Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Baroness Hayman of Ullock and Lord Randall of Uxbridge

Committee stage
Thursday 18th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group. I will not go into detail on all of them but will talk about our concerns about this part of the Bill and home in on a number of them.

Part 6 gives Ministers the power to amend or replace 17 systems of environment assessment with a new environmental outcomes regime. Changes to these technical systems will have significant environmental impacts on the ground. Environmental assessment provides the critical processes that ensure that nature, climate and heritage considerations are properly considered in the planning system and that help protect sensitive sites from damage. Given the potential for environmental harms—or benefit, of course—to arise from these changes, we believe that detailed parliamentary scrutiny is essential. We are concerned that, as drafted, Part 6 largely freezes Parliament out from shaping the process that is going to have significant impacts for net zero and for nature’s recovery.

The bulk of the detail of the environmental regime, including the outcomes that it will be built around and which actual projects it will apply to, are all going to be set by secondary legislation. In the words of the Office for Environmental Protection, the body set up by the Environment Act to scrutinise environmental policy,

“its potential environmental implications will only become fully apparent through ‘EOR regulations’”.

We believe that giving the Secretary of State Henry VIII powers to reshape all systems of environmental assessment is unsatisfactory and inappropriate, considering the climate and ecological emergency that we are living through. My amendments would require Ministers to set higher environmental ambitions in primary legislation and allow for greater parliamentary scrutiny of any subsequent EOR regulations. This would enable parliamentarians to ensure that the new processes lift rather than lower environmental standards, something that Ministers have often declared they want to see.

My Amendment 372 would ensure that the central aspect of the EOR regime—the nature of the environmental outcomes it will strive to deliver—is fully set out in primary legislation. Currently, the lack of detail in this area is such that climate is not in fact mentioned at all within the EOR scope set out in Clause 138. Perhaps the Minister will explain why. Friends of the Earth has observed that we

“are left to hope that Government will, at some later stage, include the protection of the climate as an environmental outcome”.

A consultation on the EOR published by DLUHC in March sheds little further light on this baffling omission of climate from this Part of the Bill. The consultation suggests that climate change will be inherent in the consideration of the factors listed in Clause 138 and adds that Ministers can always use secondary legislation to update it if required. Does the Minister agree that such a relaxed approach to the consideration of climate impact within environmental assessment is inappropriate in a climate emergency? My Amendment 372 clarifies that protection of the climate from the effects of human activity should be a core environmental outcome, set through primary legislation.

My Amendment 371 adds further essential details to the description of other outcomes—for example, the need for natural environment outcomes to include improvements to the condition of protected sites. Adding these core environmental aspects to the Bill will then embed them into the EOR regime right from the start and allow their detailed application to be further considered through proper scrutiny.

My Amendment 377 would strengthen the non-regression safeguard in Part 6 and ensure that the EOR regime will not be weaker than current systems of environmental assessment. The current safeguard set out in Clause 142 is far from robust, because it gives the Secretary of State the power to actually weaken standards in the EOR regulation, as long as they are satisfied that the overall level of environmental protection will not be less than before. The Office for Environmental Protection has highlighted that this “overall” wording allows for highly subjective assessments to be made by Ministers, with declines in crucial standards potentially being offset by strengthening of standards that a Minister alone feels has the same weight. For example, a Minister could balance weakened standards for the condition of protected sites with improvements in standards for environmental data collection, allowing the weakening of protected sites to proceed, to the detriment of nature. 

My Amendment 377 replaces this weak safeguard with a stricter legal test, requiring no diminution of environmental protection in any one area. This provides a higher bar to shape EOR regulations and for parliamentarians to assess them against. It also echoes the wording of the non-regression clause—Section 20—in the Environment Act 2021. This robust non-regression test should also be applied to this Bill. I hope the Minister agrees. The Government have already responded positively to one set of amendments to Part 6, and we thank them for that.

My Amendment 369 and Amendments 375 and 376 tabled by my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage highlight that, due to confused drafting, Clauses 139 and 141 would undermine the mitigation hierarchy, which is a keystone in environmental protection in the planning system. We very much welcome government Amendments 373A, 373B, 373C, 373D, 373E and 373F, which were tabled in March to address this. Will the Minister and her department look again at how this responsive approach could be extended to ensure that the EOR regime has climate considerations and that there is a robust non-regression clause built into it?

The process for scrutinising the regulations that will implement Part 6 needs to be enhanced. Currently, the Bill sees EOR regulations subject only to the affirmative procedure, which, of course, precludes amendment and almost always leads to the regulations being passed. Given the significant environmental impacts that EOR regulations will have, we believe that a more thorough and constructive form of scrutiny is required. My Amendment 388 will achieve this by requiring EOR regulations to be made under the super-affirmative procedure. This means we have an additional 60-day period for amendments and will allow for meaningful input into the detail of the new system.

It is important to highlight that a number of the environmental assessment systems that EOR could replace were originally set through primary legislation. Detailed parliamentary scrutiny and potential amendment of replacement regulations are clearly appropriate and commensurate with the need to get right the detail of vital climate and nature policies. In a letter to Peers following Second Reading, the Minister suggested that scrutiny concerns were unfounded, as the Government’s EOR powers were tightly constrained by their commitment to consultation with the public and public authorities. Public consultation is welcome, as long as it is for longer than 10 days, as I said earlier, but it does not provide a constraint on ministerial power. It is also no substitute for proper parliamentary debate.

Together, my amendments constitute a repair package for the EOR proposals. Currently, they constitute a ministerial power grab, with the Government asking us, once again, to trust they will do the right thing with the considerable powers that Part 6 confers. These amendments will provide a legislative underpinning to limit this leap of faith, embedding high environmental ambition in the Bill and enabling meaningful parliamentary scrutiny of any additional detail. I urge the Government to carefully consider the case for these improvements to Part 6 of the Bill, so that it meets the minimum scrutiny standards we expect of such significant policy changes. I beg to move.

[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 384. Before I start, as there has been some gap between my appearances in this Chamber due to health issues, I remind the Committee of my conservation interests as laid out in the register. My amendment is supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, Lady Willis of Summertown and Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. I was very grateful to those noble Baronesses for moving some amendments in earlier stages of Committee when I was not able to because of health issues.