Terrestrial and Freshwater Protected Sites
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
Where water companies do not meet our expectations, we will toughen our regulation and push them to improve their performance. This will include the Environment Agency conducting in-depth audits and reviews of water company management systems and new technologies, such as continuous flow monitoring and event duration monitoring. The results of the Environment Agency’s audits and review will help it and us to target enforcement action appropriately.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, water pollution is a key cause of the decline in conditions of protected sites. All English rivers are currently failing to meet quality tests for pollution. Given that 40% of water pollution comes from agricultural run-offs, what specifically are the Government doing to get farmers to use fewer chemical inputs?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
The principal tool we will use in the coming years is the transfer from the common agricultural policy subsidy system to the environmental land management system. Whereas farmers and landowners have, for decades, been incentivised to convert their land to make it farmable—in many respects grubbing out ecosystems and undermining nature—the new system will make those payments completely conditional on good environmental stewardship. It is probably the biggest bonus that nature and our environment more broadly will have experienced in the last century. Although that is not the only funding mechanism or tool at our disposal, it is undoubtedly the most powerful.
Timber and Timber Products and FLEGT (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, although there was no debate in 2018 when these regulations were transposed into UK law, we really should not take it that this is an unimportant issue. The UK is the second-largest importer of timber in the world, so the issue affects a lot of companies. Moreover, as the Minister said, deforestation and forest degradation are responsible for a significant amount of biodiversity loss and 11% of our greenhouse gas emissions. It therefore poses a serious threat to the health of our planet.
We supported the transposition in 2018 of the EU law which prohibited the sale of illegally harvested timber, and we supported the approach which imposes a due diligence obligation on companies. I take this opportunity to welcome the Government’s consultation and their commitment to introducing a due diligence obligation on companies using other commodities associated with deforestation, such as soya, palm oil and cocoa. It was a Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment to introduce such a due diligence obligation, and I called again, in a debate which I led in the House in March, for the Government to introduce such a due diligence obligation in the Environment Bill. Now that the Government have completed their consultation, I hope very much that they will be in a position to do just that.
This specific SI deals mainly with addressing the implications of the Northern Ireland protocol and the fact that EU timber regulations will continue to apply in Northern Ireland, unlike in England, Scotland and Wales. I had a number of questions about the monitoring organisations that timber companies in Northern Ireland would use and I sent them to officials in advance of today’s debate, saying that I would be extremely grateful if they could respond before today. Sadly, they were unable to answer the questions at that point, so I shall repeat them now.
Do these regulations mean that Northern Ireland companies can use only the monitoring organisations on the approved and published EU list? The list is an integral part of the EU regulations. Given that we will come out of the European Union on 31 December, will UK monitoring organisations be removed from the list, therefore requiring companies in Northern Ireland to use monitoring organisations from elsewhere in Europe? The officials have responded that they will clarify with the European Commission whether that is the case.
It is a very important issue because most timber companies in the UK, including in Northern Ireland, are small and medium-sized companies and very few of them have their own due diligence obligations, so they will require monitoring organisations to undertake that function for them. As it stands now, no organisations in Northern Ireland are able to undertake that function. Let us be clear about it: there are only 13 such organisations in the whole of Europe, so it is not likely that a new one will be set up quickly in Northern Ireland. I do not oppose this statutory instrument but think we should put on record that it will undoubtedly bring further uncertainty to timber companies in Northern Ireland, post Brexit.
I shall close my remarks on the issue of the enforcement of these environmental regulations. At the weekend, the “Countryfile” programme on the BBC highlighted the cuts to budgets for environmental enforcement resources and programmes here in the UK. It was disappointing that no one from Defra was prepared to go on to that programme to comment. The enforcement of these regulations falls, as the Minister said, to the Office for Product Safety and Standards. It is not an insignificant responsibility and I hope the Minister can reassure us that that body—it is a unit in BEIS—will have sufficient resources to ensure that the regulations will be properly enforced to ensure that there is no lessening in our commitment to tackling problems of deforestation.
Biodiversity
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Teverson
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, following the report by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, A lost decade for nature, published on 14 September, what action they are taking (1) to reverse biodiversity loss in the United Kingdom, and (2) to meet the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Teverson, and with his permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.
The Minister of State, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con) [V]
My Lords, in England the 25-year environment plan marks a step change in ambition for wildlife and the natural environment. The Government have announced significant funding and legislation to meet this ambition. The Aichi targets are international in scope. The Government have increased international biodiversity spending and are playing a leading role in developing an ambitious new global diversity framework. Nature will be at the heart of the UK COP 26 presidency, paving the way for transformative action.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
I hear what the Minister says, but last October he said that the Government were looking at legislative options to ban the burning of upland peat bogs and yet it has been reported that these plans have been shelved. Peat bogs are incredibly important ecological sites, supporting many rare and endangered species, helping to prevent flooding and store carbon. Are the Government going to ban peat burning or continue their failure over the last decade to meet agreed international biodiversity targets?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
As the noble Baroness will know, we are currently engaging with stakeholders on the content of the England peat strategy and we expect it to be published later this year. The Government have always been clear—as I have—on the need to phase out the burning of protected blanket bog to conserve those vulnerable habitats. We are looking at how legislation can achieve this and are considering next steps.
Single-use Plastics
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park
My noble friend makes a very good point. At the risk of triggering a groan in the House, I am afraid that I can tell him only that, having consulted on extending the charge to all retailers and upping it to 10p—something the Government are very serious about—we will be taking the next step as soon as possible.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, in 2018, the Government promised to review the waste prevention programme. If, as the Minister says, the Government are so serious about prioritising waste reduction, why has that not yet happened?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park
I think the Government’s record on tackling plastic is pretty robust. We have, for example, world-leading legislation on tackling microbeads. The many billions of microbeads that would have ended up in the environment, particularly the marine environment, will not, as a consequence of the steps we have taken. I have already mentioned the plastic bag tax, and there are numerous other bans on the way in relation to plastic stirrers and spoons and so on. It is unfair to describe the Government’s progress as slow. However, when it comes to things such as extended producer responsibility, they cannot just be invented overnight. It is much more complex and requires us to look at the whole life cycle of individual products. We are working hard to develop the right answers but it is important that, when we introduce them, they are the right answers.
Queen’s Speech
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, as someone who has campaigned on the issue of plastic bags for many years, I strongly welcome the commitment in the gracious Speech to reduce their use. Discarded plastic bags are iconic symbols of waste, be they catching the wind in high streets or flapping in rural hedgerows. However, the issue is bigger than just the visible litter on our streets and in our countryside; it is about the dangers that plastic bags pose to our wildlife—if they are discarded on the beach and into the sea they can choke or poison fish, animals and birds—and about the contribution that they make to our carbon emissions. Their creation and transportation consumes non-renewable resources, including oil, and their disposal contributes to our greenhouse gas emissions, taking 500 to 1,000 years to degrade.
As the Minister reminded us in his opening remarks, supermarkets in England gave out 7 billion single-use carrier bags in 2012 alone, and that figure has been rising here year on year, but not elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In the Republic of Ireland, plastic bag use fell by 90% following the introduction of a plastic bag charge in 2002. An equally dramatic drop in usage of 76% came after Wales introduced a charge for single-use plastic bags in 2011, and a charge of 5p in Northern Ireland introduced last year resulted in £1 million going to local environmental projects.
The coalition Government are therefore to be applauded that next year a 5p charge on single-use plastic carrier bags will be introduced in England. Given that Scotland is bringing in a minimum 5p charge this October, shoppers will have an incentive not to use plastic bags wherever they shop in our—we hope—still United Kingdom.
There have been mutterings about this initiative outlined in the gracious Speech. At a time of tight budgets, should we really be asking people to pay more when they go shopping? If shoppers take their own bags, however, they do not have to pay—and they are already paying in their council tax the huge hidden costs of disposing of these bags in household waste. That is not even counting the cost of cleaning up littered carrier bags on our beaches, which Keep Britain Tidy estimates costs us taxpayers in England around £10 million every year.
What is really good news is that our Government’s plans to charge 5p for our carrier bags will result in vital funds going to local good causes. The proceeds of this charge will stay with the organisations that collect them and not come back to the Treasury. To that end, I make a plea today to fellow Peers who sit on the boards of supermarkets, or who have influence within them, to challenge them to think now about how they can donate the profits of these schemes to local good causes.
Politics and legislation are sometimes about big-picture, sweeping changes which revolutionise our country, like the same-sex marriage Act. However, politics is also about changing everyday life in small ways that actually make a big difference. I firmly believe that a charge on plastic bags has the potential to make all of us think a bit more about our impact on the planet, raising the national consciousness about the role that each of us can and must play if we are to tackle collectively the problems of a wasteful society and respond to the challenges of climate change.