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1745 6 JUNE 2013 Pollinators and Pesticides 1746<br />
Pollinators and Pesticides<br />
[Relevant document: Seventh Report of the Environmental<br />
Audit Committee, Session 2012-13, Pollinators and Pesticides,<br />
HC 668.]<br />
3.10 pm<br />
Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab): I beg to<br />
move,<br />
That this House has considered the matter of pollinators and<br />
pesticides.<br />
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating<br />
time for this debate. Despite the fact that t<strong>here</strong> are so<br />
many conflicting events going on outside the House, we<br />
have a healthy number of MPs <strong>here</strong> who wish to participate.<br />
I am grateful to everybody for attending.<br />
The debate today is especially appropriate given that<br />
this year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of<br />
“Silent Spring”, Rachel Carson’s seminal work on the<br />
environmental cost of pesticides such as DDT. It is<br />
right that we should revisit the important issue of<br />
ecology and the relationship of plants and animals to<br />
their environment and to one another.<br />
The Environmental Audit Committee, which I chair,<br />
conducted an inquiry on pollinators and pesticides from<br />
November 2012 to March 2013. We extended it because<br />
t<strong>here</strong> were so many new developments as we carried on<br />
with our inquiry. We received 40 written submissions<br />
and we held seven oral evidence sessions. I thank all the<br />
witnesses to the inquiry. It was a unanimous report and<br />
I thank members of the Committee, some of whom are<br />
able to be present today and some of whom have sent<br />
their apologies. I also thank the Committee staff, who<br />
did a phenomenal amount of work helping us to compile<br />
our report, and put on record my thanks to Chris Miles<br />
of cdimagesanddesigns for his generosity in allowing us<br />
to use his photograph, “Pit stop” to grace the cover of<br />
the report. We are often told how accessible or otherwise<br />
House of Commons reports are, and we feel that thanks<br />
to him, the cover on our report is fitting. Bees like to go<br />
to bright, colourful flowers and we thought we would<br />
have the same for our report.<br />
The EAC report was published on 5 April. In normal<br />
circumstances we would have been content to wait for<br />
the Government response to our report, but given that<br />
the European Commission took significant regulatory<br />
action in this area on 29 April, shortly after its publication,<br />
we felt that a debate was urgent and timely, and on<br />
behalf of the Committee I sought the opportunity to<br />
hold the debate today.<br />
Let me put on record the favourable response that we<br />
have had from many who care about nature and wildlife.<br />
I thank Buglife, which affirmed that our report provides<br />
robust recommendations for the future of pollinators<br />
and the agricultural industry, and Friends of the Earth,<br />
whose recent reception in the House was attended by<br />
well over 100 MPs, although I was not able to be t<strong>here</strong><br />
myself. That testified how much support t<strong>here</strong> is in our<br />
constituencies all around the UK for its bee action plan.<br />
The all-party group on agro-ecology welcomed our<br />
support. It, too, welcomes the recent decision by the EU<br />
to ban three types of neonicotinoid pesticides. The<br />
all-party group believes that to be the right decision,<br />
and calls for decisions on our food supply and environment<br />
to be based on science and not on extreme lobbying and<br />
scare-mongering by those who have an immense vested<br />
interest.<br />
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab): I compliment<br />
my hon. Friend for the report and her work on this<br />
issue. While I welcome the decision on particular pesticides,<br />
does she recognise that t<strong>here</strong> is a wider question of<br />
eco-diversity that we have to address? If we do not, that<br />
will be something else that kills off the bee population<br />
in future. We must have a different approach to our<br />
natural environment in relation to agriculture.<br />
Joan Walley: I welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention.<br />
Our report clearly states that t<strong>here</strong> is no one solution<br />
and that we need, as he rightly says, a whole new<br />
systemic approach. The core of our report is that we<br />
need to get the balance right between scientific evidence<br />
and the precautionary principle, but t<strong>here</strong> are very<br />
many issues that relate to all this.<br />
We have had further support from many members of<br />
the general public and concerned interest groups, not<br />
least Bedfordshire Beekeepers Association, which said:<br />
“Your work has been an inspirational example of democratic<br />
scrutiny in action…we hope that you will be able to hold government<br />
to account and influence policy making both at national and<br />
EU level.”<br />
This is exactly what we are doing today and intend to<br />
continue doing. This debate is by no means our only<br />
follow-up to the report. We are raising the issue today<br />
to see how the many things that need to be done can get<br />
done, with the direction of the Government.<br />
The Committee decided to conduct our inquiry because<br />
the available evidence indicated that insect pollinators<br />
have experienced serious population declines in the UK<br />
in recent years. For example, we heard—this is quite<br />
shocking—that two thirds to three quarters of insect<br />
pollinator species are declining in the UK. Indeed, the<br />
2013 report “State of Nature” assessed 178 bee species<br />
in the UK and found that half were in decline. For the<br />
benefit of the House, I should explain that insect pollinators<br />
include not only honey bees and wild bees but other<br />
insects such as hoverflies, moths and butterflies. At the<br />
moment, the honey bee is the sentinel species for all<br />
insect pollinators, which means that most scientific<br />
studies involve bees, but given the biological differences<br />
between the various insect pollinators, it is vital that the<br />
Government monitor a wider range of species. I hope<br />
that this is an uncontroversial point on which the<br />
Government will agree with my Committee.<br />
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food<br />
and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath) indicated assent.<br />
Joan Walley: I am very pleased to see the Minister<br />
nodding. I refer him to our recommendation 13: “Defra<br />
must”—I stress “must”—<br />
“introduce a national monitoring programme to generate and<br />
monitor population data on a broad range of wild insect pollinator<br />
species to inform policy making.”<br />
We felt that that is the bottom line and the starting<br />
point of what now needs to be done. As we went<br />
through our deliberations and came to reach our decisions,<br />
we endeavoured to find as much common ground among<br />
members of the Committee as we could before we<br />
turned to the issue of neonicotinoids.