MINISTERS must “urgently get serious” about what climate change means for farming and land use, one of the city’s MPs has warned.

Caroline Lucas argued the Government’s flagship Agriculture Bill needed to be “far more explicit in its ambition” to protect and restore the natural world.

The Green MP for Brighton Pavilion said: “In the UK right now almost 60 per cent of species are in long-term decline, one in five mammals at risk of extinction.”

She added: “We’ve lost 50 per cent of our swift population over last 20 years alone and that’s as a direct result of the way we manage the land.”

The Bill, she said, did not place duties on the Government to act, adding that there needed to be a “legally binding” responsibility on ministers to ensure farmland was managed in a way that restored the natural world.

Speaking during the Bill’s second reading, she said: “Without such a guarantee the Bill will remain as with too much of this Government’s green agenda, too many words and not enough substance.”

She added: “Our wild spaces, our flowers, our animals that provide our landscape with such magic and beauty have been devastated by the impact of the way that we farm and the way we manage land and it is now acknowledged that that must change.”