My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership, but also as a director of Wessex Strategic, which has an interest in housebuilding—so I have a foot in both camps here. But I am very clear about which side I am on, and hats off to the Office for Environmental Protection for actually saying very robustly how this proposed change of legislation really stands as a regress of environmental law.

As chair of a local nature partnership—and my colleagues throughout England will have a similar issue—I can say that we are at the moment trying to persuade stakeholders to contribute to local nature recovery strategies. These are absolutely core in terms of what it says on the tin: nature recovery. That is on the Defra side, yet here in terms of levelling up we have the Government saying, “We’re not interested in that agenda; we actually want to change and regress environmental legislation”. So my question to the Minister is a very practical one: how do I and my colleagues as chairs of local nature partnerships persuade stakeholders —farmers, housebuilders, businesses and communities—to take local nature recovery strategies seriously when the Government are giving a completely different view on nature recovery?