Environmental Targets (Public Authorities) Bill [HL]

Baroness Willis of Summertown Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in full support of my noble friend Lord Krebs’ Environmental Targets Bill, specifically the need for public authorities’ duties to be aligned with climate and nature recovery targets.

My noble friend has already eloquently explained many of the reasons why we need the Bill, but I want to give another two important ones. First, the Environment Act targets as set out in secondary legislation have so far proved insufficient to improve the slow pace of delivery on our overarching nature recovery and climate aims, because some of the interim targets are not binding. In addition, some are far from perfect. They are set far into the future and are not easy for those responsible for delivery to interpret.

I will illustrate this with an example target from secondary legislation for marine protected areas:

“Before the … 31st December 2042 the number of protected features”


which

“… are in ‘favourable condition’ is … not less than 70% of the total number of”

all

“protected features within”

a marine protected area. After 35 years as an ecological scientist, I would not know where to begin on this target, and I do not think I would be alone in that.

Secondly, a point very relevant to the Bill, to which my noble friend alluded, is that most public bodies were established well before climate change and nature became national priorities. Many of these public bodies —for example, National Parks England—have solely economic objectives, which is why the Bill is needed to bring them up to date.

Can we do that on a piecemeal basis? It has been tried, often via amendments in this House, and has sometimes met resistance. One such effort, on the Crown Estate Bill, was dismissed as unnecessary earlier this week; I hope that the Minister will look kindly on the amendment I tabled yesterday to the water Bill.

Let me give noble Lords a specific example of this approach not working. At the end of last year, when the protected landscapes amendment to the then levelling-up Bill came into force, a requirement was placed on public bodies to further the objectives of protected landscapes; this included mitigating and adapting to climate change. Yet nothing has happened since then. We are still at a point where only 6% of national parks are managed effectively for nature and only a quarter of the SSSIs in national parks are in a favourable state, compared with the national average of 33%.

Can the measures proposed in the Bill work, or will this be just another set of hollow targets? We have some evidence suggesting that they can work. My noble friend Lord Krebs mentioned Climate Emergency UK, which publishes council climate action scorecards to rate local authorities’ progress towards climate targets. The Scottish councils, which have a statutory duty on climate action, score the highest of any councils in the country—well above the 52 councils in England and Northern Ireland, which have no statutory duty and are failing miserably on these climate targets. Once it becomes a statutory duty, it absolutely focuses attention and leads to action. Ensuring that all public bodies have an environmental recovery objective as part of their remits would be co-ordinated and impactful and would drive progress towards the various environmental targets. This Private Member’s Bill has my full support.