Environmental Improvement Plan 2025

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Harlech. I do not have any farming interests to declare, but I have two allotments that take a lot of time and energy.

It might not seem like it, but I want this Government to succeed, particularly in their environmental aims. The problem I have is that again and again we see that this Government do not understand the countryside, rural areas, farming, green space, newts, frogs, beavers or anything that actually contributes to the environment. That is going to be a huge barrier to this Government achieving what they say they want to achieve.

What are the headline changes in the plan that will reverse the decline in species? I cannot see a wholesale shift in our farming practices or a clamp-down on people shooting birds of prey—no names here. Of course, there is more money to improve peat-lands, but where is the peat ban that the noble Baroness, Lady Young, has been seeking for 35 years? I like the promise to grow more trees, but what about stopping cutting down ancient woodland? You cannot grow new trees into ancient woods. Once they have gone, they have gone.

I want to talk about some of the targets, because some of them are clearly failing. Target 1 is on thriving plants and wildlife. The Planning and Infrastructure Act has wrecked any chance of meeting that target. Labour’s manifesto pledge of 30% of land and sea protected, connected and managed for nature recovery by 2030 is now an unreachable promise. The targets for marine protected areas, which I will mention again, are delayed by another couple of years, and there is no wholesale site protection for marine areas, just the safeguarding of a few high-profile species. The Government do not even try to pretend they care about reaching good environmental status for our seas and ocean and have not bothered to set a target. I wish the Office for Environmental Protection good luck in its investigation of the Government, because I think they will probably fail. There is a target to restore salt marsh, sea-grass and oyster reefs, but a 15% increase by 2043 is ridiculously modest, given that we have lost 85% to 95% of these habitats historically.

Target 3 is on clean and plentiful water. That is a sore point for many of us here. Labour inherited a mess, and its refusal to take water into public hands has just deepened the mess it is in, especially as it goes into the next election. People will remember, and they are not happy. I will remind them, obviously.

The Minister has pledged to halve sewage dumping by 2030. So in another four years, I can stand here and thank Labour for there being only 2.5 million hours of sewage being pumped into UK waters in 2030. Bathers on beaches will have another five years before they can go swimming without drowning in human excrement. Meanwhile, it is the water bill payers who are funding all the work and shareholders who still make a profit.

Target 5 is on maximising resources and minimising waste. The aim of creating a circular economy based on reuse, recycling and repair is a worthy goal. But instead, we have a country full of oil-burning chimneys. The number of incinerators has gone up, and the material we should be recycling has been shoved into furnaces. Plastic production has increased along with oil company profits, and we have taken the easy option of burning plastic instead of recycling it or, even better, not producing it in the first place. Some councils have got locked into 25-year contracts with various incinerator companies, and that means that sometimes they take the refuse out of recycling and throw it into incinerators.

Target 7 is on minimising and adapting to climate change. The whole world is switching to renewable energy, but where is the big investment here in the UK in energy storage schemes? Producing the batteries and local energy storage schemes is where the innovation is. Instead of that, the Government have put £22 billion into carbon capture and storage. The biggest system of carbon capture and storage on the planet is the ocean, and the Government have not taken that seriously.

I will get back to my speech now. There is no guarantee with carbon capture and storage that the money—taxpayers’ money—will not go to oil and gas companies that have already spent decades profiting from pollution. The Government are also supporting airport expansions and adding millions of extra flights every year. That is not minimising climate change.

Target 8 concerns reducing the risk of harm from environmental hazards. It took more than seven months for the authorities to deal with a mountain of fly-tipping near the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire—a pile of rubbish 20 feet high and as long as the Lords half of the Palace of Westminster. That is broken Britain. Also, why have the Government not adopted Zane’s law to deal with hazardous waste? When seven year-old Zane died and his father fell ill, the Environment Agency had already commissioned a study showing that the ex-landfill site near his home posed a high risk to life. Yet it did nothing to warn residents before, during or after the 2014 flooding. Further, to this day, it has adamantly refused to test the land, which has flooded again this year, fully. We need a law to ensure that the Environment Agency protects people and wildlife rather than profits and secrets.

Finally, I wanted to read out the Marine Conservation Society’s ideas on how to protect our waters, rivers and seas, but I have run out of time. I shall instead give the document to the Minister and encourage her to read it because it is full of ideas, such as setting up a marine litter strategy for England to clean up the debris that we have on our shores.

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[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am quite tight for time. I shall do my best to answer all the many questions, but if there is anything that I do not cover, I will make sure I write to noble Lords with responses. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on securing this debate. I welcome the opportunity to respond and to discuss how the environmental improvement plan will deliver the targets of the Environment Act.

The EIP, as noble Lords are aware, sets out the Government’s commitment to the ambitious statutory Environment Act targets. It is our road map on how we are going to improve the natural environment and people’s enjoyment of it. It ensures that nature’s recovery is a key priority for this Government and is fundamental to our general approach, including growth, because we know that growth is not possible without a healthy and resilient natural environment.

Our EIP goes further than the previous one. It is a credible, clear plan with clear, prioritised actions to deliver the environmental outcomes of restoring nature, improving environmental quality, creating a circular economy, protecting environmental security and improving people’s access to nature. It sets out who is responsible for these actions across government and our wider society.

The EIP sets ambitious yet achievable interim targets. It is essential to have those as staging posts on our journey in order to deliver the targets that have been rightly described today as challenging. Each interim target will make an appropriate contribution to corresponding statutory targets over the next five years. We have increased the ambition of some of the interim targets since the Government’s last plan, including for air quality and to restore and create wildlife-rich habitats. We have also introduced new targets on farm wildlife and on invasive non-native species. We are maintaining our delivery trajectories for other targets and have adjusted others to ensure that they remain deliverable and credible.

On other targets, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, asked about the MPAs and whether the 5% flex was watering down that target. The flex is introduced largely to account for adverse impacts of offshore wind developments that have been consented to because they pass the habitats regulations or MCZ derogation tests. We think it is the best option to set an interim target that contributes towards the statutory target while aligning it with the changing MPA network that supports the Government’s clean energy mission. I hope that explains why we have done that.

Of course, setting clear targets and goals is simply not enough; we need to know exactly how we are going to reach them. I hope noble Lords will be reassured to know that for the first time we have published delivery plans for those targets. They clearly set out how actions contribute, who will deliver them and how progress will be measured. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, asked which actions will make the largest contribution to halting the decline of biodiversity. The delivery plans will set that out on a strong evidence footing so that we know exactly what is happening.

Driving environmental change and understanding the impact of actions being taken will obviously be complex and take time, so the delivery plans are designed to remain live and can be refined over time in response to emerging evidence, to policy evaluation and to any feedback that we get from stakeholders carrying out the delivery. We believe that this transparent and collaborative approach to communicating and adapting our plans is a major step forward. It is also central to our monitoring and our reporting of progress, which, again, is essential to keeping any delivery on track.

The EIP sets out more than 90 commitments. Each is associated with a delivery metric, and we will report on changes to those metrics in our annual progress reports, along with the latest evidence and changes to trends in our environmental indicator framework. The framework, which is also published online, objectively measures how the environment is changing across the 10 EIP goals.

Together, such approaches better enable external appraisal and will ensure that we learn and adapt appropriately as we move towards the targets. I am already very grateful to stakeholders, including the OEP, whose scrutiny and recommendations are helping to shape this improved approach. We have a clear plan and process, but we also know the scale of the challenge and are trying to match this with the right actions to get where we need to go.

SFI was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, so I am sure he will be pleased to hear that, just this morning at the Oxford Farming Conference, the Secretary of State set out how we are reforming SFI to make it simpler and fairer and to enable as many farmers as possible to benefit and help nature thrive. As someone who has a smallholding, I was particularly pleased to see that this is also targeted now at smaller farmers. At that conference, the Secretary of State also made clear that protecting the environmental foundations of farming is not separate from productivity but an essential part of it. All this will help us to meet our EIP targets, including doubling the number of farms delivering for wildlife. This follows the most nature-friendly farming Budget we have seen, to give farmers the support they need to produce food sustainably while protecting soil, water and wildlife.

Last year we had the highest amount of tree planting in 20 years, as I am sure my noble friend will be pleased to hear—over 10 million trees—and we have started planting the first of the three new national forests. We recently implemented the Water (Special Measures) Act. I have been asked about the water White Paper, and I confirm that it will be published very soon; watch this space.

The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, asked about PFAS. The EIP includes a commitment to publish a PFAS plan in 2026, and that will set out how the Government are taking action to protect people and the environment from the particular harms and risks that this relates to. We are acting decisively to improve air quality. A circular economy is an important part of this. We are further reducing environmental harm by turning waste into opportunity and creating green jobs across the country—I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is particularly interested in this. We are boosting opportunities and, as the Minister for access to nature, I am pleased that we have a chapter in the EIP on how we will do this. I was pleased that we launched the first of the nine new river walks on Boxing Day.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the importance of working together. It is important that we do this, as we will not make progress unless we have cross-government contributions in achieving these targets. That includes the land use framework, the farming road map and what we are doing across the department as well as across government. This is important. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, particularly talked about the importance of working with stakeholders and people who have to deliver. Only by government working hand in hand with communities, businesses, farmers, the public sector and the third sector can we achieve our target delivery.

The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, asked a number of questions, and I will try to fit those in. If there is anyone else, I will come back to them. He asked what aspects of the new plan give me confidence around SSSIs —in fact, there were a few questions around SSSIs. I have an SSSI on my land, so I completely understand the challenges of site management. Natural England has improved its understanding of SSSI condition and the pressures and actions needed to restore SSSIs. It is making progress: it has a more strategic focus than previously and, over the spending review, it is looking to improve the evidence from each site. It is looking at a strategic landscape scale, with a greater focus on what happens on the land outside the site boundary as well as just within it, and at those implications.

The noble Lord asked how many SSSIs are on agricultural land covered by agri-environment contracts. It is approximately 40% at the moment. Additionally, Natural England has developed a conservation enhancement scheme to fund actions on SSSI land that is not eligible for environmental stewardship schemes. We want to continue to build on that work.

On national landscapes, we know we need to go further and faster in protected landscapes to meet our national targets, and we will ensure that protected landscape bodies, landowners and land managers have the tools and resources to achieve that. We will continue to work closely.

The PMB was excellent and very much in line with government ambition. The principles of it—to drive and strengthen action towards meeting natural environment and climate targets and objectives from both local and other public authorities—are absolutely at the heart of what we will achieve. I hope we can continue to talk to the noble Lord and bring in his expertise around that.

I seem to have run out of time. I am really sorry; I had lots of lovely answers to all of the questions posed by noble Lords.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Would it be possible for the Minister to tell us about peat?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I have just been told that I can carry on because I have another five minutes; my officials will tell me when I need to stop.

I turn to the gene editing of ecosystems. We are supportive of that innovation. We have agreed the parameters for the new SPS agreement with the EU. The EU has accepted that there are a number of areas where it will have to look at our laws. This is something that we are discussing with the EU.

I turn to peat. To confirm, we are committed to ending the sale of horticultural peat and peat-containing products by the end of this Parliament. That is part of our ambition for this Parliament. We are working very closely with the sector to look at how we can make that transition.

The noble Baroness knows that I am very sympathetic to SUDS. It is worth reminding the Committee that we made immediate changes to the National Planning Policy Framework to support the increased delivery of SUDS. Clearly, we need to continue to discuss that.

My noble friend Lady Young talked about the environmental principles and asked whether people, particularly officials, have training. The answer is yes. Our recent report on the implementation of the environmental principles, which was published in November, recognised that our tools are valuable and that we do provide training.

Is there anything else that I have forgotten? I thank noble Lords very much for their contributions to the debate and assure them that we are committed to delivering the environmental improvement plan and to meeting the environmental targets.