Biodiversity: Aichi Targets

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park [V]]

Measurement is crucial to understanding and delivering good policy, but it is not as important as the policies themselves. If you look at what the Government are doing as a whole, we have probably the most ambitious environmental agenda of any Government to date. We have the first Environment Bill in over 20 years. We have ambitious measures, including restoring and enhancing nature. We have just announced a £40 million green recovery challenge fund to help charities and environmental organisations to start work on delivering much of that environmental gain across England, restoring nature and tackling climate change. We are going to use the new nature for climate fund to deliver woodland expansion, peatland restoration and more. We have announced a tripling of Darwin Plus to protect our precious Overseas Territories. We are replacing the disastrous CAP system, as I just explained, with the new environmental land management scheme, which will be revolutionary for our countryside, and we now have 25% of the UK’s water in marine protected areas. We are making progress.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, when on 8 July I asked the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, about progress in establishing the office for environmental protection to help deliver our environmental goals, he replied that

“we have always said that we will ensure that there are alternative arrangements if, given the position we are in, the OEP is not up and running by 1 January.”—[Official Report, 8/7/20; col. 1113.]

Can I ask the Minister what these alternative arrangements are?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park [V]]

The department on whose behalf I am speaking today is making progress in the construction, development and delivery of the OEP. As the noble Baroness knows, we need legislation and that requires the safe passage of the Environment Bill, which we hope to deliver in the coming months.