Environmental Principles Policy Statement

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, on securing this debate. As others have said, these principles are unbelievably important. Without them, we will not have a chance of meeting the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced.

I sit on the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and I completely agree with her about how few enforceable standards and commitments there are. Indeed, many of the submissions we have had from government departments have shown a lack of joined-up thinking, commitment and follow-through. It has been pretty frightening, and it continues to be a frightening state of affairs.

Let us talk about the principles here. Ministers have a statutory duty to have due regard to the policy statement when designing the policy and embedding the environmental principles into policy-making, but it seems quite extraordinary that there are total exemptions for the Armed Forces, defence, national security, taxation, spending or the allocation of resources within government. There are basically no policies, or very few, that do not involve spending, so can the Minister give an assurance today that these exemptions about spending will not simply be used as a loophole by departments if they want to do something not in the spirit of the principles? This is a point that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, made when he talked about these vast framework Bills under which an awful lot of things about which we know nothing can go on.

When asked what scrutiny there would be of the implementation of the principles, Defra responded to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee:

“It is primarily for Government Departments to ensure the duty is implemented effectively in their policy making. The Office for Environmental Protection will monitor the implementation of environmental law, which will include the requirement to have due regard to the policy statement.”


I do not see how it is at all clear how government departments will monitor whether new policies are consistently supportive of positive environmental outcomes, how they are to report on the implementation of the duty in their policy-making or, indeed, how its impacts are driving environmental improvements. What is the assessment process going to be?

The issue of monitoring constantly raises its head, most recently this week in the Climate Change Committee’s latest progress report to Parliament, which warned that without a clear way to monitor areas such as peatland restoration or tree planting, we just will not meet our targets. It also said that there was a clear lack of cross-departmental consistency in policy, a point I have just made and which has come up over and over in the committee. In fact, we have seen it recently, with the Minister’s own department and the trade department squabbling over trade standards with regard to Australia, and with health wanting to reduce the intake of junk food but DCMS overturning that to protect the interests of advertisers, couched in some idea about the cost of living crisis. I simply do not see why this measure will be different.

I do not doubt that the Minister wants it rolled out properly, and perhaps he shares my doubts about some of the other departments, but, without proper monitoring and reporting, there is really very little hope that it will be a success. If it is left to the individual discretion of individual Ministers with no accountability, recent history teaches us that it is unlikely to work.

The recent OEP report, Taking Stock: Protecting, Restoring and Improving the Environment in England, stressed the importance of urgent action to deliver environmental improvements. On the Government’s overarching ambition that this should be the first generation to leave the natural environment in a better state than it inherited, it says that

“we are concerned this vision does not have cross-government support or the same urgency, gravitas and awareness as the vision for Net Zero.”

Those are all points that have come from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who said earlier this week in relation to the CCC report that

“although the Government is doing well on some things”—

everyone acknowledges, recognises and congratulates them on EV rollouts and on the bid for alternative energy—

“right across the board there are serious gaps, and under the present proposals”—

this is the noble Lord, Lord Deben, not me—

“we don’t believe that you can reach the statutory, legal targets which we need to reach.”

He was very clear that ambition is one thing, and it is welcome and necessary, but it is implementation that the Government have to focus on—something that the OEP agrees with. Again, I know that Defra Ministers get the issues and want to take bold actions, but I worry that some of their colleagues across government do not share their desire for rapid implementation. It is worth noting, as other noble Lords have done, that the public, right across the political spectrum, are overwhelmingly now in favour of bold action.

The Environmental Audit Committee 2021 report, Biodiversity in the UK: Bloom or Bust?, found that excluding the Treasury from being bound by environmental principles would mean that

“the impact of Government policies and projects on nature is not adequately factored into spending decisions”

and that if we are to

“achieve the transformational change necessary to address biodiversity loss, nature must be considered to ensure the best balance in policy-and decision making. Failure to do so will mean we continue to over-exploit nature, to the detriment of the natural world and ourselves.”

As we all know, the CBD conference is coming up this year and there will be binding targets. I do not feel that very much is yet in place, in our Government or in our finances, to be able to implement the type of targets that will be agreed. We do not want to see the same thing happening as happened before with the Aichi targets.

The Environmental Audit Committee followed up by writing to the Secretary of State in March, reiterating its calls for a net-zero stress test on the 2021 Budget and all subsequent fiscal events, and for the development of nature tests to be applied to spending decisions as a means for the Treasury to demonstrate its continued commitment to integrating the lessons of the Dasgupta review into policy-making. Where is this? What is it, and where can we find it?

Defra aims to publish the final environmental principles policy statement in the autumn, but no date has been given for when the “due regard” duty will commence. How will the environmental principles inform policy development and decision-making pending publication of the final policy commitments of the duty? Greener UK has raised a number of concerns about the draft policy statement watering down principles around proportionality and how the precautionary principle is implemented, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, has spoken about.

I will say a few words about the “polluter pays” principle. In this situation pollution is synonymous with environmental damage, but it is extremely unclear who is meant by this. The document states:

“The polluter pays principle is applicable where there is evidence of, or potential for, environmental harm”.


Who judges what is proportionate? If a chicken farm is polluting a local river to the extent where it is harmful for animals and humans to be in it, but the argument of food security is posed, who is allowed to go ahead and what is considered proportionate? I know this has been raised by other noble Lords, but it is a very important point.

Finally, what will paying constitute? Is it fines? Is it an environment equivalent of a carbon tax at a flat rate? Will it be set at a level to ensure that organisations or individuals do not just accept the fines and work them into their business models? Will it include a ban on the polluting activity in question? I think we all remember the famous quote from the head of Southern Water who, when asked why he had poured sewage into the sea off Sussex and just accepted a £90 million fine, said it was cheaper to put the sewage into the sea and take the fine than to try to fix the problem. Can the Minister tell us whether these principles will apply in those areas of policy-making as well as across such other areas as procurement and fossil fuel extraction?

I will end by saying more generally that the onus is entirely on the Government within this Parliament, because we do not have a lot of time to turn the rhetoric into ambitious policies that enable business and other sectors to achieve positive tipping points in our economy.