Environment Bill (Fourth sitting)

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 12th March 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Caroline Ansell]

Q Is that where your organisation might step in? How will your organisation and the wider partnerships contribute to that production?

Dr Benwell: We hope that all sorts of stakeholders will be involved in the production. We hope that Natural England will sign off the plans, to show that they are ecologically rational, and that non-governmental organisations will come together with water companies, developers and local businesses to make it happen. However, all of those need to be sure that the plans will actually be used in day-to-day planning and spending decisions; otherwise, they will waste a lot of time and money putting together things that will just sit on the shelf. The duties to actually use them are not quite there at the moment.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Q I must have revised the questions I was about to ask about 20 times, Richard, because you just kept saying, “And another thing,” so I was like, “That one is gone.” There are a couple of things that you both touched on, but not in that much detail.

We heard from one witness that the Bill is slightly lacking an overarching vision, which they thought could be addressed by having not just environmental objectives but objectives on health and wellbeing—I see that they are debating that in the Lords today—a bit like in the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. The other issue mentioned was resource use, because there is stuff about reducing single-use plastics but not about consumption patterns overall. Decarbonisation was mentioned as well. Do you feel that the Bill could encompass those things without being unwieldy?

The other thing, which is slightly connected, is the global footprint, and I have put down some amendments on that. I entirely agree that there is not much point in doing things here if you are buying in stuff that causes environmental degradation elsewhere, or if we are funding it. I wonder whether you can say a bit more. George, on that point, one of my amendments would add to the four priority areas of the global footprint. What would be the sort of targets that we would be looking at? What would be the first things that we would address on that front?

George Monbiot: Of course, footprinting is now quite a technical and well-documented field, in which we can see what our footprint is as a proportion of our biological capacity. In land use, for example, we are using roughly 1.7 times as much as the agricultural land that we have here. A fantastic objective—it would be a long-term one—would be bring that down to 1. If we were to look at living within our means as far as key ecological resources are concerned, that would be a wonderful overarching objective for anyone.

Dr Benwell: On global resources, we should set out with an aspiration to deal with the UK’s entire environmental footprint eventually, including embedded water, embedded carbon and all those sorts of things, but for now it is very difficult to come up with reliable metrics for everything, so we should start where we can. One of the most straightforward ways is dealing with products in the supply chain that cause deforestation. It is basically the point that George was making. We know what those products are—it is things like leather, beef, soya, cocoa—

George Monbiot: Palm oil.

Dr Benwell: Palm oil, of course. It is perfectly possible to measure that footprint and set a target for reducing it. Businesses themselves came up with a voluntary commitment back in 2010, and it has had no real effect on the UK’s impact on global deforestation in some of the most amazing areas of the world. It is time to back that up with a regulatory commitment, and that would be good for the businesses that have shown a lead. At the moment, the only ones who properly investigate their supply chains, disclose what they find and take due diligence are the ones that are trying really hard. Unfortunately, it makes them look bad when the ones that are doing the worst and most damaging practices are just not bothering to report.

We should start off with a priority area for the global footprint being a metric for deforestation. Then we should have a due diligence duty that requires all businesses to look across their supply chain for deforestation risks and, crucially, to act to reduce those risks where they find them. That would be a massive step forward. It would be such an unlocker in international negotiations, where the refrain is always that developed countries are not doing their bit, but are just exporting their harm. If we show that we are not going to play that game anymore and are actually going to take responsibility, that would be an amazing thing to lay on the table in international talks.

George Monbiot: To Richard’s list of commodities with very damaging impacts, I would certainly add fish. We currently import all sorts of fish with devastating by-catch rates. The Fisheries Bill aims to improve performance within UK waters, although it is pretty vague at the moment. It would be profoundly hypocritical if we were to carry on importing fish from places with very poor environmental performance.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q On the health and wellbeing point, it was mentioned as a possible objective, but we took evidence this morning about air quality and water quality, and witnesses in both sessions suggested that we were ignoring the impact on the human population. Should there be something in the Bill that talks about people, or should it be a Bill that talks about the environment? Should we bring people into it as well?

Dr Benwell: It should definitely be in there. I think there is full potential for that to be covered in the Bill. If there is not, it should be broadened out. Yes, definitely, we should think of our approach to the natural environment as serving wildlife and people. Setting an overarching objective is one way to do it, or you could deal with specific areas.

George Monbiot: And specifically listing children and future generations as people for whom there is a particular duty of care in terms of protecting the natural environment.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

Q Thank you for your evidence so far, which has been really informative. I want to take you back to the discussion on targets—we are hearing about these things quite a lot from different stakeholders—and to your example of Dartmoor, if I may. You might know more about this than I do, but it is my understanding that about half a millennium ago Dartmoor was actually an ancient woodland, and they cut down the trees to make the ships to build Henry VIII’s navy. I do not know whether I am right about that, but that is what I have heard. I do not know whether the target for somewhere like Dartmoor should be to keep it as moorland or to regenerate it to woodland, if that was case.

I feel that the Bill is the overarching framework for a positive way forward, and that were we to try to lock in all sorts of specific targets it would lose what it is trying to achieve, because there would be so much going on. What is your opinion on taking the matter to secondary legislation in the future so that we could listen to experts? I do not know what the experts would say about somewhere like Dartmoor. They might have differing opinions, and then how would we know what success looks like?

George Monbiot: You raise the fascinating issue of baselines. What baseline should we be working to? Should we be working to an Eemian baseline—the previous interglacial, when there were elephants and rhinos roaming around, with massive, very positive environmental effects, and there was an identical climate to today’s? Should we be aiming for a Mesolithic baseline, when there would have been rainforest covering Dartmoor; a Neolithic one, when it would have been a mixture of forest and heath; or a more recent one, which is basically heath and grass, with not much heath left?

The truth is that baselines will continue to shift because we will move into a new climatic regime. All sorts of other environmental factors have changed, so we will never be able to recreate or freeze in time any previous state. That is why I think that a general legislative aim should be restoration and the re-establishment of missing species, without having to specify in primary legislation which ones they will be. The restoration of missing habitats, as well as the improvement and enhancement of existing habitats, is the bit that is missing from clause 93. We could add in habitats that we no longer have but could still support. However, we should not lock it down too much.

A big problem with existing conservation, particularly with its single-species and interest-features approach, has been to lock in place previous instances of environmental destruction. You will go to a site of special scientific interest and it will say, “The interest feature here is grass no more than 10 cm high.” Why is that the interest feature? Because that is the condition in which we found the land when we designated it as an SSSI. Is it the ideal condition from an ecological point of view? Certainly not.

We need flexibility, as well as the much broader overarching target of enhancing biodiversity and enhancing abundance at the same time. We could add to that a target to enhance the breadth and depth of food chains: the trophic functioning of ecosystems, through trophic rewilding or strengthening trophic links—“trophic” meaning feeding and being fed upon. Having functioning food webs that are as deep as possible, ideally with top predators, and as wide as possible, with as many species at every level, would be a really great ecological objective.

Dr Benwell: You are right: we would not want to set detailed targets for the condition of Dartmoor in the Bill. That would not make sense. Nor, indeed, do we necessarily want to set numerical targets for anything else. What we need is the confidence that the suite of targets will be comprehensive and enough to turn around the state of nature. In the Bill at the moment, that legal duty could be fulfilled by setting four very parochial targets for air, water, waste and wildlife. I do not think that that is the intention, but when it comes down to it, the test is whether the target would achieve significant environmental improvement in biodiversity.

You could imagine a single target that deals with one rare species in one corner of the country. That could legitimately be argued to be a significant environmental improvement for biodiversity. Unquestionably it could, but what we need—I think this is the Government’s intention—is something that says, “We are not going to do that. We are going to treat the natural environment as a comprehensive system and set enough targets to deal with it as a whole.”

I can think of three ways of doing that. You could set an overarching objective that says what sort of end state you want to have—a thriving environment that is healthy for wildlife and people; you could list the different target areas, as I had a go at before, on the basis of expert advice, and make sure that those are always there; or you could look again at the significant environmental improvement test and make it clear that it is not just talking about individual priority areas but about the environment as a whole, on land and at sea. It does not matter how the Government do it. I think that is their intention. However, at the moment, we are not convinced that the legal provisions in the Bill would require that now or in future iterations of the target framework.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow]

Q So do you welcome the requirement in schedule 5 for consultation?

Bud Hudspith: Yes, we welcome that. That was the point made before. Parts of it are fairly vague and we would like it to be much clearer as to who should be involved. There should be clear consultation with the chemical industry—the people who work in the chemical industry and the people who represent them.

Dr Warhurst: The principles sound good, but the point of principles is how they are interpreted—not just the political decisions about interpretation, but these capacity issues. The problem we see is that it is very difficult for the UK to be in a position, even if it wanted to, to go ahead of the EU, which we have not seen as very likely. In parallel areas, such as chemicals and food contact materials, where the UK could have gone ahead of the EU, it has not, even though countries such as Germany, Belgium and France have.

I will give a practical example. Perfluorinated chemicals are in all our bodies. They are in our blood. They were talked about in a recent film, “Dark Waters”. They are in food packaging, ski wax and textiles. The EU is proposing to do a general restriction on these chemicals for non-essential users. This is thousands of chemicals. That will be a huge job for the 600-person ECHA and member states around the EU. There will be challenges from industry. We know that Chemours is already challenging a decision on one of the chemicals in the group.

We do not see it as credible that a UK-only agency, which will have to spend a lot of time just administering the registration system that is set up or the applications for authorisation, will really have the potential to copy that. But we would obviously like the Government to make a commitment that they will follow this and ban these chemicals.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q I want to pursue the question about whether we would be better off in or out of REACH. Do you think there are concerns that the new regime would not provide the same level of consumer environmental protection? There is a particular issue about keeping pace with changes in the EU and whether our standards would fall below it. Do you have concerns?

Bud Hudspith: I would follow on from Michael’s point. We have concerns about the resources available to the Health and Safety Executive and the technical ability of people in the HSE to mirror what has gone in the European Chemicals Agency, its size and extent, and the amount of work that has gone on over many years to get to the position that it is in now.

It seems as though we will be in a situation where we will start again from scratch. Even if we achieve what has been achieved in ECHA, it will take us many years to get there. We are worried, especially about that intervening period. Where will we be? I do a lot of work with the HSE, and I am aware of the kind of pressures it is under. It is easy to say that the HSE will do this, or that the HSE will do other things, but unless it is given the resources and people to do that, it is words rather than action.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q There is a balance between getting up to speed dealing with current regulations and keeping pace with innovation, which presumably will have an impact on some of the industries that you might be involved in.

Bud Hudspith: Yes. The position with the EU— ECHA—is that it has come an awful long way. We are getting to the stage where it is probably working better than it has before, and I do not want to wait another five years to get to that position in the UK. It may take more than that—I do not know whether or not it will be five years.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q This is part and parcel of the same question—

[The Chair]

Sorry, Kerry, but we are a little short of time.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I was trying to clarify what I was asking about.

[The Chair]

Very briefly.

[Kerry McCarthy]

The UK, in “The Future Relationship with the EU” document, talks about

“the separate regulatory requirements of the two markets”.

What impact would that have on the chemicals industry, if there is that level of divergence—or is it about trying to keep up?

Nishma Patel: Following on from what Bud said, REACH has been there for 10 years, and a big chunk of the work under REACH has been done in the past 10 years. The UK contribution has been second in that, in terms of registrations and in providing the data behind the chemicals. To start that process again would put us on a behind path on EU REACH and REACH in general.

The annex, in what we see of the UK position at the moment, allows for the two regulations to co-operate, to talk to each other, if that is the way the negotiations go. It might also allow a mechanism to share data, evidence, on the input put into the European Chemicals Agency database. It is not completely negative. The door is still open in terms of starting from the same evidence base and regulating chemicals; it is just how UK REACH will work—that will depend on what is negotiated in that annex on chemicals, and the extent of the co-operation.

Dr Warhurst: We would agree with many of the points that have been made. We have to remember that, at the beginning of the process, the UK will essentially have an empty database and will be asking for material to be submitted to it from industry. There are already a lot of complaints from industry about the new costs that that will generate—for the chemical companies that are used to doing it, and then for all the people who import substances registered in REACH in a different country, who will suddenly have to register as well. There is a lot of cost to get a database that, even when it is full—in two years or however long—will be much less detailed than the EU one.

It is worth saying that the UK is already not good at enforcing chemicals laws at the moment. We talk a lot about the risk-based approach in the UK regulations, but we did a survey a couple of years ago of how councils were enforcing the laws on the safety of consumers—toys with illegal levels of phthalate chemicals, for example—and we found that large numbers of councils do no testing at all, and that even the ones that do some testing do not do much. Yet, when they do testing, they find lots of failure. We know that banned chemicals are on our high streets and in our markets, now. That really does not give us confidence that somehow there will be this amazing leap in UK capacity to implement and enforce these laws.

[Marco Longhi]

Q What are your views, please, on the safeguards in the Bill to protect against deterioration of chemical standards?

Bud Hudspith: I must admit that I was not clear what the safeguards were. Broadly speaking, we are supportive of the Bill and the things that it is trying to do. Our doubts lie with how deliverable that is and what resources and expertise the UK is able to apply. As I saw it, there did not seem to be too many safeguards. I was aware, again, of the amendment whereby at least there is some effort to institute safeguards.

Clearly, large parts of the REACH regulations are being transferred into the UK position. An example is that the stuff on data sheets, which is currently held within the EU REACH regulations, is going to be transferred into the UK REACH regulations, and that is fine. There are lots of things that we are happy with in respect of the change. I suppose that, on a broader level, we would like to see huge improvements to the speed at which things are done and the way things are regulated, but whether that is going to happen is, I think, questionable.

Dr Warhurst: We would back that position. The problem is that the Bill is so much about a process, and the process itself has no targets and timelines. It does not say, “You will assess this many chemicals each year. You will check this many chemicals.” This is a problem at EU level. There has been pressure, and now it has set its own targets and is doing much more.

The danger is that you end up with this sort of hollow system here. It exists in theory, but if the system does not say, “Actually, this chemical is not adequately controlled so we are going to restrict it,” it could essentially just sit doing very little, dealing with all the things that it needs to exist, and you end up with something that is hollow.

We are already in a situation where you can have a chemical such as bisphenol A in till receipts; you ban that; and then the industry moves to bisphenol S. This is demonstrated with tonnage data. That is what has happened in the EU, and the EU has not yet restricted bisphenol S; it is just going to define it as a reproductive toxin, hopefully in the next few months. These things are happening. Movement is happening. The market is moving from one chemical to another. Will the regulator move? We have no evidence. There is no obligation in the Bill for the regulator to actually do new restrictions or new authorisations.