Environment Bill

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his introduction to this already improved Bill, which I welcome in principle. However, I am not as optimistic as he is that this is the silver bullet needed to save our natural environment; we have been here many times before with legislation that has been touted as the answer to our problems. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was enacted to reflect the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, and that on the protection of migratory species. I remember my noble friend, the late Lord Bellwin, introducing the Bill on 16 December 1980, nearly 41 years ago, and saying that the Government recognised the

“awakening awareness, both nationally and internationally, of the need for conservation of our wildlife resources”.—[Official Report, 16/12/1980; col. 983.]

Since then, as your Lordships will know, there have been numerous pieces of additional legislation, including the habitats directive in 1992 and the birds directive in 2009. However, on recent evidence, we have failed miserably to stop the decline in nature and our natural environment; we must ask ourselves why.

Two major contributions to that failure have been the lack of practical wildlife management, which has been overlooked, and the fact that the current rules are often impractical and ineffective. This Bill is just one part of jigsaw legislation and supporting policy statements. Thus, the way this Bill and the Agriculture Act, strategies on tree planting, peatland, food and biodiversity and the industrial strategy work together is key to ensuring that there are no unintended consequences or voids. Looking to the future, the rather feared planning reform Bill will probably undo quite a lot of the good that this Bill will do.

Compliance involves more than just regulation and sanction; it involves understanding motive, incentive, encouragement and soft governance. The latter is part of ELMS, found in the Agriculture Act, while this Bill provides the legal and statutory aspects of environmental governance. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, the two need to marry to deliver the ambition of a very high take-up of ELMS; but is that enough to achieve an improvement in our environment? I am concerned that the long-term environmental target priority areas in Clause 1 are not fully aligned with the policy ambition

“for significantly improving the natural environment”,

given, for example, the goals that the Government have identified in their 25-year environment plan. Just as the Agriculture Act was amended to reflect the value of healthy soil to society, so this Bill needs to address the environmental damage caused by soil loss, such as the impact on riverine and estuarial habitats through sedimentation and eutrophication, flooding due to sediment build-up in watercourses, and loss of organic carbon from the soil bank due to erosion. My noble friend said that he would introduce amendments on this; I will read them with care.

Furthermore, environmental hazard mitigation, such as for the increasingly common and damaging wildfires, is not sufficiently addressed by the priority areas. While I welcome the ambition of setting targets in law to provide a means of holding government to account, these need to be complemented by a robust review framework to provide suitable accountability and ensure that targets are not simply reset as, for example, in the case of the biodiversity 2020 targets. There is justifiable concern that many of the key environmental indicators do not have relevant or robust metrics, a point made by the National Audit Office report, which stated:

“There remains a patchwork of sets of metrics that do not align clearly with government’s overall objectives or with each other.”


It also said that there are “some important gaps”, such as soil health.

It is essential that advice in setting these targets, which will come from those who are independent and have relevant experience, must include practitioners and not just theorists. Like many others, I am concerned that the role and status of the office for environmental protection is much too weak and a significant step back from the situation that we were in as members of the EU. Picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has my noble friend seen the evidence from the analysis of the Bill by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and, if so, what is his response?

Another area of concern is waste. Although it is right to improve how we handle it, I will be tabling amendments on trying to reduce the amount we produce in the first place, as prevention is just as important as cure.

In the forthcoming stages, I will focus on trying to ensure that the Bill really will provide adequate—rather than just nominal—protection for plant species and our natural environment, which are at risk.