Protecting and Restoring Nature: COP15 and Beyond

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I am genuinely struggling to know how to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question. I want to say yes, and in a sense awareness is greater now and the general public’s anger at seeing nature decline before their eyes is perhaps stronger. However, although there are some good words, unless we get rid of all the brackets in the texts and get them agreed, and unless, crucially, we have both the finance and the implementation, with a real focus on putting this stuff into practice, I am afraid I cannot stand here and tell him with any degree of certainty that we will have a better outcome.

I am coming to the end of my comments, as I am sure you will be pleased to hear, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I will touch briefly on the marine environment, because I do not want us to leave that out. I was lucky enough to join Greenpeace as part of its Operation Ocean Witness to see for myself the destructive fishing practices that are still happening, even in our supposed marine protected areas. We came across a French-flagged industrial fly shooter fishing vessel in the Bassurelle Sandbank MPA, and it was shocking to see the destruction in its wake. Fly shooting is hugely damaging not only for our marine ecosystems, but for local fishing communities, including those in my constituency, who are increasingly unable to make ends meet.

Will the Government finally please use their powers under the Fisheries Act 2020 and take action to restore our depleted seas? Will they make all MPAs in UK waters fully protected and immediately restrict the fishing licences of industrial vessels so that they cannot fish in those precious ecosystems?

I also want to underline how crucial it is that we address climate and nature together. They are two sides of the same coin. In Parliament I have championed the climate and ecological emergency Bill, which would address the climate and ecological crises in a holistic way, and I urge the Government to pick up that Bill in this new Session.

Finally, at the core of the climate and ecological crisis is our broken economic model, which prioritises growth above all else, including the health of people and planet. There is a growing body of evidence showing the dangers of our current economic model, with a report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by 82 of the world’s top scientists and experts saying that the

“focus on short-term profits and economic growth”,

often excludes the value of nature.

The Minister will be aware that the Treasury-commissioned Dasgupta review called for an

“urgent and transformative change in how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world”.

Yet we are still not really seeing what follow-up there will be to the Dasgupta review. Another inquiry by the Environmental Audit Committee on biodiversity in the UK made it clear that

“Alternatives to GDP urgently need to be adopted as more appropriate ways to measure economic success”.

We must now look to build an economy for the future, following countries such as New Zealand, which is already leading the way with the world’s first ever wellbeing budget. The nature of our economy must be on the agenda at COP15 and the Government should join other countries in showing leadership by urgently introducing alternative indicators of economic success that prioritise the health of people and planet.

Much of this debate is around global challenges, but I want to end by focusing on the local and talking about the round-headed rampion, of which I am a proud species champion. The round-headed rampion is a beautiful blue wildflower, which is known as the “Pride of Sussex” and is the official county flower. However, it is increasingly rare, since it grows only on chalk grasslands such as those on the South Downs, and those chalk grasslands have declined by 80% just since world war two. Its fate relies on the protection, preservation and restoration of these important habitats.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and I agree with her on protecting habitats, grasslands and other places. However, does she also accept that isolated protection does not really work, and that there has to be a connectivity between preserved areas, just as there has to be a connectivity between forests and natural grasslands?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He is absolutely right: that connectivity is crucial to a thriving natural environment. Unless we ensure that we have not just isolated protection areas, but a genuinely joined-up corridor of environmental improvement and even widen out from that, we will not be successful in our aims.

I will just wind up by saying that as we head towards COP15, let us remember the beauty of this world and what we risk losing by failing to protect it for ourselves, for our children and for future generations. I urge the Minister once again to do all he can to ensure a positive outcome from this important summit.

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[Jeremy Corbyn]

I absolutely agree with what the right hon. Gentleman has just said. Does he not also think that we have to do something about the market for very rare, valuable tropical hardwoods? That market acts as a huge economic incentive for people in forest areas, because it is their only way of surviving economically. We have to do something about that as well, because we are indeed the market for those products.

[Chris Grayling]

I do not often agree with the right hon. Gentleman, but I absolutely agree with him on that point. None of us in this country should be buying tropical hardwoods for furniture or other purposes.

At the same time—this is perhaps where I differ slightly from the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion—for communities in developing countries where we want to see the restoration of the natural habitats that are so crucial to some of the world’s most iconic endangered species, our starting point should be the people themselves. We have to ensure that there are proper livelihoods, so that people can earn a living and at the same time benefit from the restoration of nature. That means helping them to establish proper, viable farming on part of that land, on a much larger scale and more efficiently, it means ecotourism to bring wealth into those areas, and it means sustainable logging and the sustainable management of forests. All those things are necessary. This is, to some extent, about GDP growth, because that is how we give those people the sense that, by properly managing that land, they benefit from it and also benefit from the restoration of nature.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I am really pleased that this debate is happening today and that we are able to have a serious discussion about the effects of climate change on biodiversity. We have to be realistic: what is happening now is absolutely unprecedented in known human history, given the rate at which we are losing wildlife, biodiversity and insect life, and ultimately this is extremely damaging to human life itself. There has to be a much more thought through process of linking up all the environmental consequences of our lives, of industries and of the pollution that takes place.

Conferences such as COP15 are very important because they are a way of bringing people together. They are a way of trying to persuade all countries that the issues of CO₂ emissions and their effects on climate change and global warming are absolutely huge, and that something has to be done about them. However, that is not the whole story, because to some extent we are guilty of exporting our pollution and our emissions elsewhere. This country, most of Europe and some parts of north America have increasingly strict environmental protocols—on river waste, air pollution and so much else—which I absolutely support and endorse, but the effect of that is to shift manufacturing and polluting activities somewhere else. That means we are not actually improving the global environment; all we are doing is shifting the pollution to some other place.

I hope one conclusion from this debate—I am sure the Minister will understand all this—is that we have to be very active internationally in trying to bring about a more sustainable world everywhere. This is about joined-up actions being taken by the UK Government. A very lengthy letter sent to them recently talks about the need for joined-up action by the British Government, as well as reducing the

“ecological footprint, domestically and globally”,

ensuring that

“biodiversity loss has been halted and reversed by 2030, against a baseline of 2020”,

and creating

“robust and well connected natural infrastructure across all UK nations”,

as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) pointed out in her excellent contribution to the debate. If we do not have that sense of joined-up thinking, we will be missing the whole point altogether.

There are many issues we could discuss today, but the one to which I want to draw attention first is water pollution in this country. I grew up with the idea that, somehow or other, the appalling levels of pollution created in all of our major rivers in this country by industrialisation and the industrial revolution of the 19th century were gradually becoming a thing of the past and that we were beginning to clean up our rivers. Yes, rivers in some places are a lot cleaner than they have ever been. The Thames, just outside, was biologically dead at one time, but it was eventually—very slowly—restored quite considerably. There used to be a huge tank in County Hall showing all the varieties of fish now found in the Thames.

Sadly, for many of our rivers, the trend is now going in the opposite direction, as the water companies routinely discharge raw sewage into our rivers, which obviously has a devastating effect on fish and natural life, and clearly becomes dangerous for the rest of the population as well. Yesterday, right on cue, Thames Water sent a very long letter to all of us who represent constituencies within its area telling us how much it is going to do to try not to pollute rivers, mainly the Thames, in the future by better management of the tributary rivers, the drainage system and so on. That is good, if it is actually going to do it, but its record, like those of most other water companies, is pretty terrible. At the same time, the water industry is dragging vast profits out of the water supply and allowing pollution levels to get so bad.

I do think we have to be extremely tough on the water companies and their management of rivers. That includes managing rivers upstream, as well as managing our paved-over areas in our urban communities to deal with the flooding issues in this country. It is not as if any of this is not known, but this is a question of joined-up thinking between planning and local authorities, water suppliers and central Government to try to achieve something much more sustainable.

If we are to deal with increasing levels of unusual rainfall, that obviously means better management of rivers. It is not all going to be done by flood protection. It would be done much better by upstream planting on rivers in this country, which to some extent has been done in Somerset and the west, and the use of the floodplains as what they are intended for—the key is in their name—so that we end up with less flooding and damage to property through better environmental management of those water resources. This is about the biodiversity of our river systems, which is central to so much of our thinking.

There is a debate everywhere about rewilding. Anyone who has read Isabella Tree’s excellent book about Knepp, and the way that that rewilding took place, knows that initially, many of the neighbouring farmers objected to it and said that she was creating a scruffy place that had lots of weeds on it and was damaging their crops and so on—I have heard many of these arguments for a very long time. She reports in a fascinating section of her book that eventually, after the rewilding had grown a great deal and become much more biodiverse, crop production rates went up because of the high levels of pollination by higher levels of insect life surrounding those farms. As the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) said, there is an interesting phenomenon of joined-up thinking on farming, because it is about the biodiversity surrounding crop production as well as the preserved areas that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion talked about in her excellent contribution. We must think about that aspect.

This is also about how local authorities behave. I have the honour of representing my constituency, which I believe is the smallest urban constituency in the country and, I am pretty sure, the most densely populated in the country. Most people in my constituency have no open space of their own whatsoever, not even a balcony. Bringing up our children in that atmosphere, it is not easy to get them to understand the interaction between human life and natural life, because they live in an entirely concrete environment. What we do in our schools and our parks is important, as is the message that those young people get.

I have always visited each of the primary schools in my constituency as often as I can, usually once a year, and I have been to two primary schools and one secondary school in the past week to hold a discussion with students about their views on the environment. These are children growing up in a very urban environment, but they absolutely get the connectivity between the natural world and themselves, and they get what is possible in the small growing spaces that they have in those schools.

Yesterday morning I was in Ambler Primary School near Finsbury Park. It is a very densely populated urban area, with high levels of traffic around it. We were talking about biodiversity, growing flowers and so on, and one student asked me what I meant when I said that we should not be cutting grass too short. I was explaining about wildflowers and biodiversity, and he wanted to know whether that included football pitches. I explained that there had to be a balance between keeping grass on football pitches the right length and growing flowers and other things—it is a serious practical question if your interest is mainly in football.

Winning people over to these arguments is so important, and today’s debate will help us to do that. We must also encourage local authorities to have more permeable surfaces and fewer car parks with impervious layers, and to end the appalling practice in many parts of the country of paving over front gardens to park cars, when those front gardens are an important point of nature. Indeed, paving them over increases the danger of flooding, and thus the pollution of rivers further downstream. Some local authorities have done well on that. For example, Rotherham Council has done an excellent job in ensuring a huge level of biodiversity on all its roadside borders, and a number of other councils have done exactly the same. We should support them in that.

Those are the things we can do ourselves, through farming policy, the use—or non-use—of pesticides, and building up a sense of biodiverse resilience, which in turn will protect endangered species. Sadly, as the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell pointed out, the hedgehog is not far off being an endangered species. Obviously I hope its population recovers, but it seems to be recovering in urban rather than rural areas. That is deeply disturbing and suggests that it is due to a combination of farming practices and dangers from roads, whereas urban areas seem to be maintaining or even recovering their hedgehog population. We can do an awful lot, and we must bring up our young people to understand that.

I pay tribute to teachers in schools who do their best to achieve that. During a visit that I made recently to another local school, Newington Green Primary School, there was another brilliant set of children who were concerned about these issues. Older students, such as those at the Arts and Media School Islington, who are preparing to do their GCSEs and later their A-levels, believe—this view has also been put forward in the House—that there should be much more environmental education at all stages of our education system, so that children grow up understanding such things.

To add to what has been said already, the loss of biodiversity on a global scale is huge. The number of animal species that are becoming extinct year on year is increasing fast, and there will come a time when the elephant, the tiger, the lion and so many other large species will be on the danger list, as well as very many smaller species that are almost extinct at the present time. As such, I agree with what the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell said about changing the story and the narrative.

In some places, such as the Indonesian, African and Amazon rainforests, there is a huge economic advantage to be gained from selling tropical hardwoods. On the way to get one tree—iron tree, mahogany, or whatever else it happens to be—the whole forest around it is destroyed or, in the case of the Amazon rainforest, wantonly burned down in order to create the short-term advantage of growing soya for a few years, leaving a virtual desert behind. I discussed that issue with a lot of environmental campaigners and others from Brazil, both from Rio and from the Amazon, during the COP in Glasgow last year, and the similarity of views between those from urban Rio and those from the Amazon area was very interesting. The commitment now being made by the putative and hopefully next President of Brazil, Lula, to end all the destruction of the rainforest and promote sustainability there is welcome. I hope he gets elected and is able to achieve that goal, because it would be an enormous step forward.

It is no good western countries lecturing the poorest people in the poorest parts of the world about the need to protect their environment, because we believe it is the right thing to do, when they cannot feed their children, do not have a proper education system, do not have a health service, and are living in levels of desperate poverty. Something else has to go with it. Eco-tourism does help, as do sustainable agriculture and our purchasing practices and powers, but this is also about bringing people on board. If we just fence off an area and say, “This is preserved, and we are going to put armed guards in it to protect the animals that may become extinct”, we are not sending a very good message to the people who live in that area. The most effective conservation, whether marine or land conservation, is done with the participation, support and involvement of the entire community that lives locally.

I will give one example. In Mexico, the turtle on the Atlantic coast was rapidly depleted in numbers and was not far off extinction. There was an idea to create a protected zone for sea turtles, with lots of guards to prevent people from stealing turtle eggs. What would have happened then? Corruption would have come in, somebody would have started stealing the eggs, and so on. What they actually did was recruit all the turtle hunters to become turtle protectors as a way of making money out of visitors going there. There is nothing like a poacher turned gamekeeper to look after a species that was at great risk. Conservation can work if people bring the population along with them; it does not work if security companies, armed guards and everything else are sent in. It is so important to achieve that more universal buy-in.

I am delighted that we are having this debate. We have to ensure that the generation going through school—the next generation coming up—understands that our lives and the survival of this planet depend on how we interact with nature. That means bringing children up to understand that insects, wildlife, and wild places are not their enemies—that we have to live alongside nature, not destroy it through our activities and our greed. They will then get the message about connectivity: that when a person drops a plastic bag in a river, it ends up in the sea, and we end up eating that plastic with the fish we consume. It is about conserving and preserving the natural world and the environment. Of course, that includes the big global conferences and the international agreements, but environment is basically a state of mind: whether we live with nature, or destroy it and see it as something solely to be exploited. Today’s debate is a good example of how we can advance both of those agendas at the same time, ensuring that we get the international agreement that is essential, but bringing that debate into all the other actions of our lives and all the services that are administered by the public in this country.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing the debate and on making such a terrific speech. As she said, the forthcoming COP matters enormously for all the reasons she set out. We need targets so we can measure progress—that is the great benefit of them—and we need funding to help make that progress. We need every country that makes a commitment to have a plan back home to deliver it. We need progress to be measured and above all we need leadership. We need leadership internationally, leadership domestically in communities and leadership by us as individuals.

The decline in biodiversity and the loss of species across the world is well documented, but sadly not well known enough. I should declare my interest, as one or two other Members have, as the water vole species champion. That is an extremely grand title, especially when it is held by someone who, despite his best efforts, has yet to see a water vole in the wild. I did once hear the characteristic plop sound that water voles make—I know Ratty well from reading “The Wind in the Willows” to my grandchildren—when they come out of their mud tunnels in the riverbank and drop into the water. Perhaps it is very hard to see them for the very simple reason that since the end of the 1990s, a nationwide survey showed that water voles had disappeared from 90% of the sites where they were found a decade before—90%! There has been a further decline in the decade thereafter. In the case of water voles, one particular problem is predation by mink, who need to be controlled. What is really needed, however, is to improve water quality and to encourage farmers to restore and protect healthy waterways—in other words, places and rivers where water voles can thrive.

The heart of the problem we must address—colleagues touched on this in their contributions—is that we as humankind have been making use of the earth’s gifts, those on the land and those beneath the seas that surround us, as if there was no consequence and no end to nature’s bounty. That is what we have been doing and the pace at which we have done that has accelerated enormously in the last century or so. Just as with the climate crisis, we know now that that is not true: there is a limit and we have to start taking proper care, because we rely on the natural world and biodiversity for our very existence, including our economic welfare. We should applaud the work of Pavan Sukhdev—I had the privilege to meet him when I was the Environment Secretary—and Sir Partha Dasgupta, who have taught us about the economic value of biodiversity, if we wish to measure it in that way, just as Nick Stern told us about the far greater cost of not dealing with dangerous climate change, as opposed to the far lower cost of dealing with it, saying, “You make the choice.”

As we know, the natural world provides us with the very essentials of life: clean air and water, and food and fuel. It regulates our climate and helps to deal with pollution. It stems floodwaters and produces medicines. It is the very foundation of our economic and social wellbeing. A few years ago, I had the honour and privilege to visit the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. We went into a lab and there was a range of plants on a bench. I went along, asking “What’s this? What’s this?” One was a small artemisia sapling and another rather odd-looking bit of bark apparently came from the prunus africana tree. I happened to know, because of my job, that artemisia is essential to making combination anti-malarial drugs more effective. I learned that pygeum—I do not know if I have pronounced that correctly—from the bark of the prunus africana tree has properties that help to treat prostate cancer.

We stood there discussing malaria, which is predominantly a disease of the poorer world, and prostate cancer, which has been a disease predominantly of the better off world, although that is beginning to change. We rely on both those plants to treat those diseases. Let us imagine that some clod-hopping human being millions of years ago had walked through the forest and decided to pull up to examine the only artemisia sapling and the only prunus africana sapling on the planet—think what we would have lost. That is why there is such a strong argument for looking after both what we have and know about and the plants that surround us of which we have not yet discovered the properties.

Despite the gravity of the crisis in biodiversity, it is important to try to address the task with optimism, because in the end, making ourselves depressed about the scale of the challenge is not, in my experience, a great motivator for action. We know that we can make progress. We can look at the creation of the national parks: that extraordinary bit of legislation from the post-war Labour Government came out of a time of great conflict, economic crisis, debt and so on, with the support of politicians right across the House who were legislating to preserve beauty for posterity.

We can look at the size and commitment of the wildlife trusts. They have about 870,000 members, look after 2,300 nature reserves and provide some of the connections that my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who spoke so well, was talking about. Bits can be looked after, but the connection between them will help us truly to restore nature, which is why, towards the end of my time as the Environment Secretary, I asked Sir John Lawton to produce a report precisely on how those connections can better be made.

We can look at the marine conservation zones, which were created thanks to the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My right hon. Friend’s point about connectivity is very important. Is he aware of the agreement between a number of central American countries to create a wildlife corridor for the jaguar to survive, because it travels over a huge range? If it is cut off in certain isolated bits, it will simply die off.

[Hilary Benn]

I was not aware of that—I am now—and what a great idea for countries to work together in that way.

When we were taking the Bill that became the 2009 Act through Parliament, I was really quite surprised to discover how little we appeared to know about what was on the seabed surrounding these islands. Some very intrepid divers, some of whom I met, went down and took photographs. If the photos were shown to me or to anybody else and the question was asked, “Where was that picture taken?”, most people would say, “Is that the Great Barrier Reef?” No—it was under the murky waters of the North sea.

One thing we know about nature is that although we have been destroying it at a rate of knots, if we give it the chance, it can recover with astonishing speed. The North sea was originally covered abundantly in oyster beds, coarse peat banks and rock deposited by glaciers, and it was home to a rich community of marine species. A lot of that was sadly destroyed by bottom-trawl fisheries over the past century and it is now a relatively poor community of species.

Let me say a word on bottom trawling. It is an incredibly destructive practice, but it is unseen because it takes place beneath the waves. To make a slightly absurd analogy, let us imagine that to collect apples, someone decided to drag a net across the countryside taking with it all the hedges, tree saplings, bird nests and the trees on which the apples hang just for the purpose of collecting the apples in the process. People would be outraged and appalled, but that is what we have been doing on the surface of the seabed for a long time and no one sees it happening. It is about bearing witness to what is going on. The right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), who is not in his place, talked about the deforestation of the Amazon. The thing about technology is that, with satellites, we can see how the rainforest is reducing over time. It is really important that we use all those means to bear witness to what is taking place in order to motivate change.



We find the recovery of nature in some surprising places. There has been a lot of debate about the impact of wind farms on birds, but research has shown that, in effect, wind farms act as artificial reefs. They can host a very wide range of marine species once nature has had a chance to recover.

My final point is about the contribution that nature makes to our health and wellbeing.

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[Kerry McCarthy]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Barry Gardiner]

I will give both ways, but not simultaneously. I will give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy).

[Barry Gardiner]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. One of the constant problems, particularly in our overseas territories, which do not have the resources to be able to establish their own datasets, is the gaming between them and the Foreign Office, because technically, through the convention on biological diversity, we are responsible for the biodiversity in those overseas territories.

It is a great tragedy that this palming off of responsibility between the two continues. I know that the Minister is new in post, and I welcome him to his post, but I hope he will have robust discussions with his colleagues in the Foreign Office about this. Perhaps he could whisper something to that effect in Lord Goldsmith’s ear, given that he is Minister of State in both DEFRA and the Foreign Office. This really does need to be sorted out. The overseas territories need that support to get the database.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I absolutely agree that there has to be a measurement of the effect on the natural world and the environment, measurements of human inequality and all the normal GDP measurements. Would it not be better if the UK Government set an aim to come away from the next round of discussions with an agreed position on how we will measure the effect on the natural world of economic activity as part of the whole measurement of GDP? In that way, it would be factored in and give a legal status and entity to the environment and the natural world, as opposed to just discussing it as a separate thing as a consequence of our own activities.

[Barry Gardiner]

Indeed. One of the things COP15 is grappling with at the moment is how to reconcile the different metrics that different countries use to assess their national biodiversity and sustainability action plans, and how to integrate them into a common measure. It is much more difficult to do this with biodiversity than it is with climate change. We know the common measure in climate change—it is CO₂—but we do not have an easy common measure for biodiversity. My right hon. Friend is right. It is one of the things that COP15 really has to grapple with.

I mentioned the national biodiversity and sustainability action plans—NBSAPs—that are produced by many countries. The truth is they are simply inadequate, not from a lack of goodwill on the part of those countries but often because of a lack of the robust scientific data we were speaking about.

We also know that, even when NBSAPs are based on sound scientific data, they have to be implemented. There is no point in simply putting them into your action plan and not implementing them. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central spoke about the Lawton report. Professor John Lawton set those principles in place over 15 years ago and those principles are clear. We have to act. Whether it is in the UK, sub-Saharan Africa or south-east Asia, we have to act at a landscape scale. As John Lawton suggested, we need “bigger, better, more joined-up” habitat. That in effect is the response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on the metrics. We need to see at a landscape scale that that is happening.

The COP is setting out its target to halt the loss of biodiversity, but as I said earlier, sadly that has been our 10-yearly target for nearly three decades now. For effective implementation, we must ensure that there are key staging posts to show that we are on the right track to achieving the long-term objective. Interim objectives around the amount of reforestation and the amount of marine protection zones must be used as staging posts in the same way as we in this country use the five-yearly carbon budgets as staging posts towards our 2050 net zero target.

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[Steve Double]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: most farms and fishing businesses are passed down from generation to generation. That is how they operate, and they understand that if they do not operate sustainably, they will have nothing left to pass on to future generations, so I welcome his comments.

I was delighted to hear that the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) is a fan of “The Wind in the Willows”. I do not know whether he knows this, but “The Wind in the Willows” was written by a great Cornishman, Kenneth Grahame. He based the story on the River Fowey, which I am delighted to represent, as it is in my constituency. I invite the right hon. Gentleman to visit Fowey and see that river for himself, and just maybe, he will see his first ever water vole. There is much more I could say—

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Has the Minister had a chance to look at the comments made yesterday by Emma Howard Boyd, the chair of the Environment Agency, concerning the behaviour of water companies and the pollution in rivers, and her recommendation that instead of fining the chairs of the water companies that grievously pollute our rivers, consideration ought to be given to putting those people in jail for the damage they are doing to our environment? Is he going to respond directly to the Environment Agency and wish it well in that endeavour?

[Steve Double]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention and for raising that very important point. I am, of course, absolutely aware of the Ofwat report and the comments of the Environment Agency. It is a matter that deeply concerns me as a representative of a coastal constituency. I regret to say that one of the worst offenders is my local water authority. This morning, I asked my office for a meeting with it, and to speak to the Environment Agency, because we need to do better. The Government have put measures in place to better hold water authorities to account. I am determined that we find a way of doing that and that we bring to an end the unacceptable level of untreated sewage being discharged into our rivers and seas. I can assure him that I take it very seriously.

I thank all Members who contributed to this excellent debate. As I said, it was great to hear such agreement across House on the importance of COP15, and on protecting and restoring our environment. As right hon. and hon. Members will be aware, and as the shadow Minister said, I do feel like I am on an eight-week job interview. However, I assure Members that I am determined, however long I am in office, to take these matters very seriously and ensure that the UK does all it can and continues to lead the world in bringing together real action to protect and enhance our natural environment for the future.