Environment Bill

Earl of Lindsay Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lindsay (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for setting out this important Bill. I am grateful too for his long-term advocacy of many of the proposals it contains.

The Bill offers a unique opportunity to create a coherent, long-term framework for the environment that is capable of motivating all sectors and all parts of society to plan, to commit to and to collaborate on improving the environment on which we and future generations depend. I therefore especially welcome the Bill’s seeking to address the core governance elements that will be needed for the decades ahead. This is the critical component. Business will clearly have a key role to play in delivering the changes needed to meet our long-term environmental ambitions and hit our net-zero target. Unlocking private sector finance and investment will be essential, particularly given the pressures on the public purse.

For businesses to feel able to invest for the long term, it goes without saying that their trust and confidence will be prerequisites. Such trust and confidence will to a large extent depend on the governance mechanisms and processes by which long-term environmental targets and a national environmental improvement plan are set. This begs the question: do the governance mechanisms and associated processes proposed in the Bill need optimising?

The Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment—IEMA—and the Broadway Initiative are two respected bodies which think that the answer to this question is yes. They see a lack of alignment and coherence between the objectives and processes in different elements of the governance framework proposed in the Bill, which, if it remains unresolved, could result in their pulling in slightly different directions. For businesses, this raises questions about predictability and could unintentionally undermine their confidence to invest. For instance, Clause 1 places a duty on the Secretary of State to set at least one long-term target in each of four priority areas, but no directly stated purpose or outcome is specified to guide setting targets. Making good this omission would help increase certainty for businesses.

Another example is to be found in Clause 7, which covers environmental improvement plans, or EIPs. Their implementation will be key to achieving national, long-term environmental targets. While an EIP will be required to include interim targets, there is no specific requirement for one to include the policies and actions that the Government intend to take to ensure that long-term environmental targets are achieved. Is it not the case that the confidence and certainty that businesses need to make long-term investments would be strengthened if the Bill required EIPs to include the policies and actions that the Government intend to take? I can therefore understand why bodies such as IEMA and the Broadway Initiative see it as essential that the Bill closely aligns its core governance elements with a coherent set of objectives to give businesses the trust and confidence that they need to invest in the future.

Trust and confidence are also the watchwords that will underpin the development of environmental markets. There is a significant private sector interest in the potential of well-designed markets for nature alongside sources of private funding that are potentially available to support nature recovery. However, to maximise the impact of both public and private investment in nature, there is a need for agreed standards and accreditation to give confidence to markets, investors, regulators and other stakeholders. I declare an interest as chair of the United Kingdom Accreditation Service—UKAS—which is the government-appointed national accreditation body. UKAS accreditation already provides this confidence and assurance in many environmentally related areas, such as carbon trading schemes, emissions measurements, the microgeneration certification scheme and the Woodland Carbon Code, to name but a few. We work closely with our UK quality infrastructure partner, the British Standards Institute—the BSI—in the development of consensus-based standards that meet the needs of all stakeholders. In short, the UK already has in place a proven means to create both the standards framework that will be needed and the underpinning accreditation to demonstrate whether and where those standards are, or are not, being achieved. As the saying goes, if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. This is especially true if this Bill is going to achieve its effect.

In conclusion, I strongly support this very important Bill. It is a good Bill and, with a few tweaks to its governance proposals, it could become an even better one.