here - United Kingdom Parliament

1767 Pollinators and Pesticides
6 JUNE 2013 Pollinators and Pesticides 1768
The Government are set to publish planning practice
guidance on biodiversity. That is an important opportunity
to give councils guidance and impetus to protect and
restore bee-friendly habitat through the planning system.
However, so far there has been no evidence that the
Government are planning to take that opportunity or
even to issue the guidance for public consultation. Has
the Minister spoken yet with his colleagues at the
Department for Communities and Local Government
regarding this matter, and if so, has he impressed upon
them the importance of the issue?
Labour will continue to work with farmers and
horticulturists and with bee and environmental
organisations to create a future of secure and affordable
food produce from a natural and farm environment that
minimises the risk to our pollinators and enhances our
countryside, wildlife, habitats and biodiversity. In order
to do that, I urge the Government once again to use the
moratorium period to fill the gaps in scientific knowledge
of the effects of pesticides and to bring forward urgently
a comprehensive national bee action plan to reverse the
awful decline in bee health.
4.40 pm
The Minister of State, Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath): This has been
an extremely good debate and I thank the hon. Member
for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) and her Committee
for their report. She knows that we have had a short
delay in responding to her, for the precise reasons that
she had a short delay in producing the report. The
circumstances have been changing quickly and we want
to get it right, so I apologise to her and her Committee
for that. My noble friend Lord de Mauley is responsible
for this area, but the hon. Lady will appreciate that it
falls to me to respond to the debate in this House.
I also thank the hon. Member for Glasgow South
(Mr Harris) for his balanced remarks, which showed
that this is a complex issue. I am interested in it, not
least because as Minister for agriculture I know that
bees and pollinators are crucial. I cannot underline
sufficiently how important pollinators are to agriculture
and horticulture, so of course I have that interest.
I also have an enormous personal interest in the issue.
I spoke from the Opposition Benches about bees for a
very long time. I spoke on the subject right back in June
1998, when I said:
“We need a step change in investment in the investigation of
bee disease if we are to stem a worldwide phenomenon that is
lapping at our doorstep and has the potential to become a crisis,
both for the insect population and in economic terms”.—[Official
Report, 17 June 2008; Vol. 477, c. 204WH.]
That is what I said in 1998, so people are now free to
quote that back at me, but I meant it. We were arguing
then in the context of very little work at Government
level on bees. It took the best part of a decade before we
pressed the previous Government to start taking the
issue of bees and pollinators seriously, which they did:
we now have the national bee unit and I think we now
need to go one step further in our approach.
I welcome the opportunity to highlight what the
Government have been doing in relation both to pollinators
and pesticides and to our future plans. We take this
issue extremely seriously. It is crucial. Contrary to what
some have said, specifically in relation to neonicotinoid
insecticides, we have kept the evidence under close and
open-minded scrutiny and we continue to do so. We will
restrict the use of insecticides. Obviously, neonicotinoids
are now dealt with under the moratorium, but we will
deal with others as well, if the evidence shows that there
is a need to do so. I will come back to that point later.
The hon. Members for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) and
for Glasgow South pointed out that pollinators face
many other challenges. It is critical that one issue, such
as the use of particular pesticides, does not dominate
the debate, because so many other individual factors,
when taken together, have a complex effect on our
pollinator population.
Joan Walley: The Minister has said that the Government
will take action if the evidence shows that they need to.
Will he explain how that relates to the moratorium
delivered by the European Commission?
Mr Heath: I will come back to the specific issue of
neonicotinoids in a moment. The moratorium is in
place, so we will, of course, fully comply with it. We do
not not comply with decisions of that kind. I will return
to the evidence, because it is a critical issue.
I repeat that bees are essential to the health of our
natural environment and the prosperity of our farming
industry. The “Biodiversity 2020” document has been
mentioned. We have set ourselves the challenge of achieving
an overall improvement in the status of our wildlife and
preventing further human induced extinctions of known
threatened species. We have put a landscape scale approach
to biodiversity conservation at the heart of “Biodiversity
2020”. It is vital that that approach is effective in
helping to conserve our most threatened species.
Nature improvement areas are beginning to make a
difference for species on the ground. The 12 Governmentfunded
NIAs are by no means the sum total of our
ambitions. We want to see that approach rolled out
more widely by enthusiasts across the country. The hon.
Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) is seeing
exactly that in her city. We want that to be extended and
it is clearly already happening.
We want to make environmental stewardship more
effective. As the House knows, we are in the process of
negotiating CAP reform. It is not clear what the outcomes
will be. We do not know the extent to which greening
measures will be in pillar 1 or pillar 2, or the exact recipe
that will emerge from our decisions on agri-environmental
schemes that derive from pillar 2 or voluntary modulation.
This matter is a key consideration in that context and
I will certainly be pressing for it in the outcome.
Nia Griffith: The European Scrutiny Committee has
requested a debate on CAP reform. Will the Minister
say when that is likely to be scheduled?
Mr Heath: I am responsible for a large number of
things in my Department, but the scheduling of House
business is not one of them. In my previous post, I
might have been able to give the hon. Lady an answer,
but in my current post I cannot. To be honest, now
would not be the best time to have that debate because
we are just reaching what we hope will be a conclusive
meeting of the Council of Ministers. After that, we will
have a much clearer idea of the outcomes and how they
will be effected in the UK.