Environment Bill

Andrew Selous Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 26th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

I would like to make a little bit of progress. I am conscious of the number of Members who want to speak today.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my predecessors, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), who did a lot of groundwork on this Bill. I should also like to record my thanks to my colleague the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), who has been involved with the Bill from the start.

The Bill is key to this Government’s ambitious environmental agenda. In 2020, as the UK hosts the next climate change conference, COP26 in Glasgow, we will be leading from the front as we write this new chapter for the UK outside the European Union: independent and committed to net zero and to nature recovery. The Government will work to tackle climate change and support nature recovery around the world and here at home, whether through recycling more and wasting less, planting trees, safeguarding our forests, protecting our oceans, savings species or pioneering new approaches to agriculture.

The first half of the Bill—parts 1 and 2—sets out the five guiding environmental principles for our terrestrial and marine environments to inform policy making across the country. These principles are that the polluter should pay; that harm should be prevented, and if it cannot be prevented, it should be rectified at source; that the environment should be taken into consideration across Government policy making; and that a precautionary approach should be taken.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

What action are the Government taking to ensure that carbon offsetting is permanent and long lasting? Greenhouse gases can be in the atmosphere in some cases for hundreds of years, and there is a danger that carbon offsetting could be only temporary, so will the Government look at that point and come forward with proposals on it?

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Bill contains a number of measures relating to a biodiversity net gain. It includes, for instance, a provision on conservation covenants, which will enable a landowner entering into an agreement to plant woodland, for instance, to have a covenant on that land as part of an agreement that would prevent it from subsequently being scrapped.

Environment Bill

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Commons Chamber

The public health response to air pollution is to protect people and the environment in ways that are socially inclusive and equitable globally and across multiple generations. The Government must ensure that that happens through the Bill. Implementing my new clause’s review would demonstrate whether the Bill will reduce exposure to hazardous air pollutants for people on low incomes as much as it will for those on more affluent incomes. It would signal the Government’s real commitment to protecting all our health and, importantly, it would signal to Ella’s family that the Government are listening.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con) [V]]

While I welcome the measures in the Bill to standardise the collection of plastic waste across all local authorities, I remain very concerned at the continued increase in the production of single-use plastic. Too much of this plastic ends up as litter around our country and around the world, harming human, animal and marine health. We must start to reduce the amount of single-use plastic we make, as some of the projections for its continued production are truly alarming.

We also need to massively improve our performance on littering and fly-tipping. Part of the area in my constituency that a group of us cleared up litter from on Saturday as part of the Great British Spring Clean was already covered in litter again by Sunday. As Lord Kirkham said in the Queen’s Speech debate,

“research suggests that we have few, if any, rivals for the unwanted title of ‘most littered country in the developed world’…It is soul-destroying and dangerous to humans and animals; it pollutes the very air we breathe; it depresses and saps a nation’s morale.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 May 2021; Vol. 812, c. 409.]

We need more covert cameras to catch the culprits and more prosecutions, with greater fines, to act as a significant deterrent. Parents and schools need to do their bit to deter the next generation from littering, which is not only antisocial but criminal.

I am told by South Bedfordshire Friends of the Earth that we have, at times, continuous sewage discharge into the River Ouzel, which is a valuable wildlife corridor through Leighton Buzzard. There are very low numbers of freshwater shrimps in the river, and a chemical quality that was good in 2015 and 2016 was reported as a fail in 2019, according to the Environment Agency. We will therefore need to continue to strengthen legislation on continuous sewage discharges.

While I warmly welcome the world-leading parts of this Bill to mandate larger businesses not to source commodities from illegally deforested land, I am concerned about commodities sourced from legally deforested land, and rainforests in particular. I would like to see a certification scheme, similar to the Fairtrade one, so that we can all be reassured that the food we are eating has not come to us at the expense of virgin rainforests.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

No. 10 on the speakers’ list is not here, so we will go to Barry Gardiner.