My Lords, I regret to inform the House of the death of the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, on 20 October. On behalf of the House, I extend our condolences to the noble Lord’s family and friends.

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to reduce absenteeism in schools.

My Lords, tackling absence is at the heart of our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. If children are not in school, it does not matter how effective or well supported teaching and learning is; they will not benefit. That is why we are committed to working with the sector to provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school and rolling out breakfast clubs to every primary school.

I am grateful for that. Does the Minister agree that Covid weakened the contract between parents and schools? As a result, we have over 150,000 children missing on average every other day, double the number pre Covid, as well as 1.7 million missing on average every other Friday, again double the number pre Covid. Against the policies that she has just announced, will she agree to have targets to reduce absenteeism for those two categories?

The noble Lord is absolutely right to identify the scale of children who are both missing school and, in the case of those who are severely absent, missing more than 50%. We have seen those figures continue to rise, unfortunately. I am open to the idea of targets being the right approach, but I absolutely assure him that we are working extremely hard with a range of policies: the breakfast clubs that I have outlined, the specialist mental health professionals, the new guidance expecting close working between schools and local authorities, and the work on data and better analysis of those who are absent. That was started by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and we are absolutely determined to build on it to make sure that we bring those figures down.

My Lords, I entirely agree with the Minister that we should ensure that children are in school and get the best possible learning opportunities. However, we have a system whereby any parent can take their child out of school and say, “I am home educating them”. We have no checks on whether that home education is taking place, on its quality or on whether children are safeguarded. After Covid, we have seen children go back to school, not like school and say, “Can I be home educated?” “Yes.” Is the Minister prepared to support my Private Member’s Bill on home education?

The noble Lord is of course talking about a slightly different issue from absenteeism, which is where somebody is already on a school roll and is not attending. He makes a valiant plug for his Private Member’s Bill, which I am delighted to say I will respond to on 15 November. It is probably also worth saying that of course, through our children’s well-being Bill, we will legislate to introduce children not in school registers, to improve the visibility of children and young people who are not on school rolls, including those getting unsuitable home education.

My Lords, the Minister will know that children in the care of local authorities have generally had very disturbed childhoods and, because of that, missed a great deal of schooling. Will everything be done to help them catch up?

The noble Lord is absolutely right. Sometimes children in the care system have to move too frequently from one placement to another, which too often means that they have to move schools. They rightly get priority for admissions to schools but it is crucial that, through the work of our virtual schools and all corporate parents of children in care, we ensure that they have the stability to enable them to attend school and succeed.

My Lords, the main drivers of school absence are mental ill health and poverty, so it is very welcome that the Government will provide specialist mental health counsellors in each school. Hitherto where that has been provided, it has mainly been paid for from the pupil premium. Given that a number of those pupils now requiring assistance and counselling are not in receipt of free school meals, how will it be paid for and will it be the responsibility of the Department for Education or the Department of Health and Social Care?

My noble friend is right that mental health disorders among children are a growing problem. Working alongside the Department of Health and Social Care, we will provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school, and develop new young futures hubs, which will include access to mental health support workers. Also, we will recruit an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults, to cut the unacceptably long time that children and young people have to wait for child and adolescent mental health services; that commitment is specific to the Department of Health.

My Lords, is there any causal correlation between poverty, particularly in the wake of the cost of living crisis, and absenteeism from school?

The right reverend Prelate is right to identify that. The data shows that those on free school meals are far more likely to be absent from schools than those who are not. That is why we need a wide-ranging approach to ensure that we provide both the school action and the home backgrounds that will enable children to attend school and learn. My right honourable friends the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions are working hard on the cross-government childhood poverty strategy precisely to address some of those issues.

What is the Minister’s assessment of the National Parent Survey 2024 published by the charity Parentkind, which showed that three in 10 parents are now more relaxed about school attendance? This aligns with the department’s excellent data, which shows a big rise in that group since the pandemic.

My assessment is that it is concerning that parents, for whatever reason are becoming relaxed about their children’s attendance at school. As the noble Lord suggested, this has partly been linked to the pandemic. We know that each day of lost learning can do serious harm. Days missed can add up quickly. There is a link between absence and attainment, and pupils who are persistently absent are less than half as likely to achieve good GCSEs as those who attend every day. We need to give that message loud and clear to parents who, in being relaxed about their children’s attendance at school, are fundamentally damaging their future prospects.

My Lords, numerous studies have demonstrated the positive impact of arts and creative programmes on attendance and engagement, which is especially true for pupils from at-risk populations, where absenteeism of course creates an even longer shadow. Will the curriculum and assessment review take account of this evidence in considering the value of arts subjects, and will the Government encourage more schools to take up Artsmark, given that 96% of Artsmark schools report positive improvements on attendance, punctuality and engagement?

The noble Baroness is absolutely right that we need a curriculum in schools that will encourage all children to flourish and to be engaged. That is why, in setting up the curriculum and assessment review led by Professor Becky Francis, we have specifically asked it to consider how we can ensure that the curriculum meets the needs of disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs, and that it does that through creating space for exactly the sort of creativity for which the noble Baroness is a strong advocate.

Has any work been done on working from home? I gather that this is a factor which is leading to some absenteeism. As we are likely to see a growth in the number of people working from home, could we see that, at least in the public service, part of the contract is that those working from home will give an undertaking that their children will go to school?

My noble friend makes an interesting point. In my response earlier to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, I was very clear that, to be honest, it does not matter whether you are working from home as a parent, or where you are working—your responsibility is to ensure that your children are in school every day. If you do not do that, you are disadvantaging their futures. I do not think my noble friend meant this, but I would not want there to be some idea that there is some sort of excuse because of the way in which there are—quite rightly—more flexibilities about the way in which we work. However we as adults work, we have a responsibility to ensure that our children are in school, because that is where they will learn and have the best chance of a successful future.

To ask His Majesty’s Government when they plan to introduce legislation to implement ‘Awaab’s Law’.

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook, and with her permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in her name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for her tireless work under the previous Government in introducing the enabling powers for Awaab’s law through the Social Housing (Regulation) Act. I also pay tribute to Awaab Ishak and his parents, and the family’s efforts in campaigning for Awaab’s law. Their constructive work with the Government on this crucial policy deserves this place’s thanks and recognition. The Government will introduce Awaab’s law in both the social and private rented sector. This will support tenants to secure faster repairs, reducing health and safety risks. We will bring forward secondary legislation for Awaab’s law in the social rented sector in autumn.

My Lords, I understand that the Government have extended the timeline for implementing the secondary legislation that will set the standards that social landlords must comply with under Awaab’s law in order to also set out the rules that private landlords must comply with under the Renters’ Rights Bill. However, given that winter is approaching, bringing colder and damper days and nights, will the Minister commit to a more urgent timeline to ensure that no other child dies because of inhumane housing conditions?

The consultation received over 1,000 responses. It is important that we consider these responses in full before confirming the requirements of Awaab’s law. We intend to publish the Government’s response to the consultation and lay the statutory instrument for Awaab’s law in Parliament this autumn. Alongside it, the Renters’ Rights Bill will ensure that we have similar legislation for the private rented sector. The noble Baroness is right that we want to get this done as fast as possible. No one should ever have to lose a child because of the condition of their home. No one should have to suffer appalling living conditions. Nor should anyone feel powerless in the face of landlords who will not listen to them or who make them feel like they are the problem when they ask for help.

Do the Government agree with me that one of the problems we have now is that many social housing associations are behaving like private landlords? Many of the problems that happen for tenants, including mould, are happening in the public housing sector. Maybe we need to think again about whether we need more council houses and fewer housing associations.

On enforcement, seeking redress is important and tenants should challenge their landlords, whether it is a private landlord or the social housing sector. There are important ways to address this through the courts, but there is also the Housing Ombudsman. Tenants can challenge their landlord and if they do not get a satisfactory response, the Housing Ombudsman can address the issue, whether it is in the private or social sector. The noble Lord makes a valid point about the problems being widespread and not just in the private rented sector.

My Lords, only last week, the Housing Ombudsman said that damp and mould complaints constitute half of all its complaints. It named and shamed 20 social housing providers to which it had served severe maladministration orders. It is clear to me that the sector is already struggling with the timescales involved in Awaab’s law. Can the Minister assure us that all parties are ready for this? Following the comments made about speed, does he agree with me that new legislation is valuable only if it is enforceable? If it will not work, and if the sector is already struggling to make it work, do we not need to listen to the sector for a little longer before extending this legislation to the private rented sector?

My Lords, we are working with social landlord and tenant groups to consider the practical implications of the proposed requirements to be set through Awaab’s law. The Government’s response to the consultation, which will be published in due course, as well as subsequent regulations, will provide details on how Awaab’s law will work. We will issue guidance for landlords and residents on the new duties to be set by the regulations. The guidance will be published before the regulations come into force, to give landlords time to prepare and for tenants to know their rights.

My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree with me that Awaab’s law is not just important to our housing policy but absolutely germane to preventing child poverty? A child’s life chances depend on having a home that is clean, safe and habitable.

I absolutely agree with my noble friend’s excellent and eloquent point. It is for us all to learn lessons from what happened. She talked about the wider societal issues and unfortunate challenges we have to deal with, and I hope that we can work together across government to address them.

My Lords, in 1997, the Labour Government inherited damp and cold houses, and they had years to try to fix them. This Government have inherited from the previous Government 13 years of neglect. I welcome the measures that the Government are taking. Can the Minister introduce them as quickly as possible?

I note my noble friend’s point. There is a challenge ahead. There is a different set of economic circumstances in 2024 than there was in 1997, but we are equally focused to ensure that we can tackle this scourge in both the private and social rented sectors. We will work hard to ensure that, after the responses to the consultation, we can move on swiftly—which was the premise of the Question tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott.

My Lords, what extra resources will be made to local authorities to provide stronger investigatory powers and, ultimately, to deliver swift enforcement action?

The consultation on Awaab’s law in the social rented sector invited views on the costs of the policy. The department has considered those views and will publish an updated impact assessment alongside the government response to the consultation. As we set out in our manifesto, we recognise that councils and housing associations need support to build their capacity and make a greater contribution to an affordable housing supply. We will set out our plans at the next fiscal event, to give councils and housing associations the rent stability they need to borrow and to invest in both new and existing homes.

My Lords, the Government are right to bring some pressure to bear on the housing associations and councils to get their properties up to scratch; it is essential if we are to prevent any more incidents like the death of poor little Awaab Ishak in his damp, cold and mouldy home. But those housing associations and councils need income to keep their stock in good nick, and that means not having reductions, caps and constraints on the rental income that they receive. Can the Government assure us that rents will be allowed to rise in line with costs and not be the subject of the constraints which have kept the income down and therefore the level of repairs and major improvements at a level that is unacceptable?

I thank the noble Lord for his question and pay tribute to the excellent work he has done in this area for a number of years. To reassure him, as proposed in the consultation, Awaab’s law includes a provision for social landlords to defend themselves against legal action if they have taken all reasonable steps to comply with requirements but it has not been possible for reasons beyond their control. There is no plan by the Government to have any rent controls.

My Lords, my heart goes out to the parents of Awaab Ishak and anyone whose children are living in those kinds of unacceptable conditions. Can I press the Minister on a timetable? The consultation on the social housing aspect was in January of this year. We are some months down the line, with no apparent date for the regulations. Would there not be merit in at least introducing this for social housing now, and maybe getting some of these homes updated urgently, while the Government rightly work out how to extend it to private landlords as well?

I note the point made by the Baroness, Lady Altmann, about timing. As I said at the start, we intend to publish the Government’s response to the consultation and lay the statutory instrument for Awaab’s law before Parliament this autumn. In relation to the private rented sector, which the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, also talked about, the provision will be brought forward in the Renters’ Rights Bill, subject to consultation. On implementation, we continue to work with the sector on this and will confirm the commencement date for requirements when we introduce the regulations and publish the Government’s response.

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the benefit cap on child poverty.

Child poverty is a multifaceted issue and the benefit cap is just one factor that can influence the level of financial support available to children and families. Comprehensive action is essential to address the root causes of child poverty. This Government are committed to examining all the ways to dismantle barriers to opportunity, alleviate poverty and help families move towards sustainable employment. The child poverty task force is driving forward this work and will publish its strategy in the spring.

My Lords, as my noble friend knows well, not only is the cap a driver of child poverty, especially deep poverty, but it undermines government goals with regard to homelessness and domestic abuse. Will she therefore impress on the child poverty task force the case for its abolition alongside the two-child limit and, in the meantime, do what she can to ensure that at least the cap is uprated in line with inflation as a matter of course so that some of the poorest families are not denied the protection of the annual uprating?

My Lords, the Secretary of State is currently in the process of reviewing the levels of social security benefits that are uprated annually, and a statement will be made in due course. When the benefit cap was introduced by the coalition Government in 2013, the legislation required that it be reviewed every five years. The next review is due by November 2027. However, I hear my noble friend’s comments about the challenges facing many families in poverty. The child poverty task force, which is getting to work already, is determined to use all available levers to drive forward short-term and long-term actions across government to reduce child poverty. It is taking evidence from families, activists, local government and people across the country, and I will make sure that her comments are conveyed to it.

My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s comments about the child poverty task force, but it is an urgent question and this idea is putting things into the long grass. We want to hear from the Minister how quickly this group will report and produce some action to stop children living in poverty in this country.

My Lords, as I said, the child poverty task force has already started urgent work to address this, and it will publish a child poverty strategy in the spring. Given that the Government have not been in place for very long, looking across the whole of government to produce a strategy by spring reflects a real sense of urgency.

My Lords, in Wales children are more likely to be living in poverty than those in other age groups. Will the Minister tell us what tangible steps the two Labour Governments will take to eradicate child poverty in Wales?

I thank the noble Baroness for that question. I know that the Welsh Government take these matters very seriously. To make it clear, from the UK position the task force will work closely with the devolved Administrations. In fact, I can reassure her that the co-chairs of the task force have already written to the First Ministers to ensure that the strategy represents the interests of communities across the UK.

My Lords, I hope that the child poverty strategy group will urgently take advice in particular from teachers, who often find themselves at the forefront of attempting to alleviate the grinding poverty in which some of our children arrive in school, particularly because of the two-child cap.

My noble friend makes a very important point. I am very conscious that teachers are on the front line of this and that they see the day-to-day effects of the significant rise in child poverty we have seen in recent years. They are very much people who have things to say to us. That is why the strategy is being co-chaired by my boss, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and my noble friend’s boss, the Secretary of State for Education. Child poverty is not restricted to a single aspect of anyone’s life. It has many different causes and many different solutions. We will work across government, as a joined-up Government, to tackle this properly.

My Lords, the Government have indicated the financial cost of abolishing the two-child benefit cap. Can the Minister indicate the social cost of keeping 4.3 million children in poverty?

My Lords, I will be nerdy for a moment. We inherited two different policies. One is the two-child limit, which limits the benefits paid to any family to the first two children, except in certain circumstances; the second is the benefit cap we are talking about here, which limits the total amount that can be given to any family. I apologise—nerdiness over. One of the reasons this matters is that those problems have different solutions. One of the reasons we are having a child poverty strategy is that the different policies we inherited, the state of the social security system and the series of piecemeal changes all combine with rises in the cost of living, problems in social housing, problems with energy and problems across our society to produce the effects my noble friend is describing. That is why they have to be tackled together.

Last week the blast furnaces at Port Talbot closed and 2,700 people lost their jobs. That surely has a massive influence on the number of children in poverty in Wales. In consultation with the Welsh Senedd, what proposals do the Government have to make sure that those workers are re-employed?

I am so grateful to the noble Lord for raising that. One of the things we are determined to do is to revisit the way in which my department supports people into work. We need our jobcentres across the country to work closely with local, regional and devolved administrations to make sure we are addressing the problems in local labour markets and in local areas. In the near future we will publish a White Paper that sets out the new approach. But the noble Lord put his finger on it: we have to tackle the problems in communities to give people a chance of getting back to work. We need the country to be working—we want an 80% employment rate across our country. That is not just good for the economy or for the individuals; it is good for their children as well.

My Lords, we always welcome new initiatives to help unemployed people get back to work. With that in mind, will the Minister update the House on the current number of job vacancies?

There is always something that you wish you had put in your pack when you stand up. Today it is that. I will write to the noble Lord.

My Lords, I do not think the Minister should apologise to the House for being “nerdy”. This is definitely an area where nerdiness is welcomed across the House. Can she reassure us that the work of the task force will be comprehensively supported by evidence looking across all aspects of the issue, with granularity around issues such as support for carers and people with disabilities? What has the experience of any exemptions been? How helpful has that been? We need to be sure that the work is not only comprehensive but evidence based and transparent.

I am very grateful to my noble friend for the absolution and for the thought that I am among friends. Nerds are my people.

She makes an important point. We have a lot of evidence, but there are real gaps in it. The commission will gather the evidence that is there, listen to how people are experiencing these things on the ground and look at the impact of policies across government. To give one small example, she mentions disability. In the benefit cap, households are exempted if they get a whole series of benefits. If they are getting universal credit because of a disability—if they are getting the UC care element, carer’s allowance, PIP or ESA—they are exempt from the benefit cap, but that does not take away the problem that there is still a massive disability employment gap. We want people to get into work. If we are to hit that 80% employment target, a challenge is to look not just at the kind of jobs that are out there but at how we close the gap between people who want to work and employers who want employees. That is part of what we will do in the evidence process.

My Lords, in respect of child poverty, will the Minister do all that she can to ensure that estranged parents, especially fathers, pay their proper maintenance agreements?

Absolutely, my Lords. It is not only an area of my responsibility in the department but one of long-standing concern. A significant amount of money changes hands already but we are looking at each stage—how do we make the Child Maintenance Service operate ever better than it does at the moment? An awful lot of money changes hands, mostly relatively smoothly. There are challenges with some non-resident parents and some who simply do not wish to pay, so the Child Maintenance Service is constantly updating the range of powers it has to go after them.

We all take the same view: you may separate from your partner, but you do not separate from your children. We need to find ways to make sure that both parents contribute. We have a consultation out, which we are looking at. We are also reviewing the child maintenance calculation. We are committed to making sure that the service works well and that the principles are up to date, but no one gets away from the fact that you may leave your partner, but you do not leave your kids.

My Lords, to continue the Welsh theme, 30% of children in Wales are living in poverty, according to the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, so I stress to the Minister the urgency of reducing child poverty across the UK.

The noble Lord and I are as one mind on this. Child poverty is too high across the UK. It went up significantly under the last Administration. We are determined to bring it down, and we will do so.

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they plan to implement the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation to pause permission for new incineration plants to allow for a review of the treatment of residual waste.

My Lords, the Government are committed to transitioning to a circular economy. We are considering the role of energy from waste in the context of circularity, economic growth and reaching net zero. As part of this, we are giving consideration to the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation. This year, Defra will publish an analysis of energy-from-waste capacity in England to inform future policy. We continue work to implement packaging reforms, drive up recycling rates and take material out of incineration.

I thank the Minister, but I am deeply dissatisfied. This Government, in whom I had a lot of trust, have made the deeply irresponsible decision to allow the Portland incinerator to go ahead. I declare an interest as a resident of Dorset, although nowhere near Portland. Incineration and energy from waste is not a practical way forward; it is very damaging both in terms of public health and environmentally. I beg the Minister to speak to her department and suggest getting better advice on energy?

My Lords, it does say in the Companion that you should not thank a noble Member for their Question—so, on this occasion, I will not. The environmental permitting regulations prevent the incineration of separately collected paper, metal, glass or plastic waste, unless it has gone through some sort of treatment process first. Following that treatment, incineration is seen to be the best environmental outcome. We know that the recycling rate is too low, that we burn too much waste and that, for too long, recycling rates in England have plateaued. The way forward is to look at the whole big picture and our circular economy ambitions are designed to address this.

Will the noble Baroness commit to looking not just at incinerators but at anaerobic digesters and accept that they have a powerful role to play not just in getting rid of residual waste, particularly household waste, which is a very vexatious challenge, but in heating people’s homes at a reduced rate? Will the Government keep an open mind on energy from waste, including anaerobic digestion?

As I just mentioned, we are looking to do a review right across the piece on this, so anaerobic waste will certainly be part of that.

My Lords, it is all very well to incinerate waste, but does the Minister agree that a real priority should be to reduce the amount of waste that we produce as a country? The real way to deal with this problem is just to produce less waste.

It is a really important point that the noble Lord makes. If we are moving to a more circular economy, as this Government want, we have to see less residual waste being generated —in fact, less waste as a whole. There is a statutory target to effectively halve residual waste by 2042 from 2019 levels, but there still will be an estimated 17.6 million tonnes of residual waste to manage in 2042. Therefore, we have to look at the bigger picture. How do we actually reduce waste overall?

My Lords, is not the biggest incinerator in the country the Drax power station? It receives eye-watering subsidies for burning wood that has been transported across the oceans, creating emissions, which has had to be dried and cut into chips, also making emissions, and which emits, on being burned, more CO₂ than coal. This is justified on the grounds that, over the next half-century to a century, trees replanted in those forests will absorb CO₂. If we can take this leisurely approach to reducing CO₂, is there really a climate emergency?

I do not consider the Government to be taking a leisurely approach on this aspect. What is really important is that we look at how we decarbonise our energy from waste facilities going forward. We have consulted on expanding the UK Emissions Trading Scheme to waste incineration and energy from waste, and we are taking on board the responses to that and will bring forward detailed final policy in due course. We plan to include energy from waste under decarbonisation readiness requirements.

Currently, we are incinerating over a million tonnes of food waste a year, as well as 64,000 tonnes of potentially edible food that gets sent to anaerobic digesters; the latter in particular is a clear violation of the WRAP food hierarchy. What will the Government do to re-energise the WRAP campaign around food waste, which, for a while, seemed to work really well but now is very much on the back burner, and food waste is going up. As a redistribution charity, we could really do with that food.

The noble Baroness makes a very good point around food waste: it is a real challenge. I know from talking to my counterparts in the department that, as part of our review of how we manage waste going forward, looking at food waste is critical, because there are so many different complex aspects to it, such as what is included, what is not included, and how we work with supermarkets and with local government. She is absolutely right to raise that issue and I will be discussing it further with my department.

My Lords, in line with the Government’s climate commitments and, given energy from incineration is now our most CO₂-intensive generation, will the Government consider prioritising incineration plants for their £21.7 billion package of carbon capture and storage funding? Is it not better to fix an existing problem than create new problems around hydrogen production to fix?

Obviously, the noble Lord knows that we have the new CCS—carbon capture and storage—facilities open. We see that as a critical funding decision that we need to be working on to move forward in this area. It is also important to think about how we regulate in this area going forward and how we recover the energy from this. It a very big picture that DESNZ is working on to ensure that we have sufficient energy capacity in the future, particularly around industry, and that that energy capacity is produced in a way that fits in with the circular economy and decarbonisation, so that we can meet our climate change targets.

My Lords, when Conwy County Borough Council in North Wales switched to four-weekly collections of residual waste, this led to an 11% spike in the tonnage of recyclables collected and a reduction of 12% of residual waste. The council’s cabinet member put this down to residents being incredibly motivated to recycle and understanding the local and global benefits of recycling. How are the Government working with local authorities to improve awareness of personal responsibility in this area?

We are working very closely with local authorities but also with devolved Administrations. One thing we see as a high priority is building constructive working relationships with the devolved Administrations and different tiers of government. It is only by working together and sharing best practice that you achieve the kind of results that the noble Baroness is talking about.

My Lords, I draw attention to my registered interests. In the race to net zero, and given the importance of reducing carbon footprints, how excited are this Government about our world-leading advances in small modular reactors—SMR nuclear?

This Government, as I am sure the noble Lord is aware, have pledged great support for nuclear energy going forward. We need it as part of our future energy security, and small modular reactors are clearly a part of that nuclear journey.

My Lords, plastic waste is a major problem for the planet, yet plastic is eminently reusable. What action are the Government taking to improve and increase the level of reuse of plastic?

That is a very good point: we talk about recycling a lot but we do not talk enough about reuse. That has to be a critical part of reducing the amount of waste that we have as a country. This is very much part of the discussions with local authorities, because they have a key role to play in this. Also, encouraging people on behaviour change is difficult and the Government definitely have a role to play in that.

My Lords, considering that we are being nerdy, I wonder whether the Minister can share with the House the technologies that are being looked at to clean up the emissions from waste incineration plants.

Unfortunately, I am not nerdy, so I am unable to answer the noble Lord’s question, but I am sure that we can get back to him in writing.

My Lords, some people do not like nuclear power and will not support it, and some do not seem to like any sort of generated energy proposals. But, after 13 years of neglect, it is right that the Government take a view that they will look to reduce pollution in the environment but also keep the lights on.

My noble friend is absolutely right. It is critical that we drive forward our energy policy as a matter of urgency. The last thing we want is not only to have power cuts and insufficient energy but to become too reliant on other countries for our energy all the time. We need to manage our own energy in this country, build the kinds of energy plants we want, work on CCC and nuclear and invest in the future for our long-term energy security.

To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the acquittal of a police officer charged with murder in the case of Chris Kaba, what steps they plan to take to review the legal position of firearms officers.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for his question. As my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said in her response to yesterday’s verdict, this case has caused deep concern for communities and police officers—and, of course, for both families involved. It is important that those families are given space to process the verdict. The Home Secretary confirmed to Parliament in September that work begun under the previous Government on the police accountability system was important and would continue. She intends to set out further steps on that work in the Commons in the coming days. Of course, I will update this House when she does.

I thank the Minister for that reply, and I apologise to the House for not reading out the Question, as I believe I should have.

Obviously, this is a tragedy. It is a tragedy that a man died, and it is a tragedy for the family, for their son, perhaps for the brothers and the rest of the family. I realise that. But despite the fact that the jury in this case was unaware—as we all were until today—that Mr Kaba was to be charged and indicted for a shooting only days before he was shot dead, that he was linked to a person being shot in May of the same year, and that the vehicle in which he was traveling had been linked to a further shooting, it took a jury only three hours to find the officer in the case not guilty.

Police officers who carry firearms are very few. There are 67 million people in this country, but only around 3,000 who, on our behalf, are volunteers who must go forward to face someone who is armed or otherwise dangerous. They are paid no more for taking that awful responsibility. They do not go to work each day to kill anyone. It seems that the system does not give them the benefit of doubt that was given by the jury in this case.

Perhaps the Minister will consider in his reply today, or, if necessary, tomorrow, how the legal system can give the benefit of the doubt to these brave men and women, who on our behalf, in a fraction of a second, have to make the most awful decision they will make—perhaps never, but usually only once in a career.

The noble Lord will know that it is for the Crown Prosecution Service to determine what charges are processed. In this case, under current regulations, it determined to make those charges at this time. It is also for the jury to consider the evidence put before it, which it did in this case, and reached a verdict of acquittal within a short space of time. It is also for the Home Office to ensure that we support our police officers in doing a dangerous job upholding the law and protecting our society. All those aspects and the outcome of this trial will be assessed by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. As I have indicated to the House, and to the noble Lord, I will report back when we make the Home Office Statement in the House of Commons and, in due course, this noble House also.

My Lords, first, I thank all the armed police officers who serve, particularly those who protect us in this House. As the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said, this is indeed a tragic situation. But yesterday Sergeant Martyn Blake was exonerated fully. As another accused and exonerated officer, Tony Long, writes today in the Telegraph:

“The public is only now finding out the whole truth about Chris Kaba”.

He says of Mr Kaba’s fellow gang members that

“they should have all benefited from anonymity, granted by the courts, while Martyn Blake was denied the same privilege, isn’t just ironic, it’s a national disgrace.

I agree. What steps will the Minister take to reassure current firearms officers so that they have the confidence that they can carry out their duties with the support and backing they deserve?

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, for his contribution. He will know that the jury in this case made its assessment and gave its verdict on the evidence presented before it. Other matters on which he has commented were not presented to the jury and, therefore, the acquittal in this case was determined by the information presented by the prosecution and the defence.

The noble Lord will also know that it is important to thank the officers, who are voluntarily doing the task of being armed officers. This Government are certainly aware that we need to examine the regime and discussions around it in the light of this case and others that he has mentioned. Police officers are accountable to the law for their use of force and it is right that their powers are scrutinised robustly. It is also important that we commit to working with the police to strengthen officers’ confidence that they have the support of the Home Office in undertaking their task.

My Lords, I refer to my policing interests in the register. Of course, it is appropriate in any case where lethal force is used by the police that it is properly looked at, accountability is maintained and everyone can be satisfied whether or not that force was used appropriately. But why does it have to take so long? These cases drag out, often for several years. That is not appropriate and not in the interests of the family of the person killed or anyone else. What could be done to expedite matters?

I agree with my noble friend that it is in the interests of society as a whole, and of both the community and officers, that when difficult decisions are taken around charging following killings by police officers, these matters are resolved as speedily as possible. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary is reflecting on that; she and I will report to both Houses and consider those matters further.

My Lords, for any family to lose a child is truly tragic, but it is absolutely dreadful to lose a child in such circumstances. When you add to this the deep distrust of the police in some communities, this can lead to all sorts of problems and suspicion. The police must never be above the law, but neither should they have to wait two years for a jury unanimously to find them not guilty of such a serious charge that has been hanging over them and their family. The situation is appalling. What steps are the Government taking to fix the criminal justice system, which is broken on all levels?

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for her question. An individual lost his life in this circumstance. The jury made a decision based on the evidence before it. That is not to take away from the fact that an individual lost their life and that that has a big impact on the family. There has also been a major impact on the police officer who has been charged with, and now acquitted of, the offence initially suggested by the CPS. How long that takes is a valid question and I understand why the noble Baroness raised it. We will look at that in due course.

The noble Baroness said that the criminal justice system is broken. It has many challenges but this Government have not had stewardship of that system for the last 14 years. I did, in part, when I was a Minister in the previous Labour Government. There are challenges now about timing and a range of issues, which my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Justice will be examining. Issues that relate to the Home Office and the matters before us in the Question from the well-versed and experienced noble Lord, Lord Hogan- Howe, will be examined in due course.

My Lords, some police officers have been found convicted of appalling crimes but many others have given their lives in the line of duty, so there is a difficult balance to be struck here. It is of course right that police should be held accountable, but is the Met Commissioner not right when he says that if we crush the morale of the police, we make all of our society less safe? So, in considering the way forward, what discussions and consultation will the Home Secretary be having with those who work on the front line of policing in this country?

I am grateful to the noble and gallant Lord for his question. It is vital both that the police have confidence to exercise their duties, as demanded by this House and the Government as a whole, and that they do that in a way that is accountable but with proportion and under the rule of law. That is what we are going to examine: whether the experience of this case affects and impacts upon that particular aspect.

It is also important that the community has confidence in policing, and the two go hand in hand. We therefore need to ensure that we work through this, not just today but in the longer term, to build community confidence in policing and to ensure that the police themselves have confidence in their operational skills and that, for the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, they have confidence to discharge their duties. At the end of the day, they are protecting society and are given those powers by this House and the House of Commons to do so.

My Lords, I very much welcome the way in which the Minister is dealing with this. I had the privilege of meeting the armed section of the British Transport Police some years ago, and I was in awe of the responsibility that we place on police officers who are armed and on the front line for us. Obviously, this is a particularly tragic case, but it is also important that we say to the police that we give them our full support when they are carrying out their duty to protect the public.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his support and for his welcome. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary is continuing the accountability review that was established by previous Home Secretaries in previous Governments to examine the issues that are before this House in many of the questions raised today. My right honourable friend is reaching urgent conclusions on that and, as I have indicated today, will be reporting back to the House of Commons. My commitment to the noble Lord and this House is that, the moment she does so, I will be here to do the same, and I will be open to questions on the detail of any proposals in due course.

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. A former armed police officer speaking on the BBC’s “Today” programme this morning—and I commend his contribution to noble Lords—asked whether an alternative akin to a military court martial could be used in such cases. Is that something the Government would consider?

As with the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, brings great experience to this matter. He has made a suggestion that is worth reflecting upon, but I do not wish to give consideration to it today. There are areas that we are looking at in this whole process that I will discuss with this House in due course, but today I would rather reflect on the fact that we have confidence in our police to do the job, that the jury and the CPS came to a conclusion in the trial yesterday that respects the rule of law, and that the jury has been unanimous in its decision. We will reflect on how we approach the situation post today, if the noble Lord will allow it.

The Minister said that the jury was wholly unaware of the recent evidence that we have now been given in relation to the victim and various activities that he had been involved in. But, of course, the police will have been aware of all those matters; equally, the prosecution authorities will have been aware of those matters when deciding whether or not it was appropriate to charge and try the defendant. Is the Minister happy that, with all that information, it was nevertheless considered appropriate to bring this matter to trial?

It is for the Home Office to make decisions on a range of issues. Rightly, I am not eligible to become the Crown Prosecution Service and determine what information it presents to a jury; nor am I in a position to be the jury in the trial because I have not been party to the information that was presented to it. It is for the CPS to charge and the jury to determine, and then—if a conviction takes place, which in this case it did not—for the judge to pass sentence and for the criminal justice system to manage that sentence in an effective and appropriate way. I hope the noble Lord will accept that his points are interesting but not for me.

My Lords, in 35 years as a serving police officer, many as a detective, I developed a very high regard for members of juries. I think we tend to not give them all the information. When I was the president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, we campaigned vehemently to change the law on the right to silence. Your Lordships may be surprised to know that when we interviewed prisoners who continually said “no comment”—noble Lords will probably have seen that happen on television —we were not allowed to give that information to the jury as it was felt that it would be too prejudicial. The law was changed and I think we have had a better justice system since then. Martyn Blake was acquitted—and what a catastrophe it might have been had he been convicted. Can the Minister say whether an appeal on the evidence we have heard today would have been put before the appeal hearing?

Again, I know the noble Lord has great experience of policing, but he will also know that those policing matters, those charging decisions, that acquittal decision and any appeal decision are not for the Home Office. The issues that we will be examining are around police accountability and the issues that have arisen out of this case, but not this case. It is not for me to be judge, jury, CPS or, indeed, police. If I did all those things, this House would soon call me to order.

That Lord Purvis of Tweed be appointed a member of the Select Committee, in place of Baroness Walmsley.

That the Regulations laid before the House on 5 and 12 September be approved.

Relevant document: 3rd Report from Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Considered in Grand Committee on 21 October.

That the order of commitment be discharged.

My Lords, I understand that no amendments have been set down to this Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript amendment or to speak in Committee. Unless, therefore, any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the order of commitment be discharged.

That the Bill be now read a third time.

My Lords, I have it in command from His Majesty the King to acquaint the House that His Majesty, having been informed of the purport of the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill, has consented to place his prerogative, so far as it is affected by the Bill, at the disposal of Parliament for the purposes of the Bill.

That the Bill do now pass.

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who spoke in the debate on the Bill and have otherwise indicated support and commented on the Bill. There have been no amendments throughout the Bill. I wish that could be said for many other Bills, but I suspect that may not be the case as we proceed. This is a straightforward Bill, limited in its scope, requested by the Church of England with the simple aim to extend by five years the arrangements in place for the appointment of Lords spiritual contained within the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015.

I particularly thank the Convenor of the Lords Spiritual, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans—and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds for being here today—for his support during the passage of the Bill, along with other noble Lords who spoke and engaged in the debate.

Your Lordships will know that, as a result of that legislation six female Bishops have already been appointed to your Lordships’ House more quickly than would otherwise have been the case. In fact, we are about to see the benefits of this legislation in place again. Following the retirement of the Bishop of Worcester, the Bishop of Peterborough will replace him in the House of Lords in due course under this legislation. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester for his 12 years of dedicated service in this place, and I very much look forward to welcoming another female Bishop to the Bishops’ Benches.

Finally, I thank my officials and those from the Church of England, who worked together on the Bill. I thank the Official Opposition for their support and other noble Lords too. I hope it will have as smooth a passage in the other place. In that spirit, I beg to move.

My Lords, I welcome the fact that the Bill has strong support in the House, and that support includes these Benches. We are pleased to work with the Government in cases such as this where our objectives are aligned. I am proud of our record supporting women in this House, and our women Bishops have made many valuable contributions to Parliament since they first became Members of your Lordships’ House. As a frequent member of church congregations, I can confirm that this reflects the sterling work of female clergy right across the country.

Finally, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who is not in his place but has so eloquently led for the Bishops on this matter, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds. I thank the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal for her work on this Bill and I thank the officials involved. As she has said, I hope the other place looks upon the Bill favourably.

My Lords, I think it is down to me to thank the Government. All the other Bishops are at a House of Bishops residential elsewhere. I thank the Government for taking this on and thank those who contributed to the debate at different stages. This is a mechanism to allow us to make the progress which we need to make more quickly. I am grateful to the Government and the House for their support.

My Lords, the following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Monday 21 October:

“The House is aware that a political agreement has been reached with Mauritius about the long-term future of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Once any treaty with Mauritius comes into force, following its proper parliamentary scrutiny, Mauritius will be responsible for any migrants who arrive there. However, we needed to find an interim contingency solution for the period before that agreement comes into force. Given that there is no permanent population, BIOT has never been an appropriate long-term location for migrants due to the logistical challenges of providing appropriate care in such a remote place without civilian infrastructure.

On 15 October, a new memorandum of understanding was reached with the Government of St Helena so that any new migrants arriving in the interim period will be transferred to St Helena. The intention is for that agreement to last until the treaty with Mauritius comes into force, recalling that, in practice, no new migrants have arrived on Diego Garcia since 2022.

We are hugely grateful to the St Helena Government for their assistance. Their Chief Minister has said:

‘This arrangement presents a unique opportunity for a British Overseas Territory to be in a position to assist the UK, and we are pleased to be able to work in close partnership with the UK Government towards a mutually beneficial solution’.

The UK Government have agreed to provide one-off funding of £6.65 million to St Helena to improve health and education outcomes, and upgrade government infrastructure. This is consistent with our long-term support to the community in St Helena, which is of course crucial. This is a long-term, consistent partnership. We will support St Helena by providing technical support and funding the transfer and subsistence costs for any migrants affected. Of course, this is not the first time that St Helena has supported the wider UK family. The agreement is testament to its integral place in our family. We thank it for its support”.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. As noble Lords will remember, the previous Government were often criticised, sometimes justifiably, for making announcements in the media as opposed to making them to Parliament. It was therefore disappointing to see that this announcement was made by briefing to the media before Parliament was briefed on it.

As the noble Baroness said, an agreement was reached with the Government of St Helena. Does that mean that it was reached with the entire Legislative Council of St Helena and the residents who will be affected by this policy? Can the Minister say whether the Government are now in favour of offshoring asylum seekers while their applications are processed?

As to whether the agreement was reached with the entire Legislative Council, we respect the democratic autonomy of St Helena. It is for St Helena to determine what consultation or engagement it wishes to have; it is not for the UK Government to take those decisions on behalf of St Helena, which has the right to take them and has chosen to handle this in this way. The Minister from St Helena’s comment is very clear.

On offshoring, I think the noble Earl is trying to probe how this may or may not relate to the previous Government’s Rwanda programme. Noble Lords will recall that that programme cost £700 million and returned four migrants, voluntarily.

My Lords, it is good news that the Government have reached an agreement with Mauritius in principle, although there are of course still concerns about the involvement of the Chagossians in the process. Will any migrant who gets to these territories and is then transferred to St Helena have an opportunity to apply for asylum in this country, given the role we are playing in the interim period before Mauritius takes over its responsibilities? Will the Mauritius agreement be subject to scrutiny by the International Agreements Committee of this House? If so, when is it likely to come before us? Will the Tamil asylum seekers, who were kept in awful conditions on Diego Garcia without a solution being found until recently, be able to seek asylum in this country, even though they may have to transfer elsewhere in the interim? If so, what will be the timescale?

These are theoretical migrants, as no migrants would be subject to the new agreement with St Helena. It is not an international agreement in the same way that our agreement with Mauritius is; it is an agreement with one of our overseas territories, so it is slightly different. In the very unlikely event that any new migrants arrive in the Chagos Islands, they would be removed to St Helena and it would be for St Helena to process them and make any decisions about their status. It is our position that Diego Garcia is not a suitable place for the current migrants; most have left, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago. They will not be subject to this agreement and will be dealt with separately.

As I was recently in St Helena at a Commonwealth small islands conference, I was shocked to hear about this development. The education, health and other facilities for the small population of the island will be severely stretched. Can the Minister give us some idea of the numbers envisaged and the timescales, given the remoteness of St Helena and the transport difficulties?

I shall endeavour to reassure the noble Baroness, whose care for St Helena is clear in her question. Our hope is that no migrants arrive in the Chagos Islands during the 18 months that this agreement will be in place—it is either for 18 months or until the agreement with Mauritius is ratified, whichever is sooner. We hope that it is much sooner than 18 months and that nobody arrives and needs to be taken to St Helena. However, the noble Baroness is right to say that, regardless of any new migrants, St Helenians face health and education support challenges, and we are providing them with £7 million for that. We would also pay for the transport and subsistence of any new migrants, so we think this agreement is good for St Helena, which is why it has welcomed it so warmly.

My Lords, this is a substantial amount of money. Does the Minister agree with me that it could be much better spent on a comprehensive feasibility study of the practicalities of resettling the Chagossians on the outer islands? If that was successful and worked, surely the Sri Lankans currently on Diego Garcia could go to the outer islands.

The noble Lord rightly says that £6.65 million is a lot of money, but I point out that the previous Government were spending £50 million every year on housing those migrants on Diego Garcia. We think that that is not an appropriate place for them to be, and we are going to work to make sure that they are more appropriately dealt with.

My Lords, I agree with the Minister that Diego Garcia is not an appropriate place to house migrants; indeed, there were returns of Sri Lankans to Sri Lanka. But under the agreement, if people arrive during the 18-month period, what happens to those who are rejected for asylum after the processing takes place on St Helena? Secondly, will those who are entitled to claim asylum in St Helena be granted the same entry rights that St Helena’s residents are to enter the United Kingdom?

It is important to note that there would be no automatic right to entry rights or citizenship. It is for the Helenian Government to make a determination about anybody who arrives and facilitate their removal.

How will people be physically removed? How will they get to St Helena? Is accommodation being provided for them on St Helena on their arrival?

Again, we are not anticipating migrants arriving, and this is very much a contingency measure. But should that happen, transport would be provided and they would be accommodated, in line with all the obligations anyone would expect in terms of decency, far better on St Helena, where there is a civilian population and healthcare and education facilities. It is far better there than on BIOT, where no such facilities were available.

My Lords, I begin by thanking the Minister for engaging with me in correspondence last week, in which he calmly set out his reasoning for the present policy proposal. I express my deep sympathy to him for having to respond to questions on a Statement from the other place that is heavy in hyperbole and very weak on reasoning.

What is particularly surprising is that by this morning, the Justice Secretary, who made the original Statement in the other place, was conceding in an interview that this is not a problem you can build yourself out of.

Where did this policy originate? The last Labour Government, while recognising the obvious link between sentencing and prison capacity, decided to advance a policy that relied on prison capacity being predicted and adjusted to accommodate sentencing policy, rather than sentencing policy taking account of prison capacity. The Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford described this “predict and provide” policy as flawed. The then president of the Prison Governors Association described the then Labour Government’s policy as

“an out-of-control demand met by the provision of little more than penal warehousing”.

The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, then chair of the prison policy group, described the policy as “simplistic”.

What did the then Labour Government do? They announced plans for the building of three titan prisons with massive capacity. What did they do next? They announced the abandonment of plans for three titan prisons with massive capacity and announced plans for the building of five new prisons. If we could find them all, we might utilise their capacity, but the fundamental issue here is not prison cells but penal policy. It is not only obvious but well established that if you increase sentencing powers, sentences increase. Magistrates, like science, cannot resist a vacuum. They will fill it. Increasing sentencing in the magistrates’ court may well relieve some pressure on the Crown Court, but it is liable to increase pressure on reception prisons and category C prisons.

What will that impact be? We have no impact assessment, but the means to carry out such an assessment are potentially available. During the pandemic, the sentencing powers of magistrates were temporarily increased from six to 12 months. It should be possible to correlate this with the impact on reception prisons and category C prisons. Why has that not been done?

I note the Government’s most recent decision, which is to appoint the former Conservative Justice Secretary David Gauke to carry out a review. I applaud their decision to call on his expertise and ability to properly inform them as to what they should do next.

I come on to the question of early release, which is connected to this proposal over sentencing. If the Government are to release more prisoners in the next few days, will they please try to release the right ones? Last time, they released dozens of prisoners who did not qualify for release and dozens of prisoners who had breached restraining orders and should never have qualified for early release. Of those who did qualify for early release, some were let out on licence without an electronic tag, which might have made it a little difficult to work out where they had gone.

In coming to a conclusion, I observe that the marrying up of social policy, penal policy, sentencing policy and prison capacity in the context of recidivism, extensive substance abuse, mental health issues and the requirements for care in the community and family support raises complex issues, particularly when the Treasury will rarely, if ever, invite the Ministry of Justice to the front of the spending queue. Those issues have to be addressed as a whole and, in my respectful view, they are not well served by a simplistic statement of blame, which was essentially what was delivered in the other place.

I conclude by thanking the Minister once again for his reasoned and calm engagement on this topic and I look forward to his response.

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, gave us some interesting historical context, but I had expected an apology—or at least a guilty plea, with the plea in mitigation that he chose to leave the previous Government before the ceiling really started to fall in. They left an appalling situation: overflowing prisons, a huge backlog of untried cases, record numbers of remand prisoners, and victims seeing no outcome or closure to what they had suffered. This Government now have to deal with that, and they are running out of their few options to do so. I welcome their decision to have a fundamental review of sentencing policy and to invite David Gauke to carry it out. I very much agree with the noble and learned Lord on that; he is a good choice and I wish him well in the task.

Why are we filling prisons with more offenders than any other western European country? Why are we failing to recognise that we are putting resources into a prison system that is institutionally ill equipped to do the kind of rehabilitative work that is clearly necessary? Unless we see a significant reduction in prisoner numbers, what hope is there that rehabilitation programmes can work in prisons?

With so few options available to them, it seems logical and sensible for the Government to make use of the available time of magistrates who are willing to sit on more serious cases, freeing up time in Crown Courts. However, last time, this was not found to be very effective; it led to an increase in the demand for prison places. The Lord Chancellor conceded in the Commons:

“That is what happened and what I expect to happen again”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/10/24; col. 1011.]

It is not even a temporary solution. Do these plans overlook the possibility that some defendants will opt for a jury trial when they no longer have the incentive that magistrates can sentence them only to six months? That means longer sentences and larger prisoner numbers. Will special training be provided to magistrates to try to ensure that good use is made of them in cases dealing with more serious offences that require a longer sentence, but that the new powers do not simply inflate sentences that would otherwise have been given to potentially shorter-sentence prisoners?

The Lord Chancellor has said, and I agree with her, that

“people have to know and believe there are consequences to breaking our laws”.

This is not achieved when prisoners are released without completing their sentences or any serious regard to why they were imprisoned for a long period. Neither is it achieved by using a significant part of our resources in a prison system which is ill equipped, ill resourced and ill prepared to rehabilitate offenders. If this announcement buys the Government some time, can we have some reassurance that it will be used for fundamental change?

I thank both noble Lords for their questions. I will first address some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Beith, and then turn to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen.

On the noble Lord’s final point about buying time, that is the Government’s objective with SDS40; the standard determinate sentencing going from 50% down to 40% is indeed to buy time. As he will know, there was a Statement in the House of Commons today on a sentencing review, which we are very grateful that David Gauke has agreed to chair. That Statement will be repeated in this House in due course, so we can debate the issues raised in it.

The noble Lord, Lord Beith, asked some specific questions, including whether increasing magistrates’ sentencing powers from six to 12 months will incentivise defendants to opt for jury trial. In the brief interlude when that happened before, there was no statistical data to say that might be the case, so on that particular example we are confident that there will not be any appreciable increase in the number of defendants opting for a jury trial.

As far as training goes, there will be refresher training available to magistrates. When I was in opposition, I personally did the training for the increase in sentences. It was not that long ago, but if some magistrates feel they want the refresher training then it will be available to them.

The central point that the noble Lord made was about filling up prisons. As my noble friend Lord Timpson often reminds me, if you do nothing then the prison population will go up by 80 a week. That is the reason we are initiating this review of sentencing, which will get under way very quickly.

The closing remarks of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, were much more acceptable than his opening remarks. In his closing remarks, he acknowledged the complexity of the situation, that there are many interacting factors in the situation we have arrived at today, and that there needs to be a multifaceted approach to try to turn the tide on the ever-increasing number of people we find in our prisons. I agree with the point he made in his closing remarks.

I think the noble and learned Lord might have been tweaking my nose with his other point. He said that magistrates cannot resist a vacuum, but he knows that that is absolutely not true. Magistrates sentence within the sentencing guidelines, as do district judges. The problem with magistrates and district judges is that they sentence quicker than Crown Courts, not that they sentence more harshly. I see that the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, is nodding her head, because she knows that what I have said is correct.

The overall objective of this announcement is to increase magistrates’ sentencing powers back from six to 12 months. I look forward to answering more questions from other noble Lords on that matter.

Could the Minister perhaps respond to my inquiry as to why no impact assessment was carried out, given that there is potentially data available from the previous period when magistrates’ sentencing powers were increased from six to 12 months? If this is going to be an interim measure of some relief, we ought to know whether it is going to provide that relief or exacerbate an otherwise very difficult situation.

This measure was unavailable to the previous Government, who had to reverse it because they ran the system so close to collapse. They left the backlog unaddressed and victims had to wait far too long for justice. The prediction is that we will see a slight increase in the overall prison population, but by bearing down on the remand population in our reception prisons we will create capacity where we need it most. However, I am confident that there is currently enough capacity in prisons to absorb the initial inflationary impact, and there is no evidence that magistrates send people to prison more or for longer. Because of how precarious the situation is, we believe that now is the right time to take this measure.

My Lords, before we move on to Back-Bench questions, let me be absolutely clear that this is 20 minutes of questions—short, succinct and sharp questions—not speeches.

My Lords, last month, 37 prisoners were mistakenly released from prison under the early release scheme. One was charged with sexually assaulting a woman on the same day that he was released. Can the Minister please explain what evaluation is given and criteria used when deciding whether a prisoner is eligible to be released under the early release scheme?

I thank the noble Baroness for her question. All prisoners who were released in error under the first tranche of releases are now back behind bars. I will write to her on her question but, broadly speaking, the criteria includes whether offences were sexual and violent or related to domestic abuse. I will write to her with the specific list; it is in my notes, but I am not sure that I can find it in proper time today.

My Lords, I can see why increasing magistrates’ courts’ sentencing powers may be necessary as a short-term measure to deal with the backlog of about 17,000 remand prisoners. However, will it not result in a great increase in the number of short sentences? We know that the reoffending rate for short sentences is around 50%, or even a bit more. Although it may be necessary as a short-term measure, how long will this last? If it lasts for too long, surely it will have a reverse effect and we will end up with the revolving-door syndrome that we have seen for short sentences over many years.

I do not agree with the premise of the noble Lord’s question. It is not right that we will see an increase in the number of short sentences. Certainly, in my experience as a sentencing magistrate who gave short sentences, I gave them only to those who were already on community orders or suspended sentences. I cannot remember giving a short sentence to somebody who had a previous good character.

My Lords, can the Minister say a little more about training? I understood him to say that it would be available to magistrates who feel that they need it. Is it not better that there should be some supervision to identify which magistrates really need training? When will the training be available?

All magistrates were trained the first time these sentencing powers were put in place. Of course, there will be some new magistrates aboard and some who feel that they would like to retrain, so there will be online courses available either for refreshing or for magistrates who are relatively recently in post. The magistrates are regularly appraised—winger magistrates every four years and presiding magistrates every two years—so we can be confident that the standards are being kept up.

My Lords, before his death, the late Lord Ramsbotham regularly asked the same question of the Government: when will there be a royal commission on criminal justice? The mess in the prison system is highlighted by the Statement made the other day, but, as we know, there are nearly 70,000 cases awaiting trial in the Crown Court. Is it not time to stop applying sticking plasters and short-term measures, and instead have a proper look at how the whole system should work?

I thank my noble friend Lady Mallalieu for her question. I very much remember the noble Lord regularly asking for a royal commission. The reality is that we feel that we have a big job of work to do on reviewing sentencing and then managing the whole prison population and estate, so that it stops increasing. That is where our focus is right now. I will take back the question of a royal commission to my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor, but, to be frank, I have not heard it spoken about in the time I have been in government.

My Lords, I support a smaller prison population, not just because there are not enough places for the people who have been sentenced but because there are too many people in prison. However, one of the consequences of releasing people early, at a quicker pace than one might have planned for, is that it will put more pressure on the police service. This Government made a manifesto pledge to increase the size of the police by around 4,000 officers, but we have not heard an awful lot about that since the Government took office.

Secondly, as has been mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, and by the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, in passing, one of the measures for mitigating the recidivism of those who are released is tagging—normal tagging to determine where the person is and sobriety tagging, where alcohol is an aggravating factor, and now there is also drug tagging. Finally, the response to those tags when they are breached should go straight to the police, not to a private company to be emailed to the police to be dealt with some time later. Is the Minister able to respond to those points about resourcing?

I have just consulted with my noble friend Lord Timpson and I can reassure the noble Lord that we do have enough tags for the process which we are embarking on. I should also mention that both my noble friend Lord Timpson and I were fitted with a sobriety tag for a while to see whether it worked, and I can assure the noble Lord that it does work.

The noble Lord’s opening point was about more pressure on the police. That is right; there will be some more pressure on the police and also on the Probation Service and some social services such as housing. The philosophy underlying the Government’s SDS40 approach rather than the previous approach is planning down the whole pipeline, including people who will regrettably reoffend and how to deal with them. By managing this with a more planned approach, we hope and expect that we will reduce the chances of reoffending.

My Lords, can I refer the Minister to the recent quite appalling race riots that took place during the summer? I think everyone agrees that those involved in violence and incitement to violence, including online incitement to violence, deserved extremely harsh punishment. But the Minister will be aware that many of these people had no previous convictions and posed no immediate threat to the public and yet nearly all were remanded in custody, thus putting greater pressure on the Prison Service. Can the Minister comment on this point?

Of course, the matter of sentencing is for judges. My personal view is that the sentences I read about seemed entirely appropriate, but this is a matter for them. This was a particular situation where maybe the judges felt that even people who were of previous good character needed to be made an example of—but that was a matter for them.

Speaking as a former magistrate who worked in a young offender institution, I can say that short sentences clearly do not work. To go back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, that it is preferable to have fewer people in prison, have the Government looked at the prison system in Holland? The Netherlands has managed to reduce its prison population significantly, such that it can even outsource prison spaces to other countries, but this depends on a lot of resources being put into the Probation Service and community sentences. Can the Minister respond?

I agree with every word the noble Baroness has said. My noble friend Lord Timpson has just whispered in my ear that he has been to Holland, so we are looking at that very closely. The other point he made is that they use a lot of tagging in Holland, so that is another factor when we are looking at reviewing sentencing as a whole, although of course the sentencing review will look at adult sentencing and not at youth matters.

My Lords, I am worried about a public loss of confidence in the contradictions around sentencing. I think there was public disquiet about the high-profile case of a woman given a two-and-a-half-year sentence for a social media post, which the noble Lord has pointed out was possibly somebody being made an example of. Yet letting people out before their sentence is up for more serious crimes seems to contradict that. Also—dare I mention?—many IPP prisoners have served their tariff in prison. Will the Minister comment on whether some of those could be looked at to see whether, having done their time, they could be released earlier than their indefinite sentence? They have done their time for the crime they committed and yet they still languish in prison. It just does not seem to make any sense to the public.

I thank the noble Baroness for that question. In a sense, she exemplifies the difficulty of the various matters we are grappling with when trying to address the overall problem of having this large number of people in prison at the same time as the riots were happening over the summer period. I acknowledge that that is a difficult situation. Regarding the IPP sentences, the Government have set up an IPP action plan which they are working at full speed on, and proposals will be coming forward in due course.

My Lords, the Minister described very well the process which he undertook when sentencing somebody, giving them a sentence of imprisonment only when other avenues had been properly explored. I was a recorder for some considerable time and that very much echoes my approach and, I suspect, the approach of most judges: a real reluctance to send people to prison unless there is no other alternative. However, during the last Labour Government, there was an enormous amount of legislation changing the sentencing powers of judges and magistrates—particularly judges—and not trusting the judges to make their own assessment of what the appropriate sentence was. When there is this review of the appropriate response to the prison crisis, can the Minister convey to his colleagues that it is not a good idea to fetter the discretion of a judge and prevent them coming to the right conclusion in the right case?

I think I can reassure the noble Lord. It is intended that we will have very senior former judges on the sentencing review, who I am sure will take to heart the noble Lord’s point.

My Lords, this measure is intended, in part at least, to take pressure off the Crown Courts, but can the Minister say something about the pressure on magistrates? Is it the case that the number of magistrates fell by 50% over the decade to 2021 and has not yet got anywhere near that number? Can he say something about the backlog of cases at magistrates’ courts, too, please?

I became a magistrate just under 20 years ago and at that point there were 30,000 magistrates in England and Wales. There are now about 14,000 and we are trying to get the number back up to 18,000. So, I accept the point the noble Baroness made on that. The other point is that in the youth court, magistrates have powers to sentence up to two years—I was a youth magistrate as well. The change is important and significant, but it is not such a big step change that magistrates will not be able to handle it in any way. I am confident that they will be able to handle it, and the backlogs in the magistrates’ courts are nowhere near as bad as those in the Crown Court.

My Lords, may I seek some further clarification from the Minister? I asked him about remanding in custody and, having worked in the criminal justice system as a barrister, I am well aware that obviously the sentencing is up to the judges or magistrates. However, remanding in custody is not meant as a punishment; it is meant to protect the public.

Of course, I accept the point. The objective is not to change the number of people who are remanded in custody, because obviously that is a judicial decision, but to reduce the time those who are remanded in custody spend in custody. If we can do that through reducing the backlog, that will be a desirable effect. We think that some 2,000 days of Crown Court sittings could be saved by this change to the rules of magistrates’ sentencing powers.

Can the Minister assure us that the training of magistrates covers the circumstances in which it is right for somebody to be remanded in custody? Following the riots, suspicions were raised that some people were being remanded without true consideration of whether they justified that treatment. It is rather an important issue, and I hope that the training does cover it.

I absolutely assure the noble and learned Lord that remanding in custody is covered in magistrate training. When I used to oversee new magistrates, I said to them on their first day in court that remanding in custody is the most difficult decision they will make, both on the first day and on the last day. It is consistently a difficult decision to make and one that magistrates and the judiciary, I am sure, are fully aware of and trained in.

Can my noble friend the Minister give some reassurance that with the increased number of cases before magistrates, they will have increased resources to receive pre-sentencing reports from the Probation Service? That is so important, particularly for women with family responsibilities, before magistrates consider the sentence.

My noble friend raises a good point. There has certainly been increased resource in probation, and we are recruiting additional probation officers. That is going very well, but it takes time to train those probation officers. The other factor is an increased number of legal advisers, who are often the unsung heroes of our court system. Again, recruitment is going okay but they need time to gain the experience so that the system can be in equilibrium with these new sentencing powers.

In due course will the Government bring forward proposals to improve the way in which prisoners are rehabilitated?

It is certainly our intention to do so. That underpins so much of what we are going to do. We are increasing the number of people in the Probation Service. Obviously, we want to increase the rehabilitation figures and reduce the reoffending figures. The spotlight will be on the Probation Service to try to deliver that objective.

My Lords, given the importance of employment in stopping reoffending, are there plans to increase the number of employers that will consider taking on ex-offenders? Will the Government provide any incentives for them to do so?

My noble friend Lord Timpson has just whispered in my ear “Employment advisory boards”, of which he was a leading light and which we intend to increase. I accept the noble Baroness’s point that if people can get gainful employment when they leave prison, they are far less likely to reoffend.

My Lords, the Minister has already had a question about the rehabilitation of prisoners. A number of organisations are having quite good results in the rehabilitation of prisoners. Are the Government working with these organisations, and are they concerned with the lack of funding that many of these small organisations have? Could the Government outsource some of this work?

I acknowledge the noble Baroness’s point, and of course we value the contribution that they make. We all know these organisations. I remember working very closely with them when we were in opposition, and we continue to work with them in government. Many of them bring real expertise to the table. We want to work collaboratively to achieve our overall goal of turning around the ever-increasing prison population we have seen over the last decades.

My Lords, this amendment would simply require the Secretary of State to review the impact of this Act on the size of the sovereign grant. I have tabled it as I feel that, as part of our consideration of the Crown Estate Bill, it is important to look at the direct link between the future planned growth of Crown Estate activities and the increase in profits that will result directly from the partnership with GB Energy, and the interlinked direct impact these changes will also have on the practical workings of the Sovereign Grant Act 2011.

The Sovereign Grant Act came into force on 1 April 2012 and changed the arrangements for funding Queen Elizabeth’s official duties. It consolidated four separate sources of funding into one new sovereign grant. The grant is intended to be a more permanent system than the previous one, which was reign specific. The sovereign grant is paid annually by His Majesty’s Treasury at a value indexed as a direct percentage of the revenues from the Crown Estate. It was initially set as an indexed percentage of 15%. The percentage is reviewed every five years by the royal trustees, made up of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. The level of the grant is protected by law from decreasing because of falling Crown Estate profits, as there were during the Covid pandemic. With annual accounts published by the Keeper of the Privy Purse and audited by the National Audit Office, the process promised to be more accountable. The level of the grant has risen in recent years to help fund, in part, a £369 million refurbishment of Buckingham Palace, which was approved by Parliament. After King Charles III’s accession to the Throne, the new King approved a statutory Order in Council to allow the existing sovereign grant provisions to continue throughout his reign.

This is all very well but, to come to the heart of the matter, my concern is the direct link between the profits that the Crown Estate makes and the calculation of the amount of the sovereign grant going forward. My request is that the direct link is discussed today, and I call on the Government to consider amending it. My amendment calling for an annual review was the closest wording I was able to table on this matter.

There is a world of difference between the direct binary link that we have now, where a set percentage of the Crown Estate’s revenues is used as the only calculation basis in determining the size of the sovereign grant, and the system that I would prefer, where the Government pay due regard to the Crown Estate’s revenues as part of the process of determining the size of the sovereign grant.

I have five areas of concern about the future of these arrangements after this Bill passes. First, my personal feeling is that the present calculation is somewhat obtuse and that the Sovereign Grant Act is not a particularly helpful or appropriate way of determining how, and at what level, we fund the Royal Family. The trouble with all this is that the attempt to link royal funding to the profits of the Crown Estate is a conjurer’s trick; it is an accounting sleight of hand. The two are not related at all. The Crown Estate’s profits are, and always have been, government funds.

I am not here to have a conversation about the role, purpose or future of the Royal Family; I am not anti-monarchy. Nor do I wish to discuss the appropriate levels of funding, as none of this is relevant to the Bill. Before us is a Bill that will see the Crown Estate allowed to borrow from the Treasury, subject to approval, and if all goes well this will result in rapid investment in, and growth at, the core of the Crown Estate’s business, that of leasing seabed plots for offshore floating and offshore wind developments. When the Crown Estate is at the heart of a rapid green energy revolution, and the sovereign grant is calculated as a percentage of revenue profits and reviewed only every five years, it is only sensible for us to take a moment to examine the potential impacts that this rapid growth will have on the calculation of the grant.

My second concern is that this rapid and exceptional period of Crown Estate growth was not foreseen when the 2011 grant Act was passed, and this makes future calculations more difficult.

Thirdly, I am worried that it may potentially put the King personally in a difficult position. Your Lordships should note that, in January 2023, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, speaking on behalf of the King, asked the Government to reduce the percentage used to calculate the sovereign grant so that the total did not include the income from new offshore wind leases, calculated to be worth £1 billion annually to the Crown Estate. The request was made by the King, out of his desire that the money described as a “windfall” could be best used for “wider public good” instead of funding the Royal Family during a cost of living crisis, which he had referred to only weeks earlier. In July last year, with further Crown Estate profits, the Government announced that the grant would be changed to 12% in the following year, down from 25%, while maintaining the same level payable.

It is my understanding that a further reduction is planned to come in through primary legislation following 2026-27. In the words of the Report of the Royal Trustees on the Sovereign Grant Review 2023,

“The Crown Estate’s Net Revenue Profits are expected to increase significantly in future years”.

The trustees’ projected figures show an increase from £442 million in 2022-23 to £1.05 billion in 2024-25. With predicted exceptional linear growth forecast for the foreseeable future, will we see newspaper headlines every year to the effect of “Exceptional growth in Crown Estate’s green energy brings huge profits to the King: the King kindly wishes that these are used for the public good”?

My fourth point is that the five-year review is inadequate in this period of exceptional continuous growth. I call on the Government to amend the 2011 Act to make the review annual.

My fifth and final point relates to what is a complex and confusing system that is not only poorly publicly understood but a hostage to fortune. The system is ripe for exploitation by those who are either against the energy transition, are supportive of the old energy architecture or simply wish to use the politicisation of the energy transition to spread disinformation and propaganda. This is my biggest worry. From the challenges to well-established basic climate science to deliberate attempts to undermine the transition to heat pumps and electric vehicles to miscalculations of costs, propaganda is, sadly, ever present. A system that can all too easily be used to link the green energy transition to extra funding to the Royal Family is ripe to be manipulated by those who wish to argue that the green transition will cost you more because all the benefits are funding the Royal Family. A highly effective government communications strategy that works in partnership, wins hearts and minds, extols the benefits and lower bills is essential to support the transition, and this link does not help with that.

The move to green energy and the financial support received by the Royal Family are uneasy bedfellows. I foresee this as an opportunity that will be exploited by those aimed against the transition. My humble opinion is that the calculation of the sovereign grant as a direct percentage of Crown Estate profits represents a weakness in the system that leaves us vulnerable to interference as we transition our power generation. My wish is simply that this Government consider amending the direct nature of this link and conduct an annual review of the sovereign grant during this period of rapid growth. My amendment is here simply to allow this conversation to take place. I look forward to hearing the opinion of your Lordships and the Minister’s response on these issues. I beg to move.

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly on this group. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is not in this place and so was unable to speak to his amendment. I understand why the noble Earl, Lord Russell, has tabled his amendment, and I am grateful to him for his exposition of the background to it. On these Benches, we recognise the unusual role that the Crown Estate has in the stewardship of the assets held in the right of the Crown. We recognise, too, that the revenues from the assets do not belong to the sovereign, nor is any part of them payable directly to the monarch.

The issue here is one of communication. It must be—it is absolutely essential—that there be no perception of any direct financial link between the sovereign and any amounts received under the sovereign grant and the amount of revenue generated by the Crown Estate. Upon the announcement of the partnership with GB Energy, there was a perception from some of the more excitable end of the media that the sovereign was somehow party to, and specifically approving of, the arrangement. I encourage the Minister and commissioners of the Crown Estate to ensure that information in the public domain about the operation of the Crown Estate, but also any further partnerships that may come down the track, cannot possibly suggest any direct involvement from the sovereign and, therefore, that there should be no undue benefit accrued.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for his amendment and I will seek to address some of the points that he has raised. This amendment would require the Government, within one year of the passing of this Act and annually thereafter, to lay before Parliament a report into the effect of this Act on the size of the sovereign grant. The Government agree that it is important that there is transparency in how the sovereign grant is affected by changes in Crown Estate profits. Indeed, the Sovereign Grant Act 2011 includes a number of requirements that provide for regular effective review and reporting to Parliament.

As the noble Earl observed, under the Act, the grant for each financial year is set by reference to the profits of the Crown Estate. In broad terms, under Section 6 of the Sovereign Grant Act it is currently the higher of 12% of the Crown Estate profits two years previously or the previous year’s grant. For example, the level of the grant for 2025-26 will be set at 12% of the profits the Crown Estate reported in its annual accounts for 2022-23, published in July.

Section 7 of the Sovereign Grant Act provides for regular reviews of the percentage used in calculation of the grant to ensure the grant remains at an appropriate level. These reviews are conducted by the three royal trustees—the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. The trustees must lay a copy of the report of their review before Parliament. The last review concluded in July last year and concluded that the reference rate should be reduced from 25% to 12%, reflecting an expected increase in the Crown Estate’s profits. The next review will commence in 2026, with a view to making any change to the grant calculation for 2027-28 onwards. As with previous reviews, it will consider both the future funding needs of the Royal Household and the likely future path of Crown Estate profits—including, of course, the effect of the Crown Estate Bill that we are debating today on those profits—to determine the appropriate percentage to use.

I should note in this context that the grant for 2026-27 will include the final tranche of funding for the current 10-year programme of reservicing of Buckingham Palace’s infrastructure. The percentage for 2027-28 onwards will therefore need to reflect the significant downward adjustment to the household’s funding requirements. The Sovereign Grant Act currently restricts the level of the grant itself being reduced from one year to the next. That provision was written into the Sovereign Grant Act to reflect the view that many of the duties of the Head of State cannot be abruptly stopped, and therefore it would not be appropriate to significantly reduce funding in response to a sudden drop in Crown Estate profits. That will, however, constrain the ability to reduce the grant by the likely appropriate amount once the reservicing of Buckingham Palace is complete. In 2016, when the previous Government agreed to provide funding for the resurfacing programme, they noted an intention to bring forward legislation to reset the level of the sovereign grant to an appropriate level once the reservicing works have been completed. I can confirm that it is also the intention of this Government.

Those statutory reviews therefore provide Parliament with a report of the impact of this Bill on the sovereign grant. They also provide a mechanism to ensure that additional Crown Estate profits do not lead to excessive funding for the Royal Household. Where that is not possible under the Sovereign Grant Act, the Government will legislate accordingly.

On reporting requirements, the Sovereign Grant Act also requires two further reports on the grant to be produced and laid before Parliament each year. First, Section 5 requires the royal trustees to produce a report annually stating the level of the grant for the following financial year and how that has been determined in line with a prescribed method set out in Section 6 of the Act. This report must be laid before Parliament. Secondly, Section 2 requires the Keeper of the Privy Purse to produce annual accounts relating to the Royal Household, including the use of the sovereign grant. In common with other central government bodies, the accounts are prepared in accordance with an accounts direction issued by the Treasury, audited by the National Audit Office and laid in Parliament. The Crown Estate Act 1961 also contains a requirement for the Crown Estate to produce an annual report and accounts.

The Government therefore agree that it is important that there is regular reporting to Parliament on how the changes in this Bill will impact the sovereign grant. As I have detailed, there is already a considerable set of statutory requirements in this respect and beyond.

I thank the Minister for his comments. I appreciate that there is information of which the Government are aware from the reports that come to Parliament on this. Some of my questions might have been answered had I had sight of the business case, so I look forward to that being published.

The only slightly outstanding issue for me is about our communications strategy around the green revolution, making sure that the Government are communicating properly and taking the public with them. I still worry that there is a bit of confusion between us. I will withdraw my amendment and thank the Minister for his response, which I will go away and consider.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to move this very modest and uncontroversial amendment, which would place a duty on the Crown Estate, in carrying out its functions under the Bill, to assess the environmental impact and animal welfare standards of salmon farms on the Crown Estate. If an assessment determines that a salmon farm is causing environmental damage or significant animal welfare issues, it must revoke the licence for the farm in question. If assessments of the potential environmental impact and animal welfare standards of applications for salmon farms on the Crown Estate determine that they may cause environmental damage or raise significant animal welfare issues of concern, the Crown Estate must refuse these applications. Who could be against that, except people running salmon farms that do not meet those conditions?

I should begin by declaring an interest. I am a fisherman and my family own one week on the River Tay. I confess that I am absolutely bewitched by the glory of Atlantic salmon, which are now considered an endangered species alongside mountain gorillas and Siberian tigers. This is a really serious issue.

The Crown Estate commissioners on both sides of the border—I regret that the Bill does not cover the commissioners’ activities north of the border because of devolution, but I am sure that if England sets the standard then others will follow—have a responsibility to protect the seabed, which was owned by the Crown and has been vested in the Crown commissioners for centuries. The monarch is not involved, but the commissioners should have a clear duty to protect the environment and nurture the ocean’s wildlife, particularly given the commitment to those ideals of members of the Royal Family, in whose name they act.

I shall concentrate on the impact of farming Atlantic salmon, which has to be licensed by the Crown Estate. There are farming interests that have very high standards, but a wide variation of standards has been applied to salmon farming across the globe. All over the world, salmon farming has resulted in environmental damage to wild fish populations and threatened other species as a result of varying practices.

Salmon are often concentrated in large numbers in open-net cages and flushed with chemicals and antibiotics to combat disease and lice—lice that literally eat the fish alive if not treated. The death rate in the cages is appalling and would never be allowed for conventional farming. Some 20 to 40% of those salmon die and are dumped. Imagine what people would say if they were going past fields of cows or sheep and finding those sorts of casualty levels—there would be an outcry. But of course all this is unseen because it is below the surface of the water.

The list of various toxic chemicals that have been used to tackle lice includes organophosphates, which are highly dangerous, as we were often reminded by a former Member of this House. Other chemicals work by dissolving the bodies of the lice on the salmon, which are crustaceans. That results in the chemicals leaching into the sea and may very well explain why fishermen then start catching lobsters and crabs with half their shells dissolved. I urge anyone listening to this debate to look on YouTube at the horrific condition of salmon in some of these cages as a result of uncontrolled sea life predation. It is a horror movie that is widely available and very easily seen.

The feed that these salmon are given is fishmeal pellets, to which further chemicals are added, including in some cases dioxins and PCBs. These are all controlled, but to present this as a sustainable environmentally-friendly product stretches credibility. Other chemicals are included in the feed in order to change the colour of the flesh. If you are a supermarket, rather like when you want to paint your house, you can get a colour code and choose in which shade of orange or red you would like the fish on your shelves to appear—perhaps, as a result, misleading the customers as to what it is they are buying.

The importance of ensuring effective regulation and best practice hardly needs emphasising. The supply of pellets demands catching gargantuan quantities of small fish. Estimates vary, but those that I have seen are that between 3 and 5 kilograms of anchovies, sardines and other small pelagic fish are needed to produce just 1 kilogram of farmed salmon. That is a ratio, if you are being kind, of 3:1. To describe this as a sustainable business beggars belief. The scale is such that whole fishing communities have lost their livelihoods in west Africa, where the fish are taken by large vessels and turned into fishmeal, creating a lack of employment for local fishermen and a collapse in local economies.

There is also irreversible damage being done to the seabed as fish faeces, chemicals and uneaten food fall through the cages. All that lands on the seabed, creating a disgusting, vile brew on an industrial scale. There are vast numbers of fish. Even in a small tank there will be 20,000 salmon, with up to 90,000 in the larger cages.

Such high concentrations of salmon produce high concentrations of lice. These swarms of lice attach themselves to wild, migrating salmon, with fatal results. Escapees bring diseases to the wild population and whole rivers have been cleaned out of wild fish. Diseases include ISA—infectious salmon anaemia—and bacterial kidney disease. ISA is like AIDS for salmon but without any possible cure. There are many examples of how these viruses have been transmitted. In California, believe it or not, Atlantic salmon were being farmed using eggs transported from Norway. Those eggs contained the virus, which then took out the local population of Pacific salmon.

Some in the industry are in denial. The truth is that, when the salmon farms arrive, it seems that the wild population crashes. Examples include the loss of the sea trout runs on the Scottish west coast and the once-great salmon rivers in Norway. In British Columbia, on the Broughton archipelago, the wild pink salmon population was reduced by 80% by sea lice that came from fish farming. In Chile, ISA—that virus I have just spoken of—resulted in the collapse of the entire industry. Iceland saw huge protests, with about 1% of the population turning up to protest outside the Parliament about the possibility of fish farms being allowed to continue.

Wild fish interbreed, diluting the gene pool and reducing the ability of the progeny to make migratory journeys. This ability has been honed over hundreds of thousands of years by fish that are genetically unique to each river. They are breeding with the salmon from the farms. They are described as “Scottish salmon”. They are no more Scottish salmon than anything else. They are based on Norwegian salmon and are genetically modified to grow quickly. They are a million miles away in terms of their gene pool and structure from the fish that operate in the rivers of Scotland, each of which has a unique genetic identity and as a result is equipped to be able to run the river to spawn and to go out to sea and return after one or three years. If those fish interbreed with this alien species, the result is progeny incapable of making that journey and therefore the destruction of the population in the rivers concerned. And by the way, on the numbers escaping, in Loch Melfort in Scotland 48,000 fish escaped, dwarfing the wild population.

There is a growing realisation around the world of the environmental damage being caused. This is resulting in complete bans on fish farms. Alaska has had a ban since 1990. Argentina has introduced a ban. California has introduced a ban in state waters. In British Columbia, the plan is to phase out open-net farms by 2025 and move to closed systems.

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Forsyth and have signed Amendment 37. We have now got to the stage of the debate where this amendment has been grouped with Amendments 37F and 37G from my noble friends Lord Leicester and Lord Douglas-Miller.

This is a really interesting debate, because much of what this involves is in Scotland. Of course, there are aspects of this which are devolved. It might be tempting for the Minister to say that it is nothing to do with him, but I think that would be unwise and unhelpful. I hope that the Minister is not tempted to do that, because Clause 3(1) states:

“This Act extends to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”.

It would be helpful to know what discussions, if any, have taken place between the Minister’s department and Scotland Office Ministers about the kinds of issues that have been raised so eloquently by my noble friend Lord Forsyth. I say “eloquently” but I mean vividly as well and, in some cases, very movingly, too.

I am not one of those who has always been implacably opposed to salmon farms around Scotland. What I very much oppose is what my noble friend described and has described in his amendment as lowering “environmental impact” and lowering “animal welfare standards”. It must be in all our interests to ensure that these salmon farms, which provide so much economic activity in relatively marginal areas, should also be run in such a way that we can all be proud of what they are doing.

I look forward particularly to the speech on aquaculture that my noble friend Lord Douglas-Miller will make in a few moments, and that of my noble friend Lord Leicester on offshore energy installations and generation. In the meantime, I do not know whether the Minister will be able to accept my noble friend’s amendment—it would be great if he could—but what I suspect is more likely, and what I would like him to do, is to give a very positive encouragement to this amendment so that perhaps at a later stage the Government might come forward with their own amendment to put right what is clearly a wrong.

My Lords, I was unable to speak at Second Reading, but I am supportive of the Bill’s objective to enable the Crown Estate to continue to fulfil its core duty of maintaining and enhancing its value.

Amendment 37, as introduced so powerfully by my noble friend Lord Forsyth and to which I have added my name, is a massive improvement to the Bill. I also agree with what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said in his impressive speech. I suspect that the main purpose of the Bill in the minds of its drafters was to ensure that the Crown Estate should continue to focus on activities which align with wider national needs, including energy security and sustainable economic growth, as the Explanatory Notes make clear. Indeed, the Bill specifically mentions its role as an enabler of offshore wind power generation.

Offshore wind power generation has a part to play in our energy mix, but it may receive too much emphasis as most offshore wind projects produce electricity too far away from where it is needed, and the costs of transmission and storage are often opaque. I would like to see more emphasis on small and so-called advanced nuclear reactors, which can be sited adjacent to data centres and industrial clusters where the energy is actually needed.

It would appear that the Government have introduced this legislation with only one major objective: to encourage and enable the Crown Estate to build more offshore wind farms. This is also evidenced by the announcement of the partnership with Great British Energy. I look forward to learning more about how GBE will operate; there are still relatively few details available. However, it is important in legislating to increase commercial activity in the seabed around our shores that restrictions must be placed on the development of salmon farms in England and Wales, especially given the damaging effects on nature and the environment resulting from salmon farms operated in coastal waters and sea lochs in Scotland. I declare an interest in that I fish in England on the River Tamar, as well as on the Rivers Laggan and Sorn on the Scottish island of Islay. We do not want to see the depleted populations of salmon migrating to English and Welsh rivers exposed to the additional threats posed by salmon farms.

Just over a month ago, my noble friend Lord Forsyth asked in Grand Committee what steps the Government were taking to protect wild salmon populations. I confess to having been underwhelmed by the reply to the debate given by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, especially on two points: the need to monitor more strictly the harmful activities of some salmon farms, and the quite ridiculous restrictions placed on river-keepers’ ability to control stocks of predators such as cormorants. She noted that some predators are themselves protected so we had to be

“careful about how and when such predators can be managed”.—[Official Report, 12/9/24; cols. GC 170-171.]

I think that the noble Baroness is unaware that the cormorant population has increased from some 2,000 in the 1980s to over 62,000 today. Each bird requires over a pound of fish a day; why are they still protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981? Why does the EU still protect them under the birds directive? Does the Minister know how many gamekeepers are employed by the Crown Estate and how many cormorants they are licensed to shoot each year?

In replying to the debate last month, the noble Baroness the Minister said that the Government recognised the need for higher standards to be maintained in fish farms. The problems of excessive sea lice escaping fish possessing a very different genetic make-up and a very different DNA construct compared with indigenous fish were raised by several noble Lords in that debate, and spoken to especially powerfully by my noble friend Lord Forsyth just now. What discussions has the Minister had with the Crown Estate about fish farms and about moving to more sustainable methods of farming salmon, especially land-based farms, which are completely isolated from the endangered wild salmon population? As my noble friends Lord Forsyth and Lord Strathclyde have already said, this amendment would very much improve the Bill.

It is fortunate that, until now, English river systems have been, I believe, free of open-net fish farms, but I worry that the encouragement, implicit in the Bill, for the Crown Estate to increase commercial activity might change that—and I believe that this amendment is therefore absolutely necessary. I hope that the Minister will accept it.

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—words that I never thought I would hear myself speak. I was unable to attend the Second Reading but my noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle did attend. After the previous day in Committee, I was approached by four different Conservative Peers who complained that a Green had not spoken on that day. One of those Peers was the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who has consistently, over the 11 years I have been here, complained that Greens speak too much. I hope to hear him express his gratitude today to hear a Green speak.

I support the amendment because, although I am highly suspicious of Conservatives and their environmental credentials, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is absolutely genuine in his care for salmon—and I support that completely. This is a very sensible amendment, and I cannot see any reason for the Labour Government not to accept it, so I look forward to the Minister’s explanation of why they will not.

These issues of environmental impact and animal welfare standards should be an overarching staple of any check on any Bill or policy that the Labour Government bring forward. I am afraid that these days I have my doubts about the Labour Government’s environmental credentials. We have seen some horrific decisions already in the first 100 days, or three months, so I sincerely hope that the Labour Government will accept this quite simple but, I think, very necessary amendment.

My Lords, I too rise in support of the very modest amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Forsyth. Woe betide any Government who fail to accept an amendment tabled by four such eminent Peers as the movers of this amendment. I hope that the Government will recognise that this very modest amendment is worthy of significant support.

I say that it is modest because internationally, as has been pointed out by my noble friend, salmon farms are banned in multiple countries—not only the countries that he has mentioned but Denmark and Australia, to name two more. The practices that have led to these bans differ. Some are concerned that, with thousands of fish in each pen, salmon farms can act as a breeding ground for diseases and pests, which is undoubtedly the case, particularly with sea lice. Almost half the salmon in Scottish salmon farms are said to be infested with the common salmon louse. The consequences of that were made very clear by my noble friend in his opening speech.

There is another reason. In Argentina the main concern was that a provincial government voted to ban intensive salmon fishing after campaigners successfully argued that it would wreak environmental havoc, close down local fishing fleets and threaten the nature tourism established there.

My Lords, I also support my noble friend, who recently sponsored an important debate in the Moses Room on this very subject. I inform noble Lords, if they had not spotted it already, that this is a very modest measure. It is not instructing the Scottish Environment Protection Agency or the local planning authority; it is simply instructing the commissioners of the Crown Estate and asking them to be more responsible in terms of outlook to the environment and, in particular, to the obvious evidence that is accumulating about the damage being done to salmon and sea-trout.

I want to reinforce what I hope the Minister is going to say by giving him what I think it is the really important example of the River Lochy on the west coast of Scotland near Fort William. That was once a very important salmon river with a prolific angling catch of well over 1,500. It has gone downhill quite catastrophically: the numbers have decreased; the number of staff employed as ghillies on the river has gone right down; and the impact of tourism on the economy has been very badly affected.

About seven years ago, the two fish farms in Loch Linnhe were both fallowed for a year. The following year, the number of grilse coming into the river went up very sharply and the angling catch went up by a factor of three and a half. That seems to me to be quite compelling and overwhelming evidence of the damage that is being done, which my noble friend described so eloquently. I hope the Minister will accept this amendment because it is a modest amendment and, as I say, it is not actually affecting any government or local government organisation; it is simply affecting the commissioners and giving them this extra duty. I support my noble friend.

My Lords, I declare interests as a trustee of the Burnham Overy Harbour Trust and president of the Wells-next-the-Sea RNLI station—I say that only because they both go out to sea. I apologise that I was not here at Second Reading on 2 September; I was in the Netherlands on business also relating to the environment. Like my noble friend Lord Trenchard, I agree that the main purpose of the Bill is to allow the Crown Estate to borrow and leverage against its assets and manage them in a way becoming of the 21st century.

I am astounded that the Crown Estate is not required to undertake the same level of environmental impact assessment that we do on the mainland. Amendment 37F is incredibly straightforward. It seeks to install in law a requirement for the Crown Estate to undertake an EIA, just like any other business on the mainland planning to undertake large-scale engineering works.

In preparation for this amendment, I spoke to a number of people in my local community on the coast of North Norfolk: Andy Frary of the Wells & District Inshore Fishermen’s Association; Bob Smith, the Wells-next-the-Sea harbourmaster; Leo Hambro, founder of Tidal Transit; and Professor Jenny Gill of the School of Biological Sciences at UEA—she is not really in my community any more, because she has just moved to Fife.

As the harbourmaster and I discussed, obviously the Crown Estate wants the rent, but this EIA needs to be rather more rigorous. If we insist that the Crown Estate will be required to undertake detailed environmental impact assessments, who will monitor that? Will it be the MMO? Bob Smith’s view is that the MMO is vastly removed from the coalfaces; it gives out the licences but has inexperienced staff and does not really understand local communities.

The fishermen I spoke to, the harbourmaster and I are very much for wind farms out to sea. We have marine protected areas and, ironically, once a wind farm is established, it becomes a sort of natural marine protected area. Rock armour is placed around the base of the wind turbines to protect them from big tides and scarring, et cetera. It then quickly attracts crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—and fish and there is a 50-metre “no fishing” rule for fishermen, who cannot get close to them. It is almost a sanctuary for all these crustacea. As they develop and thrive, they move out and the fishermen can then catch them.

There was also concern that giving licences to different companies for different wind farms was rather disjointed; they should be liaising on where their cables can come together out to sea so that they hit the land in one place. That has happened to an extent in North Norfolk, where they come ashore at Weybourne.

Professor Jenny Gill looks at this from an environmental point of view. The location of these wind farms is the most important thing. We need to avoid putting them where birds are—they are easier to monitor than fish and sea mammals. The concern is bird strike out to sea. Organisations such as the BTO and the RSPB have done a lot of work on flight heights of migratory birds and sea birds in relation to rotor speed and on whether bird strike is a big threat. Bob Smith surveys boats going out from Wells-next-the-Sea; maybe they are lucky and the wind farm they have been surveying is in the right place, but they come back and say, “We saw four birds today”. That damage is not happening.

In seeking this EIA, I am encouraging the Government to involve nature conservation organisations at an early stage so that they can be part of the planning process. Professor Gill mentioned that this is getting quite complicated. Beth Scott, professor in marine ecology at Aberdeen University, has worked on how tides work in open sea and form around tidal nodes and on whether putting static turbines on the ground changes the way tides work and the spatial way in which they move.

The big thing is making the planning process more transparent and getting conservation organisations at the table. They do not want to be adversarial; they are all at the green end of the scale and want to see a lot more of this renewable energy.

I had a very interesting conversation with Leo Hambro, of Tidal Transit. He operates crew transfer boats. I talked to him about the construction phase of these wind farms. He said that there have been improvements of late, in the last few years, including air bubble rings that are placed around the piling system which let out bubbles to reduce the sonic boom—which of course carries a long way underwater—therefore, we hope, mitigating damage to mammals. However, that has happened only recently.

When trenching, that is done either through some sort of underground machine that pulls a plough through the sand or, more often, through a large ship pulling a plough which turns over a trench a metre deep, into which the big cable is placed and then sand is placed back over it. If necessary, a few more rocks are placed on top of it. However, there really ought to be an EIA to decide which route these cables take. I suspect they probably take the shortest and cheapest route, but do they avoid mussel lays? They must avoid sunken ships, but off the coast of north Norfolk, in Cromer, we have a very important chalk reef, and it is important that that is protected.

To go back to crew transfer boats, Leo Hambro has seven of them. In fact, there are 200 around the UK and 700 around the world. Some 80% of them are in the UK and Europe because of the large-scale wind farms we have out to sea. To explain, these boats go out every day and take engineers to maintain and man the wind farms. The average stat for the industry is to use 1,500 litres of red diesel a day. In reality, he said they could use 2,500 to 4,000 litres a day, particularly if they are servicing a wind farm which is 45 miles away. He has to service East Anglia ONE from Lowestoft. These boats are going at 20 knots, so they are burning a lot of diesel.

It is not the case that when they get out there they switch their engines off. They have to spend up to two hours pushing against the turbine to make a safe platform for workers, transferring kit on and off the boat, et cetera. When they are then waiting for another three hours or so for the engineers to do their work, they have to stand off, but they do not drop an anchor and switch off; they have to run their engines to maintain generators and such on-board.

Leo Hambro is operating boats out of Wick, Grimsby, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. An interesting point to which I hope the Minister pays attention is that one of his boats is being converted to run on pure electric. That is being done in Great Yarmouth and should be ready for May 2025, thanks to DfT UK SHORE funding. It also includes offshore and onshore charging infrastructure, which I will come to in a second. The reason I mention these boats is that, for 200 boats using 2,500 litres of red diesel a day on average, five days a week, 50 days a year, that is 125 million litres of diesel.

That takes me to exhausts. AdBlue is added to the exhaust to reduce toxins, including nitrous oxide and sulphur oxide, and diesel particulates. AdBlue is made of synthetic ammonia—

Watch the time.

Am I not allowed 15 minutes?

No.

My apologies—this is it. AdBlue is not made from green ammonia. All these marine exhausts omit their fumes below the water to keep the exhausts cool. AdBlue is depositing heavy metal poisoning into the sea. I will stop there.

My Lords, in addition to the amendment standing in my own name, I support my noble friend Lord Leicester in his amendment. I would add to it the requirement of the offshore wind industry to provide adequate funding to research and understand the cumulative impact of all these offshore wind developments on migratory birds and fish. By way of comparison, what we now understand with aquaculture is that one farm on its own makes no material difference to the wider environment. The problem is that the cumulative impact of all these developments is devastating.

Most regrettably, the aquaculture industry has no obligation to pay towards monitoring this impact on the environment or on wild salmon and other species, with the burden of proof left to the NGO and charitable sector to fund the science that demonstrates the terrible impact that aquaculture is having. Let us not repeat this disastrous situation again with offshore renewables. It should be a cost of business and a licence requirement for the offshore wind industry to fund independent, ongoing research into the impacts of individual and cumulative sites on migratory birds and fish, with the results of this work directly influencing future developments.

On the amendment standing in my name, I declare my interests as set out in the register and draw attention to my roles as a trustee of the Kyle of Sutherland District Salmon Fisheries Board, as the past chairman of the Atlantic Salmon Trust and as the proprietor of two salmon rivers in Scotland.

I also support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Forsyth, who spoke so passionately about the issues of aquaculture. During a recent Question for Short Debate tabled by my noble friend on the parlous state of the UK’s salmon stock, many noble Lords raised serious questions about the impact that aquaculture, and in particular open-cage salmon farming, was having on salmon stocks and the wider environment. This is becoming a worrying theme. We have all seen the harrowing pictures of malformed and diseased farmed salmon held in very questionable conditions by bad operators in this industry.

What is much harder to see is the impact that the cumulative size of this industry is having on our wild salmon and the wider environment. However, any objective review of the science leads to the conclusion that there are a number of serious negative impacts from this industry. The three most serious are: first, the catastrophic impact of elevated sea lice numbers caused by a direct result of intensive open-cage salmon farming on juvenile wild salmon survival; secondly, the impact of intensive salmon farming on animal husbandry standards for fish kept in open-net cages in such density and the subsequent cross-contamination of numerous diseases from farmed to wild fish; and, thirdly, the impact of genetic introgression from genetically modified farmed salmon escapees interbreeding with wild salmon populations, rendering them unfit to survive the rigours of the natural world. These are serious issues that are having a profound long-term negative impact on the natural environment and on wild salmon stocks specifically.

Why is this relevant to the Crown Estate Bill? In simple terms, salmon farmers are there only because they get a licence from the Crown Estate. Without a Crown Estate licence, they would have no right to be there, and the cumulative impact of the industry, and the bad operators among them, would not be causing the levels of environmental damage and animal suffering that they are. Given the nature of this monopoly, it is surely right that the Crown Estate commissioners are enabled through the Bill to hold to account those to whom they have granted a licence, and that they themselves are held accountable for the outcomes that they enable. Without these amendments, the Crown Estate commissioners are unable to fulfil their duty of care to others with whom they share the coastal space to ensure that they are not adversely impacted. They are unable to prevent the negative animal welfare issues from continuing; unable to ensure that there is no detrimental impact on other species that live in this precious ecosystem; and unable to ensure that the wider environment is not damaged by the bad operators to whom they have granted a licence to operate.

These amendments seek to give the public and the environment a practical and sensible level of protection against malpractice and environmental damage, by giving those who enable these fish farm operators—namely, the Crown Estate—the tools to manage the cumulative impact and to remove the bad operators. They will also give the Government the power to hold the Crown Estate commissioners to account to ensure that they do this. We have all seen the devastating impact that can occur if we fail to hold those in a monopolistic position to account in areas such as sewage discharge, so let us not repeat the same mistakes here.

As it stands, the Crown Estate has no ability to influence or remove bad operators in the aquaculture industry to whom it has issued a licence. Crucially, the Government have no ability to hold the Crown Estate commissioners to account for any negative outcomes arising from the issuing of these licences. It is simply not right that the organisation that is in the sole position to enable an entire industry—and, incidentally, to make tens of millions of pounds from issuing these licences—can have no influence over, or responsibility for, any negative outcomes from its actions.

The simple measure of requiring the Crown Estate commissioners to report annually on the impact of aquaculture on the environment and animal welfare standards—and enabling and compelling them to remove licences from those operators that fall short of the required standards—must surely be a desirable and fair outcome for everyone. It would significantly reduce any negative impact on the environment and help to improve animal welfare standards. These amendments have substantial cross-party support, and I hope that the Government will accept them as improving the Crown Estate Bill.

My Lords, I will speak to this group of amendments. I was not sure which one most suited the comments I wished to make, but I think it is probably Amendment 37F in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Leicester.

At the heart of all three amendments is a question about the relationship between, on the one hand, the economic activity that we wish to undertake, quite properly, and, on the other, the environmental and natural consequences that may take place. It is about the right balance between what we seek to do economically and what we seek to protect environmentally. I will speak to that general point.

Taking my lead from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, I should declare my interests. I too am an angler, although I do not get to spend nearly enough time on the river, and I also happen to own the river, which is rather nice. I am chairman of the Caithness District Salmon Fishery Board, which is currently very involved with Crown Estate Scotland on various issues. I may also be—I hope—the beneficiary of a number of renewable projects. I have every sort of interest that you could possibly have; I think that they are broadly covered by my register, but I thought that I had better spell them out.

As I said, the heart of the three amendments is about seeking to ensure that, when we set out to undertake an economic activity of any kind—and this is absolutely what happens on land—we make a proper and full assessment of what the impact is likely to be on the environment that we are putting that economic activity into. That includes the flora, fauna, fungi and everything else that you might find there.

I want to give one quick example; it is in Scotland but I think it is relevant. We on the north coast have four rivers which are all in very good health. On the Thurso we electrofish every year and for some years now we have known that you cannot get any more juveniles into the river, it is in that good order. So, at a time when most of Scotland has salmon stocks that are endangered, as the noble Lord pointed out in introducing his amendment, we have the one bit of Scotland that actually is in good order and producing good salmon—and long may that last.

The west of Shetland wind farm, which is going to go ahead in the not-too-distant future, and which I support as a piece of offshore energy, may have a problem for us in the fishing world, and that is that we do not know where our smolts go. When the salmon grow in the river, they come to a point where they smoltify and they take to the sea and off they go. They are then called “smolts” or “post-smolts” and we do not actually know where they go. There has been smolt tagging and tracking in the Moray Firth which discovered that the fish that come out of various rivers in the deep south around Inverness and places like that have a tendency not to do what you would expect, which is to scoot up the coast and head past Orkney. For reasons known only to them, they leg it across to Aberdeenshire, which I always thought showed a bit of a lack of taste. The point about that is they do not go through the Beatrice wind farm and that piece of knowledge is vital in being able to look at what you may need to do to mitigate.

Similar studies on the west coast show that Irish and west coast fish tend to go due north, as you would expect, and straight off to Iceland. We just do not know where our smolts are going, so we made contact with Crown Estate Scotland, which I have to say has been incredibly helpful on this, and the chairman put me in touch with various people. As a result, I believe that there will be a smolt-tracking project which will allow us to know where our smolts are going and we will therefore know whether we have a problem, so we can look at what can be done to mitigate it if we have.

That comes back to the point I was making that, without information, you cannot make a decision on the appropriate thing to do. Crown Estate Scotland on this occasion has been extremely helpful, as I said. It wishes to make sure that it does the least harm, which is wonderful, but it seems to me correct that, in forming any legislation, it is appropriate, as we do with the nuclear industry and a whole range of other things, to state what it is that people have to provide by way of information in terms of an economic impact assessment and what they will do to mitigate the inevitable downsides that occur when you have developments of these kinds.

So I am not sure whether I am supporting anybody in particular—noble Lords will have to make up their own minds on that—but I am supporting the principle that we need knowledge and information about what may happen so that we can then make an informed choice on what mitigation is required and how much damage we are prepared to accept for the value brought by the economic activity.

I am most grateful to the noble Viscount for giving way and I am much heartened to hear that his rivers and fish are doing very well. I just wonder what his reaction would be if someone decided they wanted to put a fish farm in the track of his migrating smolts when he knows where they are.

I suspect I would be pretty horrified, given all the information that I know about it, but I have long tried to stick to a principle in your Lordships’ House to speak about what I really know about and avoid the things I do not know too much about, so I hope the noble Lord will forgive me if I do not go down that road.

To come back to my central point on the need to get information, it is about the right duty that we should ask the Crown Estate to have and then the process it should follow to deliver it. So my request to the Minister would be to look at the obvious strength of feeling on all of these points and perhaps the Government should look at what their view would be as to the right process and the right way to put it into the Bill and come back with an amendment that would achieve that and would suit the Government.

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register and in particular as a trustee of the Blair Charitable Trust. I will make two brief points, but generally I feel very supportive of both Amendments 37 and 37G.

The first point begins with the Defra food security statistics, as updated in October 2023, where it is noted that the production-to-supply ratio in the UK is 75%. That is essentially a measure of the number of calories that we produce on these islands that we need to eat. We need to import, therefore, a quarter of all the calories at least that we eat. In fact, it is more, because we export some of what we produce as well. No new land is being produced and we are chipping away at the existing farmland with forestry, development and a certain amount of rewilding, and the population is growing, so the number of calories is going up. Aquaculture is therefore a very obvious way of improving the situation and, while I fully accept all of the many problems that we heard about so powerfully from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, earlier on, we are going to have to face up to the fact that aquaculture is something that we will need if we are going to try to narrow the gap of the production-to-supply ratio.

As the Minister said in his Second Reading speech— I am sorry that I was not there—the Crown Estate is very rarely here in this Chamber; it last came in 1961. So it is important to prep the Crown Estate and do some future-proofing of it, and much of the Bill is about getting on top of energy and prepping it for energy as well. Again, we are going to need to grapple with the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, raised, but on this visit to the House I think we must prep it for aquaculture as well. That means that we are going to have to have some amendments that are along the lines of Amendments 37 and 37G. I slightly prefer the width of Amendment 37G, but there are good things in both of them.

I move to my second point. There is a lot to learn from the experiences of Scotland in aquaculture, and English commissioners will certainly and inevitably face the problem faced by the trustees of the Blair Charitable Trust that a high financial offer for the use of something may come from a riskier and lower-quality bidder. The effect of Amendments 37 and 37G would be to give those commissioners an easier ability to turn down somebody who has offered a larger amount of money but has lower environmental standards and to say clearly, “No, your bid is not there, it is not in the overall interests of managing the land”—on behalf of all of us, I may say. That is a very important point.

A few years ago, I went to stay with some friends near Oban and they took us down to visit a bankrupt fish farm. I do not know whether anyone else has visited a bankrupt fish farm recently, and I know that “desert” is the wrong word when one is talking about a sea loch, but “desert” is quite a good word for describing what we saw. It was awful, and of course it goes a long way beyond all of the netting arrangements. It was dead and horrible and it smelled and there was waste everywhere and our friends told us of the great difficulty in working out who was going to clear it all up and who was going to pay for the clear-up, because Crown Estate Scotland had not put in place bonding arrangements —something those in construction would do because, if the construction company goes wrong, you can finish off the problem. It usually happens with shipbuilding, although not with Scottish ferries, but bonding arrangements are extremely important and they had not been put in place. I am glad to say that I went back a couple of years later and the area has improved, but it is not perfect. I therefore have direct experience of the horrors of things if you do not get it right, and I suspect there are many war stories—so if aquaculture comes, as I know it will, to England and Wales and Northern Ireland, people can learn from their Scottish cousins.

On my experience of charitable trustees worrying about potential land users, I went back and looked at some trustee board papers, and the process we actually follow in real life when we are considering letting land users on to the Blair Charitable Trust, which is quite big, is very similar to the two processes set out in Amendments 37 and 37G. That process has been going on for a long time on what is a very old-established plot of land. I therefore feel that these are tried and tested routes to something as well, and that they are very good. They have a long-term view built into them, as well as the fact that you must look to the whole environment, as we do at the Blair Charitable Trust. These amendments are therefore vital, and they will make the job of the Crown Estate commissioners much easier.

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate to listen to. I had not intended to partake in it, but I was prompted to do so by the last two speeches, by my noble kinsman Lord Thurso and by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. This is clearly a much bigger problem than just salmon. From listening to the debate, it seems that we all want the offshore energy—we need it—and, undoubtedly, as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said, we will need aquaculture in the future in a much more abundant way than we have it at the moment.

It strikes me that it is very odd that those who operate our farms and our energy on land face very different hurdles to those who operate at sea. Can the Minister, who has quite a lot to take away and think about from this well-informed debate, look at this whole question? This is a rare opportunity for us to try to get this right for future generations. We do not want to solve a problem now by creating a further problem for the future. Let us get this right so that we take a holistic view of development at sea, whether it be fish farming, agriculture or energy, so that the right environmental standards and precautions are put into place before and after an event. As the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said, at the moment it is all too easy for fish farmers to put themselves into liquidation and leave a mess for others to clear up. That cannot be allowed to happen in the future.

My Lords, I want to make a very brief intervention on the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, and I would like some assurance from the Minister on some important points that the noble Earl made.

One of the points the noble Earl made was that we need to look at offshore developments not one by one in sequence but holistically. We are moving now into new waters with floating offshore wind; I am particularly aware of the Celtic Sea development, but obviously there is also floating offshore wind further out in Scottish waters. I would very much like an assurance from the Minister that, before those developments take place, in terms of actual building and specific location, there will be an overall environmental assessment for the whole of the future developments as opposed to each one individually. We want to understand the total effect rather than those individual effects.

We also need to consider the issues around the landing of those electric cables and all the infrastructure. In the North Sea, we have had the issue of a spaghetti of energy cables coming into various places all around it, and now, far too late, we are looking at trying to change that into a rational grid where we can have greater interdependence and greater trading but also fewer landing areas in terms of environmental damage.

In an earlier group, I raised the issue of a potential conflict of interests between the Crown Estate wanting to have offshore wind and therefore doing its own environmental assessments for these developments to be oven-ready—to use that phrase so badly used in the past. I very much wish to be assured by the Minister that there will be that global view of future areas of development, particularly of floating offshore wind, rather than doing it piecemeal in the ineffective and rather damaging way that we have done in the past.

My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, Lord Douglas-Miller and Lord Leicester for these important amendments. I first declare my interests as set out in the register as the owner of fishing rights in both Devon and Sutherland, as a developer and owner of renewable energy assets and as president of the South West Rivers Association.

Amendments 37 and 37G require the Crown Estate to take responsibility for the environmental impact of salmon and broader fish farming, as well as the welfare standards in those industries. This applies both to existing licensed salmon and fish farms as well as new applicants for licences.

We support sustainable farming of wild Atlantic salmon or any fish species when it is done with sufficient respect for animal welfare and with protection of the environment in mind. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and recognise that it is critical that fish can be farmed so a growing global population can continue to include fish within its diet without putting unsustainable pressure on wild fish populations. We also celebrate that the United Kingdom is one of the few places in the world that has ideal coastlines and sea conditions, and that the industry can bring much-needed jobs to parts of the country with limited employment opportunities. Its contribution to those communities is important. However, the salmon farming industry should not be at the expense of the wild population that spawned it and was already occupying this coastline and these river systems for millennia before farming began, or at the expense of equally valuable jobs in managing the rod and line fisheries or indeed historic salmon-netting rights.

This Bill and these amendments target only England, Wales and Northern Ireland. As we all fully understand, the Scottish Crown Estate has been devolved. However, it is hard to debate these amendments without acknowledging the damage that Scottish salmon farms have done not only to the west-coast-of-Scotland rivers but to English, Welsh and Irish rivers. Migratory patterns of salmon and sea trout are still not fully understood, but it is clear that fish travelling to these rivers also have to navigate open-cage salmon farms in Scottish waters.

To my knowledge, there is only one fish farm in UK waters outside of Scottish waters, and that is in Northern Ireland. While these amendments will capture that farm, we also hope and intend that they will provide that any future development of salmon farms in our waters, or indeed any other aquaculture, is done with much greater scrutiny of the environmental implications and with full accountability for any harm caused and with the highest standards of animal welfare.

As my noble friend Lord Forsyth and other noble Lords mentioned, the evidence against salmon farms for their impact on wild Atlantic salmon and other salmonids has been well laid out: they are a reservoir of sea lice that prey on passing salmon; they are a reservoir and breeding ground of disease and bacterial and fungal infections; and there is the long-term existential threat, as farmed species’ genetics increasingly diverge from wild, that interbreeding with the wild species by escaped fish has on their continued viability in the wild. I note that it is thought that 5,000 salmon escaped from the Northern Irish salmon farm earlier this year.

There are other environmental impacts that have also been discussed: the amount of wild fish that are caught solely to be processed for fishmeal and fish oil to feed farmed salmon; the dead zones created on the seabed; and the chemicals that are used to treat diseases impacting on local wildlife. In addition, lumpfish and five species of wrasse have been used since the 1990s as cleaner fish in the industry to eat sea lice. The lumpfish are also farmed, and the industry is moving to farming of wrasse as well. What environmental standards do these have, as well as animal welfare standards?

There are also significant welfare concerns for the farmed fish themselves, as expressed during this debate—exposure to predation from sea lice; images of hundreds of tonnes of dead fish routinely being taken out of these cages and disposed of by incineration, burial and other means; and the apparent overcrowding of these fish within the open-cage salmon farms.

As my noble friend Lord Forsyth mentioned, Washington state chose to ban open-cage Atlantic salmon farming in 2018, and British Columbia plans to shut all its open-cage salmon farming by next year. That is not what is suggested by these amendments, which would ensure that the Crown Estate environmental and welfare obligations are explicit and that the entity is held accountable for any environmental damage or welfare issues caused on its estate. Better practice is available in the world; there are better techniques for farming Atlantic salmon that could be brought into operation to mitigate and even eliminate many of the causes of damage. We understand that these are all likely to add to the cost of production, but why should our environment and our wild Atlantic salmon subsidise this industry? Surely we have learned our lesson from the impact of the green revolution on native bird species and river system health?

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords for the points raised during this debate and for powerfully highlighting such important issues. I will respond to the amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Dou