Environment Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of the Woodland Trust and my involvement in a range of environmental charities, as listed in the register.

Ministers must quail when they hear noble Lords welcome a Bill as an okay Bill and then go on to say that it will need substantial amendment to become a better one. I welcome this Bill, at long last, but it needs amendment to do the job. I thank the Minister for meeting me to discuss some necessary amendments.

The species abundance target that the Government have indicated they will come forward with needs to provide clear, measurable statutory targets and interim targets for biodiversity, to match the statutory targets we already have for climate change and to enshrine in law a commitment to a 2030 target to halt and reverse biodiversity decline—a commitment that the Government have already made. We look forward to seeing the detail of this addition to the Bill, and I hope that the Government welcome and act on the recommendation of the Delegated Powers Committee that the publication and any subsequent amendment of the biodiversity metric should be subject to parliamentary scrutiny.

The Bill also needs to provide long-overdue statutory protection for ancient woodland. Noble Lords have heard me go on about that before. We need similar protection to that accorded to sites of special scientific interest. We need a statutory basis for the England tree action plan to ensure that it is indeed action, gives proper priority to native woodland and does not end up overfocusing on commercial forestry as part of the dash for trees.

But perhaps the most important thing as we see the Bill through our House is to help the Government join up two pieces of important legislation. The planning reform Bill is not yet published, and I have big suspicions about it. Rumours abound that it will designate land, in a top-down way, as either suitable for development or to be protected, and leave local communities powerless. As other noble Lords have highlighted, if the planning reform Bill is not to counteract completely the protection provisions of the Environment Bill, we need in statute measures to link and harmonise these two pieces of legislation. The Environment Bill needs to give a legal status to local nature recovery strategies so that plans, planners and developers have to take account of them.

We also need to enshrine in statute a land-use framework for England. I tried to do this during the passage of the then Agriculture Bill and was told that the Environment Bill was a much more suitable place to put it—well, here we are, now at the Environment Bill. The planning Bill sounds like it will have an oversimple, binary approach to land use: worth protecting or worth developing. The reality is that we need a much more nuanced approach to land use, as it needs to deliver multiple benefits: biodiversity, conservation, climate change, food, flood risk management, water quality, health and mental health, to name but a few. Land needs to be multifunctional and to deliver a whole range of public and private benefits, and we need a land-use framework to do that.

A number of other changes to the Bill will be necessary. The Government’s commitment to a much-enhanced tree planting programme will be fruitless if imported tree and plant stocks do not have to be disease free and conform to a single clear plant and tree health standard, with UK and Ireland-sourced and grown planting stock being an absolute requirement for all planting supported by public funding. A much wider network of safe nurseries should be established now in preparation for the future, creating jobs as well as safeguarding tree and plant health and preventing future decimations of newly planted stock by the introduction of tree and plant diseases.

There are many other amendments which noble Lords will want to see, and we have heard about some of them already. This is a big Bill, which risks getting even bigger. The Minister will no doubt threaten that if we attach too much to it, it will be further delayed, or even collapse under its own weight. I am always rather mystified when Governments say that; there is one simple way of getting a Bill to go through quickly, and that is to accept some sensible amendments rather than resisting them at all costs. If the Government did that, the Bill would progress more quickly, the environment would be better protected, and we would all be happier. I hope the Minister will confirm that he will do just that.

We need not just an amended and stronger Bill but action. We are striding the global stage right now, with the G7, with COP 15, and especially when we host COP 26 in Glasgow. We need domestic action at a scale and pace which inspires global action and encourages leaders to tackle climate change and promote biodiversity across the world. The Government are going to find providing global leadership jolly hard to do if back home they have been resisting every sensible improvement to this Bill.