Examination of Witnesses (Questions 760
- 769)
TUESDAY 27 JUNE 2000
RT HON
MICHAEL MEACHER
MP, MR ELLIOT
MORLEY MP, MR
ROGER PRITCHARD
AND MR
JOHN OSMOND
Mr Olner
760. You have spoken about that, Minister, but
what about stick for some of these industries? If they cause damage
to the environment and damage the biodiversity of any particular
area, should they not be fined, and perhaps those payments go
into an environmental pool that could be used for other worthwhile
projects?
(Mr Meacher) I entirely agree. Of course damage to
the environment should be remediated. We have just set in place,
I think on April 1st, the Contaminated Land Regime, which requires
any company, or indeed individuals, who contaminate the land to
make it good at their expense. If you damage a SSSI as a result
of the Countryside Bill currently going through, you can be required
to restore it to its pristine state, again at your own expense.
In regard to pollution which damages habitats for biodiversity,
as I have already said, I am keen substantially to increase penalties.
There has been talk in other areas that those should be linked
to turnover or profits, and I think they have to be significant
penalties which are actually going to deter serious and gross
damage to the environment. I think we have to prize the environment
more, all of us—individuals and companies.
761. I can fully understand and appreciate the
grand scale of pollution that sometimes happens, but I am more
concerned about the creeping damage that is done to the environment
and to biodiversity in certain areas. It is not one great big
thing but a number of small, interlinked ones. Do you think people
who do this should be better policed, and if they are found to
be damaging the environment, they should be fined?
(Mr Meacher) The Environment Agency is, if course,
responsible. It is our eyes and ears, if you like, for examining
damage done to the environment, and not only requiring it to be
made good, but prosecuting where they see fit. The Environment
Agency have recently appointed a chief prosecutor. I was pleased
about that, and I have certainly encouraged them to take a tough
line. No-one wants to have a penal attitude, but there is a very
small minority of both companies and individuals who behave extremely
badly, and they have in the past believed that they could get
away with it, and that the likelihood of being caught or the size
of the penalties were so derisory it was worth the risk. I think
we have to change that mindset.
Chairman
762. "Biodiversity" is not a term
that really grips the public imagination, is it?
(Mr Meacher) No.
763. What are you going to do about it then?
(Mr Meacher) Ask you, as an august Committee, to come
up with a better phrase. We have thought long and hard about this.
I agree, biodiversity is notoriously sometimes seen as a washing
powder. It is famously regarded as something very different to
what it is. But I cannot think of a phrase.
Mr Gray
764. What about "nature conservancy"?
(Mr Meacher) You takes your money and you makes your
choice.
Chairman
765. So you are not offering us a better solution.
What about the Biodiversity Action Plans? Are they not pretty
bureaucratic? Are they really going to grip the public's imagination?
(Mr Meacher) You are absolutely right, Chairman, that
getting the public's imagination and support behind them is extremely
important. Biodiversity, or indeed the environment in general,
is classically one of those things that cannot be left to a few
individuals and the rest of the people just carry on as they are.
It has to be meaningful and relevant and important to everyone
in order for it to be respected. I would not have said that the
Biodiversity Action Plans were bureaucratic. I think quite a lot
of the things I encounter are fairly bureaucratic but I would
not have said that about BAPs. I think they are under-funded,
they are fragmented, they are not connected up, and they are not
followed through, and it is to underpin them and make them more
effective which I think is very important. I do agree we need
to get across, particularly with regard to local plans, to local
populations. Again, how do you do that? By having demonstrations,
exhibitions at the Civic Centre, local Agenda 21, which is hopefully
organic development, not bureaucratically orchestrated by the
local authority, but all the relevant interests, including business,
NGOs, interested individuals, meeting to look at the environment
and the contribution that they can make. You could almost do this
infinitely. We are certainly by no means doing enough. How we
strengthen and underpin local Agenda 21 is the answer to your
question.
766. You have been telling us all morning that
a lot of this has to be left to the enthusiasm of volunteers.
How do we get the volunteers to have some sort of scientific base
for it? My impression is that in this country birds do pretty
well. It may be that certain Ministers have an interest in birds,
but are you really satisfied that algae or ticks or the liver
fluke get as good a look in in biodiversity terms?
(Mr Meacher) You are right. Some creatures, of course,
are much better for the imagination and childlike fondness really
than others. Issues like algae and eutrophication, ticks with
Limes disease which is beginning to appear in this country because
of climate change, are very serious. Your first question was,
I think, about the position of volunteers.
767. You told us that you rely on volunteers
for a great deal of this.
(Mr Meacher) Yes.
768. I am suggesting to you that the problem
with that is that volunteers tend to like certain groups, of which
birds seem to get very good coverage and other things do not have
as much public appeal. So we have, I understand, a very good count
of birds in this country, and yet we do not have a clue about
mammals, do we? We do not know what the state of dormice is and
things like that.
(Mr Meacher) I think it is a hard fact of life. We
are dependent on volunteers. It is true that the Heritage Lottery
Fund has made available revenue grants in order to improve the
capacity and skills of volunteer recorders, which I think is important.
We should not under-estimate that people who do give of their
time freely and extensively are not driven by simple ideas about
biodiversity. They have a much better and deeper understanding
of the nature of the whole network and the importance of, for
example, eutrophication and its damage to habitats in which they
may be interested. They are interested in mammals. I do not know
how much we know about the habitats or populations of dormice,
but I do not think they are as uninterested as you indicate.
(Mr Morley) I think there is a wider issue that you
have raised there, Chairman. You mentioned birds, and indeed,
birds attract a lot of attention. But there are still problems
in that where you have quite a scarce bird, a threatened species,
we have some Biodiversity Action Plans targeted through MAFF for
birds such as cirl bunting and stone curlew, and we have had tremendous
success. We have achieved the target of increasing the breeding
populations. I do not think that is a problem. Where you have
small populations of species under threat, you can turn them round
because you can pour the resources in and you can do it on a small
scale. Where we have a big problem is farmland birds, for example,
where there is a significant decline right across the board. Therefore,
the biodiversity approach has to be very broad-based to address
some of those very big declines of a wide range of species.
Mr Donohoe
769. Surely it is a previous administration's
fault that that happened. They introduced a heavy fine for stealing
eggs, where schoolboys were nicking magpies' eggs because they
were colourful. Now we are in the position where we have no song
birds because the magpies are stealing all their eggs. Therefore
we should not, should we, become involved in doing that? We should
let it all go to nature.
(Mr Morley) I do not think collecting eggs is part
of nature, and I think the relationship between things like magpies
and song birds is quite a complex one, which is not quite as simple
as some people think. But there is also the issue of mammals.
I think there is a lot known about dormice. It is a special species,
but there is very little known about other species like yellow-necked
mouse, which is a very rare species and we do not know its distribution
and we do not understand it. There are issues of wider biodiversity
rather than targeted biodiversity.
Chairman: On that note, unless you can tell
us what a yellow-necked mouse looks like, we had better finish
this session. Thank you very much indeed.
|
