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Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, I know that the Minister has a fondness for agriculture as I well remember when he trudged round the fields of Lincolnshire, trying hard to unseat me. We are very pleased to see him in his new role. The gracious Speech made one reference to the countryside. It stated that legislation would be brought forward to, "to ensure the better management and protection of the natural environment and to provide support for rural communities". I want to deal with the setting up of the new agency for the English countryside, Natural England, and, above all, I want to deal with the destruction of the English countryside by wind farms, which has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Monro. Even worse is the destruction of our coastline by even more useless wind farms, from which the cost of a unit of electricity is even more expensive than that of a unit produced by nuclear energy. These wind farms are subsidised, particularly with the back-up needed for when the wind does not blow. To a farmer struggling to make a living they are an attractive proposition, but, even with the subsidy, they make virtually no contribution to the national grid. Having struggled for 40 years to make a Highland estate in Sutherland "wash it's face" commercially, I went to look at several wind farms—one on Carter Bar on the Borders and, worse still, one on the coast of Caithness, next door to the Dounreay atomic power station, which is closing down. The noise and the hum from these wind farms, and the damage that they do to wild life and the countryside, are quite unacceptable. I went to the Dounreay exhibition explaining about the closing down procedure. Most people in Caithness and Sutherland would welcome a new nuclear power station at Dounreay. In the early 1980s, a special power line was put in to take the electricity from Dounreay to the smelter at Invergordon. Dounreay has a most powerful link to the grid at the moment. The decision on other nuclear power stations cannot be delayed any longer. It takes time to renew them and no wind power could possibly fill the gap. As a whole, the farming community will give the new agency, Natural England, a chance. It has worked well in Wales and we will have to see how well it works in England. The Bill states that its general purpose is the conservation of the natural environment, "contributing . . . to social and economic well-being". There is a major risk that it will treat conservation as a priority that will override all others and that, in effect, land managers will be thwarted in maintaining the adequate economic returns from their land that could possibly pay for that conservation. Natural England should not supplant the income-generating activities of the regional development agencies. Will the Minister and his colleagues look hard at ensuring that the Bill will deliver that? It is important that Ministers attempt to make the government machine more joined-up. Will the Minister tell the House how many fewer officials there will be in his department after these changes have been brought about and how much public money will be saved?