Environment Bill
Debate between Chris Grayling and Geraint DaviesWednesday 26th February 2020
(4 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Environment Act 2021 View all Environment Act 2021 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder). He focused on air quality and that is very much what I want to focus on today. I agree with everything he said about that. I also agree with him that we should leave the environment in a better condition than we found it, but I fear that, in its current form, the Environment Bill will not deliver that mandate, which I share. It certainly will not deliver the bigger mandate of delivering zero carbon for 2050. As the Minister will know, the latest projections show that we will reach the 1.5° increase by 2030, not 2040, so we really do need to up our game. The Bill is possibly capable of delivering environmental protection, as opposed to climate change mitigation, regarding air, chemicals, plastics and our oceans.
The problem with the Bill, at least as it is drafted at the moment, is that it does not have the teeth to deliver enforceable, known targets to ensure that we deliver those higher standards. As we leave the EU, the real risk is that because we do not have dynamic alignment, we will fall behind the escalating standards in the EU and possibly even behind the current standards. On air quality, the Minister will know that we consistently fail to meet the EU air quality standards and that is why the Government have been taken to court on several occasions by ClientEarth and rightly fined. We need a system that can duplicate that, but that system does not exist.
Chris Grayling
It baffles me that Opposition Members think that this country is incapable of setting high standards itself without having an international body to do it for us. If we all, collectively, across the House, believe in high environmental standards, why cannot we look after our own interests, rather than have somebody else do it for us?
Geraint Davies
That was very much an own goal by the former Transport Minister, who cancelled the electrification of the line to Swansea and knows that the UK has consistently failed to meet standards. The empirical evidence shows that we have not and cannot do it with this Government, because we have been dragged into court, kicking and screaming, for failing those standards. That is why we have the Bill, which waters down the standards, does not provide an independent agency and does not provide an opportunity for fines to be paid for failure to deliver World Health Organisation standards. In my view, such fines should be paid to the health service to treat people for the harm and to local authorities to actually reduce air pollution.