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Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

When I read Clause 13, my mind goes back—probably a good deal further than that of many noble Lords who sit in the House at this late hour—to another place in the late 1960s, when I spoke on behalf of the Opposition and when the then Minister of Agriculture, Fred Peart, who was much admired by a great many of us and who became Leader of another place and then Leader of your Lordships’ House, introduced legislation to set up rural development boards. Those rural development boards from the 1960s also had a power to acquire and dispose of property. I recall that the organisation was set up in the north Pennines, with its headquarters in my old constituency of Appleby. One of the things it did was to acquire a very run-down estate owned by the trustees of a Member of your Lordships’ House who is now deceased and whose name I shall not repeat. The board purchased that property with a view to setting up a project of great social and economic engineering in Nidderdale. At the time the project generated deep hostility because it was felt that it was not for a state organisation to acquire large swathes of country, whether in Nidderdale or elsewhere, in order to carry out the sort of social engineering which I think is implicit in Clause 2, covering Natural England’s general purposes. I have a good deal of sympathy with the amendment. Call it déjà vu if you like, but I am anxious about setting up an organisation with powers to acquire and dispose of property and to carry out social and economic well-being policies, as described in Clause 2. Can the Minister tell us what he thinks Natural England will do if it acquires or disposes of property? If he cannot do so tonight, perhaps between now and the Report stage he can consider whether the example of the rural development board set up in the 1960s is being resuscitated today. It really was a disaster and the board was wound up in the early 1970s, largely because of its grandiose plans to acquire swathes of the countryside in order to carry out social and economic engineering exercises. I hope that we are not retracing that disastrous step which, thank God, was cut off at its stocking tops in the early days.