Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 Committee Report

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, like other members of the Select Committee, I add my thanks for the skills of our chairman: we are indeed fortunate to have his expertise, his passion and his good-natured chairmanship. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, both alluded to, it is not always the easiest job to chair Members of this House, and I thank him for it. I will also say how appropriate the title of the report is: indeed, the countryside is at a crossroads and it is important that in this House we learn the lessons of the past as we look to the future. I will be brief because I wish to cover an issue that has been very ably addressed by others, including the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I assure the House that I will not repeat the points he made; I have a number of additional points on the issue of the governance gap to pick up.

As noble Lords can see, the report recognises that a governance gap will be in place when we leave the European Union and very strongly supports the creation of the new environmental body that the Government have consulted on. As other members have said, that consultation is weak in a number of areas. There has been some tightening of commitments and Members in both this House and the other place should take credit for the fact there has been some tightening through the process of the EU withdrawal Bill, with the body now being given the power to initiate legal proceedings and to list the environmental principles in legislation. But I will highlight four areas where I think there are still weaknesses and where the committee’s report shows what I think is the correct way forward.

The first is an issue that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, did address and which I, as a former chief executive of the CPRE, feel particularly strongly about: the consultation on the environmental body does not guarantee a complaints process for the general public on the future of environmental protection. We have seen in the past how important citizens’ rights to seek environmental justice have been in improving the quality of our environment, in particular air quality. If we are going to have this environmental body, we need the public to see what is being undertaken and to feel that they have a stake in their environment. It is so important to them and if there is not a complaints process for the general public, it will undermine any commitments the Government might make. The Government’s consultation does not strongly back a complaints process—that is a fundamental flaw.

My second point concerns an issue that has not been raised so far by other noble Lords: the scope of the new environmental body. The consultation limits who is subject to the enforcement and commitments therein. Our committee decided that it should be not only central government but all public authorities. We took advice from a number of individuals. I will quote just one, who said that the new body should,

“certainly … hold public bodies other than Government to account”.

That evidence was from Secretary of State Michael Gove to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee in November 2017. So clearly the government consultation is stepping back from the Secretary of State’s own commitments, quoted in our report and made in another place late last year. Might the Minister be tempted to say whether he stands by the wording in the government consultation or agrees with his own Secretary of State?

Thirdly, there is no commitment in the consultation to set out the environmental goals and objectives in legislation, yet all Members of this House, of whatever political party, have all seen how important it was to set out goals in the Climate Change Act to ensure that there was cross-party support as the issue moved forward. That is a singular failing. The committee felt that it was really important to set targets for nature in legislation. It is something that the Liberal Democrats feel very strongly about and had as a manifesto commitment in 2017.

Fourthly, I strongly echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, on the need for independence and sufficient resources for the new body. Our committee saw from so many examples, particularly when looking at Natural England, that there is a real need for clarity on independence, as well as sufficient resources. Frankly, it is a load of old guff that the Government did not feel able to set out in the consultation some clarity on the two key issues of how the new body will be independent and sufficiently resourced. We know that the Government do this. Let us not forget, when the Water Bill was going through this House and the Government committed to undertake a consultation on the very tricky and controversial issue of water abstraction, they then produced an extremely good consultation document, setting out at great length two alternative proposals for the route they might go down. It was a very controversial issue and the Government set out the ways forward in their consultation document with a great deal of clarity. One can assume only that the Government have not set out the key issues of how the body will be independent and sufficiently resourced because they think that people will not be particularly happy about where they might end up.

Finally, another issue which has not been touched on by other committee members—so I hope your Lordships will allow me a little time to address it—is the strength of the duty that all public authorities should be under when they take account of environmental principles. In our report, as our chairman rightly highlighted, we talk about the biodiversity duty and how successful it has—or has not—been. On page 55 we say that,

“the requirement to ‘have regard’ for biodiversity is weak, unenforceable and lacks clear meaning”.

Yet the Government are proposing that public authorities should only “have regard” in future as they undertake their environmental principles. That will clearly not be sufficient.

While I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, that changing the wording on its own will not be enough, it is still important that the wording is tight and can form a bedrock so that when this body holds public authorities to account, the public authorities know what they have to do. If we do not have that, we will not be replicating the current status of environmental protection that we have in all EU treaties, and if the wording is not strengthened it will be far too easy for environmental protections to be subjugated to other competing calls such as those for economic growth.

The House may well wish to reflect on the problems caused for rural housing by the viability test. That has basically run a coach and horses through the requirements for rural housing—and that is exactly what will happen if the wording is so weak that public bodies have only to “have regard” for environmental protection. Without stronger wording and if we do not get it right, I am afraid that all the laudable words, particularly from this Minister—I echo the comments of others—about this Government’s intention to leave the environment in a better place will not be deliverable.