Environment Bill

Lord Anderson of Ipswich Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 9th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. While I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, that we have achieved some rapprochement, I was looking for total independence for the office for environmental protection and the consequences of that for Northern Ireland. While welcoming the progress, I am therefore still disappointed that the Government have rejected attempts to strengthen the independence of the office for environmental protection in law. I felt that needed to be placed on the face of the Bill.

I have carefully read what the Minister in the other place, Rebecca Pow, said yesterday on this important matter and note that she put some helpful statements on the record, including to confirm that the Government have no intention of issuing guidance before the OEP is up and running and has developed its own enforcement policy. She also recognised the conflict of interest inherent in this guidance power involving the implementation of environmental law by the Defra Secretary of State.

While these are welcome statements, my fear is that they could be forgotten or ignored by future Secretaries of State. I repeat the point made in several debates on the importance of future-proofing. I recall that I had amendments about the need for the independence of the OEP in Northern Ireland in Committee, on Report and during the last ping-pong. My great wish remains for such assurances to be written into the Bill, but sadly—like the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington —I believe we have achieved as much as we possibly can. Regardless of the outcome of this debate, I will write to the DAERA Minister in Northern Ireland to ask for similar assurances to be provided.

I ask the Minister here to tell the House whether he is confident that the Bill and this OEP will be totally accountable, and what discussions he has had with the DAERA Minister in Northern Ireland regarding the accountability of the OEP. We have a five-party Executive in Northern Ireland, and it is not always easy to achieve consensus on a wide range of issues. I would welcome answers to those questions.

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, having pestered the Minister since well before Second Reading for meaningful judicial remedies on environmental review, I will speak to Motion B and Commons Amendments 33C and 33D, which I believe are the product of negotiations between a variety of departments —some of them powerfully opposed to what they see as constraints on development.

While I thank the Minister and his colleagues at Defra for shouldering that task, I sense that the imprint of the Treasury and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities is visible on the end result. The good news is that the courts are now to be trusted with a discretion over whether to grant a remedy, even if substantial hardship or prejudice may be caused to developers or other third parties. The bad news is that this discretion is, as the Minister has said, weighted: weighted in favour of the developer. Uniquely in our law, the court will be barred—save for an exceptional public interest reason—from granting a remedy in such cases, even if it is satisfied that a remedy is necessary to prevent serious damage to the environment or to public health. The Minister’s example of the harmfully polluting factory makes just that point.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, spoke in Committee of an underlying feeling that environmental law is to be

“a grade below some other laws so that, although you fail to comply with it, you can still be all right”.—[Official Report, 30/6/21; col. 815.]

I regret that, while this amendment does achieve a limited upgrade for environmental law, a good deal of truth remains in his comment.

It was tempting—but would in the end have been futile—to fight on so, making the best of it, I end with two positive remarks. First, I draw attention to the helpful indication that the Minister has just given about what is intended by the obscure phrase “exceptional public interest reason”. By his own account, such a reason will exist whenever the public interest in preventing serious harm to the environment or to human health substantially outweighs the interest in preventing hardship to a third party. Less benign interpretations of that phrase might have been imagined, so I am grateful to him and his counterpart in the other place, Rebecca Pow, for their clarity and their express acknowledgment that their statements may in future be drawn on by the courts as a legitimate aid to statutory interpretation under Pepper v Hart.

Secondly, I take comfort in the fact that even after what we must assume to be the passage of the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, the full panoply of court remedies will remain available on judicial review—if not at the suit of the OEP, which will be allowed to bring judicial review proceedings only in urgent cases, then at least to other claimants with a sufficient interest. In that context, I note the Government’s view, expressed from the Dispatch Box on 30 June, that

“the OEP’s complaints and enforcement functions would not affect the rights of other persons to bring legal challenges against public authorities by way of a judicial review”.—[Official Report, 30/6/21; col. 823.]

In those circumstances, with profound thanks to the noble Lords from all parties and none who have signed and supported various amendments on this theme, and to the Minister and the Bill team, I offer a qualified but sincere welcome to Amendments 33C and 33D.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak specifically on Motions A, A1, B and D. My noble friend Lady Quin will then return to Motion C later in the debate. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord Anderson, for their perseverance and commitment to achieving proper OEP independence and enforcement powers. As we have said repeatedly, these measures are necessary to ensure that the environmental standards set out in this Bill, and indeed elsewhere, are protected for the longer term. I am also grateful to the Minister and the Bill team for listening and engaging on the issues that we have raised.

However, what we have before us today is not ideal, and we believe that the Government could have gone further to amend the Bill to give the assurances for which noble Lords across this House have repeatedly pressed. Throughout the process, we have supported the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in his determination to protect the independence of the OEP. This has been a fundamental issue and we continue to support Motion Al, which he has tabled today. We believe, as his amendment sets out, that the OEP should have complete discretion to carry out its functions free from the interference of government.

In this context, there have been a number of areas of detail which have been helpfully clarified by the Government in the Commons and, again, in this Chamber by the Minister today. For example, despite the Government’s insistence on the right to issue guidance to the OEP, we welcome the recognition that this should be limited to the areas of OEP enforcement policy listed in Clause 22. Quite rightly, it has been made clear that the Secretary of State cannot issue guidance on enforcement issues against the Defra Secretary of State, as this would be a clear conflict of interest. It has also been helpfully clarified that it would be within the scope of the OEP’s remit to investigate broad categories of individual cases that might have a common theme. This includes cases that have a discrete local impact but national implications.

We also reiterate our support for the proposal that Parliament should scrutinise the draft guidance before it is issued. All this goes some way to providing reassurance on an issue that we nevertheless believe continues to represent a flaw in the overall construct of the legislation. Can the Minister also assure us that before the Government publish any draft guidance, they will consult the OEP? Can he also assure us that the framework which will be agreed with the OEP will also set out its commitment to a five-year indicative budget? These are issues which the Minister will know are outstanding from earlier debate.

On the issue of enforcement, we welcome the tabling of the Government’s amendments to Clause 37(8), which address the concerns that the threshold for achieving a successful judicial review was insurmountable and anyway gave precedence to the interests of third-party polluters rather than those of the environment and the community. The amendment recognises that, on occasions, granting a remedy to address behaviour or damage will be necessary even if it may cause substantial hardship to the rights of a third party.

We have argued from the beginning that the courts should have the discretion to weigh all these factors equally in the balance. The Government’s amendments do not achieve that objective, but nevertheless we support the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, in the view that this compromise wording is a step forward and the best that we will get at this stage of the process. No doubt the exact meaning of “the exceptional public interest” test will be played out in the courts in years to come, and we very much hope that the widest possible interpretation of it will become the norm.

The Minister will not be surprised to hear that we still have reservations about the final wording in the Bill on these issues, but nevertheless, we accept that progress has been made, and hope that he can reassure us on the remaining outstanding questions about the OEP’s independence.