilient communities; right skills; green and safe places; and sustainable travel. We had a busy, positive and successful first year of implementation. We were mindful of issues and developments—the uncertainty surrounding our future relationship with the EU, and serious and organised crime. Challenges such as these reminded us to act today for a sustainable tomorrow.
I hope my brief practical example of leading and working with the Welsh future generations Act will lend support in this House to the implementation of a similar and better Act for the citizens of our neighbouring country.
We lack enough forward-thinking decision-makers. There is the business-as-usual approach of many politicians who are in denial about the climate crisis. Future generations will look back in astonishment at the blinkered ignorance of it all. Many children and young people are already telling us to fix things for them, whether it is Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion. The young feel that we are running out of time, and it is not really our time we are running out of but theirs. That is why we desperately need public bodies to act in pursuit of the environmental, social, economic and cultural well-being of the United Kingdom in a way that accords with this future generations principle.
We need to follow the Welsh example and have an independent voice that will call out the short-termism that is endemic in our political system. I do not have the rich life experiences of the noble Lord, Lord Bird—although I guess there is still time—but I have always cared about justice. For me, it is about the injustice of having people sleeping on our streets. I have volunteered many times with homeless organisations because it is something I care so deeply about. I feel that we currently have a Government who are not engaging with the social disparities and problems that we face. I urge the Government to give a good hearing to this Bill.
I am so glad that we heard from Wales earlier. Children Wales has an excellent set of national participation standards, which
“puts the involvement of children at the heart of improving well-being.”
A report from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk considers that, if a British Bill of rights comes to pass, it should include intergenerational rights. The section on policy options for England says:
“Civil society needs to mobilise to form strong cross-party support for representation of future generations.”
The report Generation 2050, produced as a resource for local government in Wales, suggests that government institutions can reflect the needs of future citizens by allowing ideas to surface from those citizens of future generations.
I am currently involved in an initiative of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which seeks to encourage children to participate in its deliberations. It follows a recommendation from the Council of Ministers stating that
“the capacities that children and young people have, and the contributions they can make, are a unique resource to strengthen human rights, democracy and social cohesion in European societies.”
Surely any policy concerned for the wellbeing of future generations must acknowledge and include the rights of future generations to have their say. I look forward to discussing the Bill further.
The first State of Nature report, published in 2013, studied 3,000 species and found that 60% were in decline. Modern farming has been a total nightmare for the creatures from the stories of our childhood—the hedgehogs, moles, rats and toads. We all read about them; they are not here any more. By 2019, the new State of Nature report concluded:
“Farmland birds have declined more severely than birds in any other habitat”.
More than half have disappeared. We have one turtle dove where we once had 10. Some 250,000 miles of our nation’s hedges, almost one-third of the total, have been destroyed to create ever larger fields.
However, we are at a turning point. When we became part of the European Economic Community, we joined the common agricultural bloc. The CAP consumes $65 billion a year, about 40% of the whole EU budget. It has been rightly criticised for its perverse incentives and its environmental impacts. For me, the only bright light of leaving the EU is that at this moment we have a chance to reform our agricultural policy for the first time in 50 years. Beginning next year, we will transition from subsidies for just owning land, regardless of what you do with it, to subsidies linked to the public good.
The Bill coming forward is good, but not good enough. Nothing is good enough. This is why my noble friend Lord Bird’s Bill is so important. If our children are denied access to the natural world, we know from so much research how much they suffer. We all suffer. We are passing on a less than perfect world at the moment—very much less than perfect—and the numbers for wildlife, sad to say, are still going downhill, so I urge all noble Lords to work with those of us working on the Agriculture Bill and to support my noble friend Lord Bird’s Bill, and help to cement the reforms that are very necessary if we are to ensure that our children can also have a hedgehog in their garden on a summer night, as I did.