Environment Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Framlingham

Committee stage
Monday 28th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Framlingham (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am very happy to support Amendment 82. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, for dealing with it so comprehensively that I feel there is little more for me to say.

I speak to support the view that the office of environmental protection must not only have teeth but must be totally independent from all strands of government. There are many good reasons for this. Independence is, in a way, self-explanatory and a good thing in itself, but it is even more important to spell out that it must be independent of government when the judgments it will have to make may well be on cases in which a government department is involved. Additionally, I suspect there may be environmental transgressions, such as on effluent disposal, where much tougher punishments are required, and in some cases present legislation may be adequate but it is simply not being enforced correctly. The culprits may well have links to the Government, or the Government may, for various reasons, not be prepared to take as strong a line as they should.

In summary, it has been described as a core part of the Bill. I am not too sure what significant difference to the protection of our environment the creation of this office will have. I suspect much will depend on the approach and, more importantly, the resolve of the person appointed to the task. By giving it true independence, we can at least give it the best possible start.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, when the office of environmental protection was mooted, I hoped it would be on the same basis as the Climate Change Committee, and be totally independent of government. When that was not the case, I hoped that the structure of the Bill would be that advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and that that part of the Bill should be within the remit of the Climate Change Committee, which is sufficiently independent.

I remember when I was a Minister, and that was many blue moons ago now, being quite irritated at times by the interference of Brussels. We had perhaps some of the best civil servants in the whole of the EU then; my advice was excellent, and I thought that what we were doing was right. But on reflection, perhaps we were not that right. I remember I once lost a Division and went to the Leader, the late Lord Whitelaw, and said to him, “Willie, I’m terribly sorry, I lost that amendment”. He looked at me and said, “Malcolm, perhaps they were right”. Perhaps the Government are wrong on this occasion. As I see it, the problem is that Defra will remain judge and jury, and there is a route for disaster.

I shall give two examples. One example is the water authorities, which I helped to privatise in the mid-1980s. My friend, the late Lord Ridley of Liddesdale, made a revolutionary change in policy by taking control of pollution away from the water authorities and handing it to the National Rivers Authority. The water authorities were outraged, but it was right. What went wrong was that the NRA was amalgamated into the Environment Agency, and the money for the Environment Agency was reduced so that the controller of the polluting companies did not exercise the brake that was needed. We talked about that a couple of days ago.

The other government department that is a classic example of judge and jury is the Forestry Commission. I know that my noble friend on the Front Bench agrees that the Forestry Commission has been an utter disaster for this country. It has cost the taxpayer a huge amount of money and planted the wrong trees in the wrong places with the wrong policy. I hope that that is beginning to change. I have been banging on in this House on that for more than 50 years, but at long last I am being proved right.

I would really like the OEP to be seen to be independent. Not only does it have to be independent, which it is not under the Bill—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, said, the schedule is not strong enough—it has to be seen to be independent. My noble friend Lord Cormack was right: this is better done by negotiation. The Government will get defeated on Report on this, but it would be far better if we got an amendment that we could all sign up to, because that would send a message to everybody who will be affected by the Bill—which is the whole of the country—that there is unanimity in Parliament that that is the right way forward. At the moment, as I said to my noble friend when he was kind enough to have a meeting with me, I am unhappy with the OEP. I am not quite certain what the right amendment is, but I know that there is one out there if we all make an effort to get it right.