Timber and Timber Products and FLEGT (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]]

My Lords, although there was no debate in 2018 when these regulations were transposed into UK law, we really should not take it that this is an unimportant issue. The UK is the second-largest importer of timber in the world, so the issue affects a lot of companies. Moreover, as the Minister said, deforestation and forest degradation are responsible for a significant amount of biodiversity loss and 11% of our greenhouse gas emissions. It therefore poses a serious threat to the health of our planet.

We supported the transposition in 2018 of the EU law which prohibited the sale of illegally harvested timber, and we supported the approach which imposes a due diligence obligation on companies. I take this opportunity to welcome the Government’s consultation and their commitment to introducing a due diligence obligation on companies using other commodities associated with deforestation, such as soya, palm oil and cocoa. It was a Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment to introduce such a due diligence obligation, and I called again, in a debate which I led in the House in March, for the Government to introduce such a due diligence obligation in the Environment Bill. Now that the Government have completed their consultation, I hope very much that they will be in a position to do just that.

This specific SI deals mainly with addressing the implications of the Northern Ireland protocol and the fact that EU timber regulations will continue to apply in Northern Ireland, unlike in England, Scotland and Wales. I had a number of questions about the monitoring organisations that timber companies in Northern Ireland would use and I sent them to officials in advance of today’s debate, saying that I would be extremely grateful if they could respond before today. Sadly, they were unable to answer the questions at that point, so I shall repeat them now.

Do these regulations mean that Northern Ireland companies can use only the monitoring organisations on the approved and published EU list? The list is an integral part of the EU regulations. Given that we will come out of the European Union on 31 December, will UK monitoring organisations be removed from the list, therefore requiring companies in Northern Ireland to use monitoring organisations from elsewhere in Europe? The officials have responded that they will clarify with the European Commission whether that is the case.

It is a very important issue because most timber companies in the UK, including in Northern Ireland, are small and medium-sized companies and very few of them have their own due diligence obligations, so they will require monitoring organisations to undertake that function for them. As it stands now, no organisations in Northern Ireland are able to undertake that function. Let us be clear about it: there are only 13 such organisations in the whole of Europe, so it is not likely that a new one will be set up quickly in Northern Ireland. I do not oppose this statutory instrument but think we should put on record that it will undoubtedly bring further uncertainty to timber companies in Northern Ireland, post Brexit.

I shall close my remarks on the issue of the enforcement of these environmental regulations. At the weekend, the “Countryfile” programme on the BBC highlighted the cuts to budgets for environmental enforcement resources and programmes here in the UK. It was disappointing that no one from Defra was prepared to go on to that programme to comment. The enforcement of these regulations falls, as the Minister said, to the Office for Product Safety and Standards. It is not an insignificant responsibility and I hope the Minister can reassure us that that body—it is a unit in BEIS—will have sufficient resources to ensure that the regulations will be properly enforced to ensure that there is no lessening in our commitment to tackling problems of deforestation.