Environment Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, because I know from my experience as chairman of the Climate Change Committee why it works. It works because there are statutory targets to be met within reasonable times. If the target date is 2050, no Minister presently serving will have to be responsible for it. Indeed, I remind my noble friend that when a former Labour Party Administration announced a date for net-zero houses which was some 10 years later, there was ribaldry on the Conservative Benches on the basis that that would mean that they would not have to do anything during their period of office.

I am afraid I am long enough in the tooth to recognise that the Climate Change Act ensured that no Government could put off the actions they had to take until a more convenient time arose. The brilliance of the Act was to bring together two very different timescales. One is the democratic timescale of four or five years for the renewal of mandate and the other is the continuing timescale of fighting climate change. A democratic society has somehow to bring those two together. The cleverness of it was that by ensuring that Parliament agreed on the interim budgets and therefore they were democratically voted on, the Climate Change Committee was then able to hold the Government to them. They could not be changed without their agreement. That brought these two things in line.

What surprises me about my noble friend’s—and he is a noble friend—reply during the previous debate was his suggestion that somehow everything that is true about the Climate Change Act does not count in the Environment Bill. He does not believe that because he is a great supporter of the Climate Change Act. It is just not possible to hold those two views. I fear that this is the result of some apparatchik somewhere who does not want anybody to be held to anything. All of us should recognise how dangerous that is from the news today. Despite everything that has been said at this Dispatch Box and a similar Dispatch Box in the other House, the Government have bent over to the Australian Government and removed from the agreement the commitment to meeting the climate change figures and temperatures in the Paris Agreement.

If that is so, how can we possibly accept merely the assurances? We have to have it in the Act—we have to have it clearly there, not because we have any doubt that this Minister, this Front Bench, would do what they say they are going to do, but because we have lived long enough to know that if it is not in the Act, in the end it does not get done.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I fully support Amendments 11, 13 and 14. I simply ask: what is the point of having targets if there is no duty to meet them?

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I want, very briefly, to support Amendment 11. The whole point of this Bill is that it is going to be ready for the COP 26 meeting. It is a model Bill. It is something that we hope that other countries will adopt as a method of dealing with very difficult problems.

It seems to me in business experience that if you have long long-term targets, interim targets are very helpful. Therefore, as a necessary logical consequence, one would want the model Act to have such interim targets as well—the exemplar we would want other countries to follow. As I am sure we will be managing the thing in a logical way and therefore managing it with interim targets and would want other people to do that as well, it is logical that we should have these targets.

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[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, I will also speak to Amendments 16, 17, 25 and 29 in my name. this amendment is looking to include heritage as one of the requirements of EIPs.

The Government stated clearly in Committee that they are committed to heritage through the 25-year plan, but it seems to have been neglected in the EIPs. The problem is that if it is not on the face of the Bill there is no compulsion for heritage to be looked at in this provision. There is an issue here, because while we talk about environment, there is a read across to many historic landscapes where heritage has led to the conservation and preservation of species. In the summer I was working on hedgerows. You can tell the age of a hedgerow by the number of species incorporated in it, and if you say, “we’ll replace it with a modern hedgerow”, you will end up with just one species and a degradation of the landscape. Preserving the historic heritage could save many parts of the environmental landscape that could be at risk.

It was clear in Committee that the Government are not going to place this on the face of the Bill, but can the Minister state clearly before the House today that while they are not placing it as a duty under the EIP, they see it as a fundamental area that should be brought into an EIP going forward?

I would love to make a long Second Reading speech on the joys of heritage but obviously, in the interest of haste I am not going to. In return, I would like the Minister to make a very strong statement. However, I will raise a second issue. While this is not part of this Bill, the heritage sector in this country has been very worried about what has been going on in Afghanistan. Those working in the heritage sector in Afghanistan are particularly at risk and were on a bus ready to go to the airport to be taken to a safe country. Unfortunately, the bomb went off and those people have not been able to leave. I hope that the Minister will raise this with the DCMS. I know that the DCMS has been doing a lot of work on this, but there is a long-standing and strong link between those in the heritage sectors in this country and in Afghanistan.

I beg to move.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale. I support all these amendments. As an ex-archaeologist I feel strongly that this is something we must take notice of. We cannot keep trashing our heritage. I will try to be brief, if not as brief as last time, but will give two examples of where we have absolutely blundered.

The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, mentioned “historic”, but my area of study was prehistoric. For example, the way Stonehenge has been treated, with plans for a tunnel and a road, is absolutely outrageous. Why is there no understanding that these monuments contribute not only to wildlife, the landscape and the soil in lots of ways but to human happiness? Luckily, the plans for the monstrous Stonehenge road have been turned down by a British court.

That is a prehistoric example. An historic example is Bevis Marks Synagogue, which has just celebrated its 320th anniversary of continuous use, which is absolutely incredible for a building in London. However, an application has been made to build three high-rise tower blocks around it, which would plunge it into darkness for most of the day. This will impact on the people who go there, and it will be a tragedy to degrade this stunning monument in this way. It seems that, with ambition, development and building, people lose sight of what is good for us all. The local community is, of course, absolutely up in arms and trying to stop the City of London Corporation’s planning committee.

The Green Party is incredibly keen to support these amendments. I am astonished that the Government do not understand rather better the need for our heritage. They make a lot of fuss about statues at Oriel College but somehow, these other wonderful monuments do not seem to play any part in their thinking.

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In conclusion, given the Assembly’s role in these appointment processes, I urge the Minister and the Government to reconsider this and support and endorse Amendment 24 from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and my cross-party Amendment 30. It is entirely appropriate for this Bill to provide for equivalent oversight of the appointment of the Northern Ireland member of the OEP board. No arguments have been advanced by either the UK Government or DAERA in Northern Ireland as to why the OEP should be subject to a weaker arrangement for appointments than that for existing comparable oversight bodies. Precedent exists for the nature of this appointment process in Northern Ireland.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said that he brought the amendment back because it was the most important one for this Bill and, quite honestly, I agree. There are lots of very important amendments but, if we are going to have one, this must be it. I absolutely take the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, on Northern Ireland, and support both amendments.

It is obvious to anybody looking in from outside that the office for environmental protection must do things such as hitting the share price of a water company whenever it dumps sewage into our rivers. We must have an independent OEP that commissions research into the impact of pesticides on our wildlife and insects and hands it over to MPs so that they can actually challenge Ministers and the lobbyists in Whitehall. We need an OEP that can say a straightforward no to damaging developments, whether it is infrastructure or development, urban or rural. It should not be suggesting mitigation and greenwash, which is what could happen with such a toothless watchdog. This country needs an OEP that is a rottweiler and not a lapdog.

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, I also support Amendment 24 and related amendments. Again, I quote the unprecedented statement made yesterday by the Archbishop, Pope Francis and the Ecumenical Patriarch:

“We stand before a harsh justice: biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and climate change are the inevitable consequences of our actions, since we have greedily consumed more of the earth’s resources than the planet can endure.”


For that reason, we cannot solve these complex problems through good intentions alone. Independent scrutiny is absolutely vital. Therefore, I support the maximum possible independence for the office for environmental protection. Action on climate change and biodiversity will be challenging politically for every Government over the next three decades. We will face many difficult decisions. It is essential to build in independent assessment and challenge for the medium and long term.

Over the last three years, I have had the privilege to be part of the board of the Government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation—as it happens, alongside the new chair of the office for environmental protection, in whom I have every confidence in that major role. One of the major threads running through the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation’s work—which, I believe, has been excellent—has been a strong ambiguity about its independence from government in terms of budgets and the appointment of its chair and board. The questions were present at every meeting, whether spoken or unspoken, and consumed a significant amount of energy. Reading the political runes at any given moment was, on balance, a distraction from the CDEI’s vital task.

As has been said, the OEP needs to command national and international confidence for the objectivity of its advice and recommendations. I join many other voices in urging the Government to build in greater independence along the lines of these amendments.