Cross-government Cost-cutting

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for securing this crucial debate on the Government’s plans to cut even further our clearly already hopelessly overstrained and underresourced machinery of government. Yesterday in the Finance Bill debate, I focused on the social costs of the kind that the noble Lord so powerfully introduced this debate with. These are the result of the past decade of austerity 1.0, a policy that only the Green Parties across these islands have been consistent in opposing, and the threat of austerity 2.0, a cascade into a hell of poverty and inequality, which the Government have just embarked on.

Today I am going to focus on the impact on the natural world, the very foundation of life on these islands and of the economy, which the Government like to talk about as their top priority. To start topically, COP 15, the biodiversity COP, has just finished, with a better outcome than many had hoped for: a globally agreed promise, to which the UK has signed up, to protect 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. Yet currently only 3% of England’s land and 8% of English waters are being effectively protected and managed for nature, as identified in the 2022 Progress Report on 30x30 in England by leading NGOs. As my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb so regularly sets out in this House, our streams, rivers and seas are in a parlous state and our air is causing great damage to human health—and no doubt also to the natural world. That is in large part due to failures of enforcement as well as failures of regulation.

These are matters largely for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—Defra. We all know, and the political journalists here in the lobby tell us, that Defra is regarded as a department pretty far down the Whitehall pecking order—far below the lofty towers of the Treasury, with its tight stranglehold over the purse strings and narrow focus on the economy. To meet our COP 15 commitments, and for these islands to make the transition to looking after the natural world in a few short years, is a huge job, yet Defra is in no way keeping up with even the commitments that have been made by Ministers here in your Lordships’ House. The ENDS report recently came up with a list of 16 areas in which the Government had failed to meet their own commitments under the Defra umbrella. One of the largest of those was, of course, the legally binding commitment to set targets for air and water by October 2022. If anyone missed them, they were rushed out late last Friday afternoon—in December.

In your Lordships’ House, on 15 September 2021, the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, promised that an independent environmental assessment of nappy use would be published by the “end of the year”. That was in the middle of 2021, and it has not been published. Also in your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, promised us a soil health action plan for England on Report on the Environment Bill, on 8 September 2021. It was offered as a trade-off for the other place dropping the soil targets that so many noble Lords from all sides of your Lordships’ House helped me insert into the Bill here. There is no soil health action plan as we enter 2023.

I am going to carefully anonymise my concluding remarks here, as I do not want to get anyone to get into trouble. I was speaking recently to a member of Defra staff who I know to be extremely dedicated and knowledgeable—indeed, a world-leading expert in their field. They have to be, since the problems that they are tackling in England are worse than pretty well anywhere else in the global North. This staff member’s head dropped in despair as they told me that staff had been told to prepare for a 20% to 40% headcount cut. This would be a gutting of a department already hamstrung by understaffing, poleaxed by cuts, and facing the huge burden of trying to manage post-Brexit deregulation. Can the Minister reassure me that that cut to the Defra headcount is not going to happen? Can she offer a Christmas present for nature, on these islands, where nature does worse than in almost any other part of this poisoned, plastic-choked, trashed planet?