Environment Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Cherilyn Mackrory

Thursday 12th March 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Q My question is specifically directed at ClientEarth. You have taken the Government to court over their failures on air pollution three times now. Do you feel that the Bill gives sufficient powers to take action against the Government if there are future failures? Also, my concern is about the buck being passed to local authorities to a large extent. In the wider picture, I have just heard that Bristol has finally got its directive from the Government today, but unless funding is released for transport, housing and all the things that go with it, it will be very difficult for local authorities to do what is required, so where is the balance? Who should be held to account, and can they be held to account under the Bill?

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

Q I suppose that my question follows on from that. I am lucky enough to represent a coastal rural community. My confusion is about how we measure these targets. I do not know what success looks like where I live, compared with London, for example. We might also set targets in the Bill, but where I live might have met them already while London has not. Who are we setting the targets for? I find it a bit too complex, which is why I am leaning towards using secondary legislation to manage that. Following Kerry’s question, I would also like to hear a little more about the role of local authorities.

Katie Nield: I will go first, given that the first question was directed at ClientEarth. The cases that ClientEarth has taken against the UK Government have been key both to driving action to meet the legal limits we already have and to highlighting this as a serious issue and highlighting Government failures so far. It is really important that the Bill allows people to continue to do that against these new binding targets. They need to be meaningful, and that means that the Government need to be held to account against them. That is key.

What is also key is that we should not have to rely on organisations such as ClientEarth or individuals to take action. That is another reason why it is really important that the Office for Environmental Protection—the new environmental watchdog set up by the Bill—has adequate teeth to do that job and scrutinise Government actions. I assume you heard in previous evidence about the shortcomings of the Bill in that respect, so I will not repeat that.

In terms of action from local authorities, what has come out in the discussion so far has been clear: air pollution is a national problem and there are a huge number of different sources that need to be dealt with. It is not a localised issue with just a small number of hotspots that need to be cleared up. What we are concerned about is pushing the burden of responsibility on to local authorities to deal with this problem—that will not be the most effective way to tackle this national public health crisis. We need the Bill to reflect that, and we need the environmental improvement plans to reflect that.

At the moment, the Bill provides some new powers to local authorities, and those are very welcome, but it risks putting the burden of responsibility on them. This goes back to the point Liam was making earlier about the opportunity to introduce a broader ranging duty on all public bodies across different levels of Government and different Departments from the central level to ensure that they are doing their bit to contribute to those targets.

Professor Lewis: I would like to comment on assessment in a rural environment, because that is really important. Most people potentially live in places that will not be anywhere near a measurement point. It has been possible to bring action on nitrogen dioxide because there was a very good way of assessing it: we knew where the pollution was—at the roadside—and there was a network of measurements and, crucially, an ability to predict, model and fill in the gaps in between, where everybody else lived. That provided you with the evidence base with which you could say, “These areas exceed; these areas don’t.”

It is harder with PM_2.5 because it does not come just along the roads, although there are sources there; it comes from many places. You might rightly ask, “How will I know if it is getting better in my constituency?” The answer is that if we do adopt things like a 10 microgram target and continuous improvement, we will have to do more measurements, because we will not have the evidence to present to say whether it is getting better or not. There is a fundamental difference as you go lower and lower: the challenge in proving that things have got better, and particularly in places that historically we would not have thought of as pollution hotspots, is pretty hard. People should go in with their eyes open that there will be more of a burden in demonstrating that progress is being made.

Katie Nield: I suppose setting am ambition for that target also provides an opportunity for us to better assess it and better understand the impacts it is having on our health, so it is an opportunity.

Environment Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Cherilyn Mackrory

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

[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.

Environment Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Cherilyn Mackrory

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th March 2020 Public Bill Committees

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

Q I am interested to see that the Bill provides a balance between the detail and the direction of travel. My question is to do with how much of a carrot or stick approach the industry needs from Government. The industry has come on in leaps and bounds in this direction in recent years, but in terms of consistent labelling and practices between different local authorities, how much of a stick or carrot approach do you think the industry needs from Government? Or is industry able to take charge on this?

Martin Curtois: Consistency of labelling could be one of the most significant changes in the right direction. At the moment you have this awful phrase, “widely recyclable”, and no one knows what it means. It could apply to one local authority and not to another. We would advocate literally a simplified traffic light system, whereby green is recyclable and red is not. I think the shock, for a retailer or producer, of having a red dot on its packaging would be such that it would want to avoid it. At a stroke, you would be improving recyclability straightaway.

That is one key element of it. It also drives people mad that they just do not know whether a product is recyclable or not, so you would get an improvement not only at the front end in terms of the manufacturers’ production, but in the materials we receive at the processing facilities. As you can imagine, we receive thousands of tonnes of materials a year. Anything that can be done to ensure that people are sorting it more efficiently at the outset will make our job of reprocessing it more straightforward.

Andrew Poole: For me and for small businesses, a lot of this legislation is generally about trust. The problem is that, if we do not get these things in place, everyone knows that the stick will come. There is an opportunity at the moment to be on the front foot. A lot of our engagement around the Bill has been about keeping businesses on the front foot and steering the legislation in a way that is beneficial to everyone. It is a case of giving all of these things a consistent approach, including labelling, for example. It is about trust in the outcomes of the legislation, and about making the right decisions. It is about trusting what they can see and seeing that the decisions are the right ones. It is important to have that transparency around the whole Bill.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q Can I ask the FDF about food waste? It is mentioned peripherally in the Bill in terms of the separate collections and so on, but there is nothing more. There is a food strategy being worked on by Henry Dimbleby and others, which may have stuff in it. Is there scope for more specific provisions in the Bill? For example, Courtauld is still voluntary. Progress is being driven by the good guys rather than there being an obligation on everyone. You referred to the figures produced by WRAP. Could the Bill do more on that?

David Bellamy: We have not identified any shortcomings to date. Obviously, there are voluntary approaches. You mentioned WRAP, and there is also the UK food waste reduction road map. Companies are signing up to that in increasing numbers and manufacturers are making good progress. We are expecting a consultation on food waste reporting from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs soon, and there is no need for primary powers in the Bill to do that. There was talk of the potential for powers on setting targets down the track. I am not sure where the Government are on that at the moment.

We have not identified any shortcomings as such. The inertia is there with the UK food waste reduction road map, and knowing that food waste reporting is going to come in as planned as a legal requirement in line with the road map.