Environment Bill

Debate between Chris Grayling and Fleur Anderson

Report stage & 3rd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

Hon. Members will be pleased to know that the children of Our Lady of Victories Primary School in Putney have been writing to me about the issue under debate this afternoon. Thirty members of year 6 wrote to me with lovely pictures all about the environment, and most of them said that the most important issue to them was the environment and tackling climate change, so I know the eyes of those children and children across the country are on us this afternoon as we debate this.

I was on the Environment Bill Committee last November. We spent a long time discussing it line by line, with many, many amendments, and this is the third time that I have debated the Bill in the Chamber. I am very glad that it is back. It is not missing in action—it is here today—but I am disappointed because it could have gone further. Despite all our work poring over the Bill and all the evidence submitted by civil society groups, we see a Bill before us that will still fail to tackle the climate and ecological emergency. I am worried that it is just warm words without the back-up of a really strong Office for Environmental Protection, whose remit and powers have been watered down since the Bill was last before the House.

I will focus today particularly on trees. It is welcome that the Government have announced, in the past week, the England trees action plan, but we now need strong wording and a much more ambitious plan in this legislation that will drive the action that is needed across Government, the economy and society. In Putney, Roehampton and Southfields, we love our trees and our green spaces and we know that, across the country, trees are essential for climate reduction, meeting that net zero target, biodiversity and our mental health. However, the UK has one of the lowest areas of tree coverage of any country in Europe. At current rates of planting, it will reach its own target only by 2091, as was pointed out earlier by the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). That is 40 years off the target of 2050 and it is an example of where we can have a lot of warm words and keep talking things up, but if we do not have enforceable action by the Office for Environmental Protection, as there should be, we will be coming back here in one year, in five years or in 10 years’ time and we will not see the amount of tree planting that we need.

The action plan was originally promised as a 30-year vision for England’s trees and woods, but it has been published as a shortlist of commitments, with three years of funding. Long-term funding is needed for any real environmental action. Clear timescales are needed to ensure that objectives are met, and clarity on that funding beyond 2024 will be absolutely necessary to give the sector long-term security. I welcome the provision for consultation with local people about tree felling that will happen in their roads, and I think that will give people the power they need to stick up for their local trees, which will be very good. However, Ministry of Defence land should have been included in the Bill. We have power over so much of our swathes of land in this country and the armed forces have environmental targets and actions, so they would be able to put such provision into place. Why is MOD land not included, because we could have lots of tree planting? I share the concerns that other Members have expressed today that this Bill will be undermined by the planning Bill.

Despite the progress over the last week, there is an urgent need for a medium to long-term strategy with clear targets to ensure that we protect, restore and expand our woodlands and trees. New clause 25 sets out what targets these should consist of and I hope it will be supported by the House. It will go some way towards rescuing the Bill, as will the other amendments that I will be supporting today, along with my Labour colleagues, and I urge colleagues to support them to improve the Bill.

[Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson). I have sympathy with a lot of what she says about trees, but it is really important for the House to remember that it is also a matter of restoring marine conservation areas and wetlands. Many alternative habitats offer better ways of capturing carbon than simply planting new trees, so we must focus on the full range of habitats and not just on one aspect, however important trees are—and I will be talking later, if I catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, about deforestation.

For this section of the debate, I want to talk about why I tabled new clause 4. I welcome the Minister’s comments and I welcome the announcements from the past week. What the Secretary of State said last week is enormously important if we are to start to reverse the decline of species in this country. It is tragic: back in the 1950s, there were something like 30 million hedgehogs in this country. Now, there are estimated to be 1.5 million. That is a catastrophic loss. When I was a child, hedgehogs were around in the garden all the time. I have never, as an adult, seen a hedgehog in my garden or anywhere near it. This is a tragic loss and one we have to work to reverse.

There is a whole range of reasons why that has happened, including habitat loss and the loss of wildlife corridors. It is enormously important, in looking at planning policies, that we focus on how we ensure we maintain wildlife corridors. It is also about the protections available. As the Minister knows, I have had a lively debate with the Department over the weeks. I welcome the approach she has taken. I understand the shortcomings in the existing law, but the reality is that it is nonsense that the hedgehog, which has had a 95% decline in its numbers, is not protected, whereas species that are much less in danger and whose numbers are recovering are protected.

The existing law protects primarily against malicious action by human beings, but of course not all species that are endangered have faced malicious action from human beings. A hedgehog does not face that, particularly, but some other animals on the list, such as the lagoon sandworm, valuable though it may be, is not in my view facing direct malicious action from human beings either. It faces threats to its habitat, and so do hedgehogs. We have a situation today whereby if a developer is going to clear a bit of land for development, he or she has to do exhaustive work to establish if newts are present. Much as we love the great crested newt, which is a fine species, it is not actually endangered in this country. We have laws about it in this country because it is endangered elsewhere in the European Union—happily not in the United Kingdom—but there is no obligation to see if other species such as the hedgehog are present. Developers can just bulldoze a hedgerow without checking if there are hedgehogs asleep in it.

I would like to see a holistic approach to any new development, where it is necessary to do a broader assessment of the presence of species and take action accordingly to protect them, and not have a focus on one individual animal as opposed to another. We have too many species that have declined in numbers. We should be protecting them all. Of course, we will need to develop in the future to ensure we have homes available for people in this country, but that needs to be done in a careful way: protecting wildlife corridors, protecting numbers, and ensuring that the steps we take maximise the potential to retain, restore or develop habitats of our species.

I welcome very much what the Minister has said today about hedgehogs. I think everyone in this House will welcome any measures we can take to protect them. I pay particular tribute to the former MP for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, Oliver Colvile, who was the first champion of hedgehogs in this House. I hope we will all be hedgehog champions going forward. We shall be holding the Minister’s feet to the fire to make sure her Department delivers.