Brexit: Environmental and Climate Change Policy

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as chairman of the Woodland Trust and as president and vice-president of a range of environmental and land management NGOs and professional bodies. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for securing this debate—and I hope she lives.

We are told that Brexit means Brexit, but what it does not mean is junking our standards of environmental protection. A number of public surveys during the referendum campaign demonstrated continuing public support for high levels of environmental standards. However, many of these standards have been negotiated as part of the EU framework over the last 40 years, and, as many previous speakers have said, the task of untangling them and taking control from a UK point of view is going to be very complicated.

Brexit might mean Brexit but no amount of wishing removes the UK from the European bioregion. We will continue to share air, seas and migratory species, so it is vital that we at least maintain the current standards of protection for air, water, land and biodiversity, and that we recognise the full range of regulation and legislation involved. The range is massive—25% of EU legislation is about environmental protection, and it will be a big piece of work to repatriate that. It is crucial that we maintain robust, well-enforced environmental and wildlife laws, and it is absolutely vital that we give business a sense of security and continuity in delivering to these standards. The last thing that business wants is absence of certainty or, even worse, the flip-flopping that we have seen on environmental standards from the Government over the last 18 months.

I welcome the great repeal Bill—a wonderful title. We have to watch that the tweaks made to ensure operability do not result in any watering down, either by design or by Sod’s law. In particular, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, stressed, we need to understand what will replace the compliance regimes that are currently ultimately ensured by EU processes such as infraction procedures and the European Court of Justice, to make sure that our environmental and wildlife laws are enforced by domestic compliance regimes that are at least as tough. Can the Minister tell us the Government’s initial thoughts on such monitoring, compliance and enforcement regimes?

We also need to take this opportunity to address the parts of our domestic policy framework that are failing. Trees and woodlands are crucial for a whole range of things: wildlife conservation, timber productivity, the management of carbon, enhancing farming output with shade and shelter for crops and livestock, the improvement of water quality, reducing soil erosion, flood control, access to recreation and human health. What is not to like about trees? Apart from that, the public love them. So people need trees, yet over 600 of our ancient woodlands—those cathedrals of woodlands —are at risk from proposed infrastructure and built development.

There is a huge loophole in the national policy planning framework that means that ancient woodlands have little protection compared to ancient buildings, and local planning authorities are therefore often unable to stop the destruction of ancient woodlands and trees. I press the Minister to say what the Government intend to do to improve the protection for ancient woodlands and to at least bring it into equivalence with the protection given to ancient buildings under the national policy planning framework.

I turn now to land management policy, which will be fundamental to Brexit. For many years, the common agricultural policy has been slated as being the major downside of European membership, along with the common fisheries policy. CAP is a major element of European activity, in that it accounts for 45% of the European Union budget, yet it has been pretty disastrous for about 30 years in driving the decline in our native wildlife and environmental standards. It is pretty odd that even the farmers—those who benefited from it—did not much like it either. Post-Brexit CAP demise may be the only silver lining. I am trying to stay enthusiastic in the face of the blackness that will follow Brexit by saying that, like the kid in the sweet-shop, we will have the opportunity to design, at long last, a properly integrated approach to land use policy, focused on multipurpose land use and public benefit.

Land is a scarce commodity; we are not making any more and, with climate change, we may have rather less. But it is not clear what we consider land to be for. Is it for food security; timber production; ecosystem services and the protection of air, soil and water; biodiversity; climate change mitigation; flood management; public access; or built development? We need to face the fact that all these are legitimate claims on land, and therefore a future land use strategy needs to take an integrated approach that balances all these needs. Will the Minister tell us how the Government intend to establish an integrated debate on this issue? All the competing interests need to be round the table at once, talking about it, not just part of a consultation after the Government have had unilateral and bilateral consultations and discussions with those various competing interests.

The Government should take this opportunity to combine their proposed environment and agriculture 25-year strategies. They are currently being prepared separately, although with some overlap, but they are both about what the same land is going to deliver.

Currently, 75% of our land is farmed, and land managers need to be incentivised and rewarded for delivering the full range of land-based services, but only for services that are delivered for public benefit. We need to see the integration of food and timber production with the delivery of ecosystem services, and that must be the basis of any incentive and grant system. As the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, was quite right to point out, this needs to happen on a landscape scale greater than that of individual farms. Public subsidies need to be targeted spatially to reward groups of land managers for delivering public good together.

It is vital that the new land use policy takes full account of the benefits to be gained from substantially increasing woodland cover. The current subsidies for woodland planting—with the benefits that trees bring, which I have already outlined—simply are not working. Last year, as a nation, we undershot the government planting targets by a whacking 86%. We are the country in the European bioregion with the lowest level of tree cover but we are now effectively deforesting. Will the Minister give a commitment to turn around this situation in the short term to get the planting rates back up, and make a longer-term commitment to enhance the creation of forest cover in a future integrated land use policy?

Before I finish, I want briefly to touch on two or three other issues. The first is the importance of integrating what we want to deliver for the environment for the future in all the current Brexit discussions. The industrial strategy will be fundamental, but it must have the environment at its heart. The trade strategy will be crucial, both to the standards we need to achieve in environmental terms and to the future viability of farming. The infrastructure strategies we need for future economic development must take full account of the environment, and likewise the climate change and energy policies we adopt for the future. Therefore, will the Minister let us know what government thinking is on putting the environment at the heart of all these key debates that are happening as we speak?

The law of unintended consequences is an axiom that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong—I am feeling that enthusiastic and optimistic at the moment. The range of what might emerge from trade negotiations is huge, from quasi-single market membership to the World Trade Organization. Let us not mess up the agricultural industry by mistake during those negotiations. Let us not develop a system of our own that is even more bureaucratic than the previous European one. Last but not least, please, we must have full parliamentary scrutiny as we transfer to the future—improved, I hope—system for environmental protection in this country.