Office for Environmental Protection Debate
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Earl Russell
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Office for Environmental Protection
Earl Russell Excerpts(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Benyon (Con)
The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, raised the issue of peat. The England Peat Action Plan committed us to restoring 35,000 hectares of peat-land by 2025—which is fairly soon—through the nature for climate fund. Through the net-zero strategy we are also committed to restoring 280,000 hectares of peat by 2050. We will bring forward legislation this year to ban the use of peat in horticulture. That is just one area that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, raised. I also draw her attention to our 34 new landscape recovery projects, which show that we are on track to have 70% of land in environmental land management schemes by 2028. This is progress and has real benefits to our environment on the ground.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, launching the annual assessment, the chair of the OEP said that
“government’s plans must stack up. Government must be clear itself and set out transparently how it will change the nation’s trajectory to the extent now needed, in good time”.
We do not yet have that clarity or transparency. What action will now be taken to meet the key delivery plans, the interim targets, and to implement an effective monitoring and evaluation learning framework?
Lord Benyon (Con)
The noble Earl probably missed what I said earlier about the fact that this report covers just two months since the announcement last January—a year ago—of the environmental improvement plan. In a year’s time, he will be able to see how we are doing against that through the next report, in the summer. Through the Environment Act, noble Lords on all sides were rightly keen to ensure that there is an accurate monitoring and reporting system. These are not state secrets; this is 800 pages of data that we can share that underpin the targets that we produce in that plan. We are committed, through parliamentary processes and through the OEP, to report on those monitoring methods. We will continue to do so in an open and transparent way.