Queen’s Speech

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I add my welcome to the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Morse.

We face a climate and nature crisis, yet this Government are not on track to meet their fourth or fifth carbon budgets and have failed on almost all the global targets to reverse losses in wildlife and the natural environment by 2020. We needed the gracious Speech to offer up new plans to deliver for our environment, protect our rights to environmental justice and ensure that all of government aligns with climate and biodiversity goals.

Despite some welcome steps, the gracious Speech is not sufficiently transformational. The Environment Bill should include a legally binding target to halve the decline of biodiversity by 2030. Doing so will drive action across government to restore nature and encourage other nations to raise their nature ambitions in advance of COP 15. Your Lordships must amend the Bill to include such a target and to strengthen measures to tackle waste and to improve resource efficiency and air and water quality, if we are to deliver the scale of environmental improvements that future generations need.

This Defra Bill also risks being undermined by other departmental plans, as other noble Lords have mentioned. The planning system should create great places for people to live and contribute to nature recovery, but the Project Speed planning proposals and recent decisions on extending permitted development rights and excluding major infrastructure proposals from biodiversity net gain run counter to that. The Government must do far better in encouraging co-ordination between departments to deliver climate and biodiversity goals.

The Queen’s Speech comes at a time when the clock is ticking for environmental action to protect our planet. All of us, not just the Government, must act. As citizens, we must transform how we travel, what we eat and how we heat our homes—in short, live sustainable lifestyles. Some 59% of the measures in the climate change committee’s recent pathway for the sixth carbon budget contain some element of societal behavioural change. Securing those changes requires public engagement, yet the one climate assembly in the UK to build consensus on how to do that was initiated not by the Government but by six Select Committees in the House of Commons.

The Government must provide more opportunities for participation in environmental decision-making alongside better education and communication. Doing so is part and parcel of delivering our right to environmental justice. Worryingly, the Queen’s Speech points in three ways to a Government determined to undermine that right—a right established in the Aarhus convention, to which the UK is a signatory.

First, as proposed, the office for environmental protection, which will hold public bodies to account on environmental law, is insufficiently independent of the Government and has limited remedies, including no powers to fine. This means that we have weaker sanctions to hold the Government to account now than when we were members of the European Union. I wish the body well, but it is even blocked from advising the Government on planning proposals contrary to environmental legislation in the way that the climate change committee did so effectively recently on the impacts of allowing a new coal mine in Cumbria.

Secondly, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill proposes measures that could curtail peaceful environmental protest, despite the police already having powers to limit protest to ensure safety, as my noble friend Lady Miller rightly said.

Thirdly, the judicial review Bill could neuter environmental groups seeking to hold the Government to account. Only last week, three climate activists applied for a judicial review to challenge the Government’s support for continued North Sea oil and gas production. Maintaining the right of citizens to challenge the Government of the day to deliver the climate and environmental goals that we must deliver is a fundamental cornerstone of British democracy.

The threats in this Queen’s Speech to our right to environmental justice, alongside insufficiently transform-ational initiatives to deliver for our environment, show a Government not yet fully committed to putting climate and biodiversity goals at the heart of all their agendas.