Environmental Principles Policy Statement

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for tabling this debate and setting out the concerns of the Environment and Climate Change Committee so clearly and eloquently.

Like other noble Lords, I was extremely interested in the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. He raised some important issues and gave us a bit of a history lesson, looking back, but the challenge for us here is looking forward. He referred several times to the statement as regulations, but I am not sure that is quite the status of this document. The question is: what is its status? The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said it was a new animal, a trailblazing mechanism, and I agree. The problem is that what we have before us is not an SI, which at least has a formal procedure, imperfect though it is—negative, affirmative and all those issues. It is not that. When it was first published, I put down a Written Question asking how Parliament was to scrutinise it. It was passed from pillar to post before I finally got an answer from anyone.

Indeed, I do not think we would have been having this debate if the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, had not tabled this Motion. It seems to me that this is wholly inadequate and that there should be a much more formal process for consideration of these sorts of policy statements. I do not know how often the Government were thinking of replicating this, but I certainly hope the Minister can give us some more assurance that there is a proper, formal process and that we do not have to put these special requests in if we want to debate this. It should be part of an established mechanism.

I suppose that then raises the question of what happens. We are now considering a draft. We have all piled in and made comments, and there have been formal comments from some of the committees, so what is the status of all those comments? How can we be assured that they will be taken on board? What is the status of this discussion here? Without getting into a detailed discussion with the Minister, I hope he is able to give us some assurance on all this that these matters are being taken seriously.

All noble Lords have made the point about how important these principles are and how fundamental they are to all the work we are doing on protecting the environment. It is a crucial wing, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, of the environmental governance system for England, which we spent many happy hours scrutinising during consideration of the Environment Act. If these principles fail to do their job properly, that undermines the other elements of the environmental governance package, so it is crucial that the wording in this document is clear, unambiguous and consistent with the other provisions of the Act.

That is why I very much commend the committee of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for rightly spending time considering in detail the draft and the intent behind it, and I pay tribute to the care with which it has done so. Like the committee, we feel that there is more to be done to strengthen the wording. For example, we share the concerns expressed today about the repeated emphasis in the draft on the need for a proportionate response to the application of environmental policy statements. It sounds like such a reasonable phrase until you dig down into what exactly is meant and how it is being applied in this context.

As the very helpful briefing from Greener UK points out, proportionality gets mentioned 19 times and is a running theme of the draft. In that context, it encourages Ministers to interpret and proportionately apply the principles rather than making them a requirement of the policy direction, which in effect means an element of watering down rather than having a balanced judgment. It also calls on Ministers to balance social, economic and environmental considerations in making policy and to factor in the financial costs and benefits.

This has resonance with our long debates on the Fisheries Act when we were debating sustainability. The Government’s insistence on balancing sustainability with social and economic factors has resulted in continued overfishing and depletion of stocks, and that is just one example. These considerations could well result in a justification for the cheapest policy option being pursued on the grounds of economic concerns, even if it could result in the greatest environmental detriment. That is not the right balance; you do not balance all those things equally. As we tried to argue in the Fisheries Act, sustainability should be the prime factor and the other factors should be secondary. We were not successful then, but in this case the environmental principles and policies should be the primary factors while other factors should be secondary. In effect, what we have here is that Ministers are given an opt-out clause to ignore the environmental principles if they think other factors are more important. I hope the Minister will feel able to take the draft away on that count and revisit the undue emphasis on proportionality.

The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, also rightly raises the committee’s concerns about the new interpretation of the well-established precautionary principle. As she says, the wording has moved away from the established use where there is a risk of serious or irreversible damage, even if it lacks full scientific certainty. It is a question of how you measure the unknown unknowns, if you like. Now the draft introduces new caveats about needing sufficient evidence that there is a threat of serious irreversible damage, and any choices to prevent environmental damage should be cost effective. However, it does not make clear how you can judge whether something is cost effective when the full impact of any future harm clearly cannot be calculated.

Again, that gives Ministers an exit route to ignore the precautionary principle, which has stood us in good stead for so many years. As several noble Lords have said, that is worrying; there has been some quite negative briefing against the precautionary principle over the last few months, but it has stood us in good stead and has proved right on many occasions. It is not something that we should ignore easily. I hope the Minister will be able to reassure us that a wider interpretation of the precautionary principle will be embedded in the final version of the document.

The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, also raised concerns about the watering down of the integration principle. The Environment Act is quite clear that the Government’s policy priorities should be integrated across all departments, with a requirement to act on them. The looser wording in the new draft simply calls on policymakers to look for opportunities to apply the environmental policies.

Again, a number of noble Lords have said this: herein lies the real problem. Although Defra Ministers may be committed to the environmental policies which have been developed by the department, the fact is that they do not have the clout or influence to roll them out across other departments—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, who gave other examples. We also saw this with the Government’s response to the national food strategy, where there were virtually no commitments to act on the Dimbleby recommendations in the health, education and welfare departments’ responsibilities. This is the real danger in being able to roll out other aspects of the Environment Act which require cross-departmental co-operation. It has not been helped by stories in the news recently that the Prime Minister has dropped his commitment to many of the environmental priorities that had previously been on the agenda. I hope the Minister understands why a clear commitment to the integration principle is essential to making the policies reality.

I hope the Minister can give us some assurance about the timescales for implementing the policy statement and the environmental principles. It has taken us a very long time to get to this point and we really should not have to suffer any further delay. When exactly will the final version of the statement be laid before Parliament? What will be the scrutiny process then for us to have a further look at that draft, and can he assure us that there will be only a limited period of formal implementation, given that the statement will have been in the public domain for many months by then? Can he give more details of how the department intends to use the implementation period to educate and ensure that all departments and public bodies are aware of their new obligations to build the environmental statement into their policy-making processes? I look forward to the Minister’s response.