Environment Bill

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 28th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Duke of Montrose (Con) [V]]

My Lords, in addressing the amendment put forward by my noble friend the Minister, the Committee has today listened to some skilful analysis of the devolution situation from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. I await his comments on this amendment with some interest.

I want to probe my noble friend the Minister a little more on one aspect of what he sees as the content of his amendment, which refers to

“how the OEP intends to co-operate with devolved environmental governance bodies.”

Like some of your Lordships, I sat in the House as we debated Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act in 1998. The argument ended up being not to reserve the environment to Westminster, but there was still the oversight of all the EU’s environmental legislation to fall back on. That is the situation we face at the moment.

The Government are working on the problems that this now presents. I understand that they have hopes of a legislative consent Motion for their ideas. We foresaw some of this when we debated the Trade Bill in January. The Government were prepared to admit that one route to achieving agreements was to have a number of framework agreements. How many frameworks do the Government expect to have in relation to the environment, and what mechanism are they using to reach agreement on any of them? Are they working on any of these? If so, what stage have they reached? I wonder whether my noble friend could give us some details either now or in writing.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I will make a couple of brief points in relation to Amendment 96 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. First, a system exists that I think would meet what the noble Lord is asking for: I refer, of course, to the guidelines developed by Lord May of Oxford when he was the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. These guidelines have three core principles governing the use of evidence in policy-making, which is partly what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was talking about. They are: first, seek a wide range of expert opinion; secondly, recognise uncertainties in the evidence; and thirdly, openness and transparency in the use of evidence. These guidelines will be especially important for the OEP because many, if not most, of the environmental issues that it will deal with will be ones where the evidence is contested. People will have strongly held opposing views, or they will claim that the evidence is incomplete or that there is uncertainty.

The answer to the request from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is for the OEP to follow the Government Chief Scientific Adviser’s guidelines. At the same time, the OEP may wish to follow the example of many other public bodies in conducting as much of its business as possible in public meetings so that the decision-making processes can be directly observed and the evidence, as it is being evaluated, can be studied by the public. Does the Minister agree that it would be valuable if the OEP operated under the guidelines set out by the Chief Scientific Adviser?