Environment Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill, as many other noble Lords have done, but it clearly needs quite a lot of improvement, which I am sure we will be able to do in the subsequent stages. I shall start by commenting on the difference, raised by many noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Whitty and the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, between the EU structure that we used to have and the present Bill. To sum it up, I found from working on transport and the environment from the industry point of view that the difference was that the EU was seen to be totally independent of the Government and had teeth. Those are the two things that we need to look at in discussing the Bill.

The Bill is full of targets, which is a good thing. As many noble Lords have said, they are very wide-ranging and welcome. I believe that many of them need to be legally binding, but we also need to talk about monitoring and enforcement, and all that needs resources. It is not just the targets in this Bill; many other parts across government need to have some kind of connection if we are going to achieve the overall targets that everybody wants, one of which is net-zero carbon.

I shall cite one or two examples from the transport field. The first is biomass. Ministers occasionally say that if we have 100% biomass-fuelled airliners, we can fly as much as we do at the moment, but then somebody else has said that if you want that amount of biomass, every piece of cultivatable land in the world will have to grow biomass and therefore we will all starve. That is not a very good idea. Ditto the latest idea of having hydrogen powering everything. I am told that to create so many kilowatts of hydrogen, you need double the amount of electricity that you need if you use it to power whatever you are trying to do. We have to find solutions for all this. In his wonderful valedictory speech, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury mentioned a phrase that many people are frightened to mention: there will have to be some change of lifestyle.

The other example I shall give is from a debate we had a couple of weeks ago in your Lordships’ House on electric scooters. I pointed out that by the end of this year there will be 1 million scooters operating illegally in this country and asked how the Minister would suggest that ensuring that these scooters do not go on the roads, cycleways or footpaths could be achieved without a massive increase in the number of people and the budget. I am afraid that Ministers tend to ignore the whole question of enforcement. They say that the allocation of funding is difficult, but it needs to be done if the law is to be respected, and that applies to many things in this Bill.

My other point relates to water contamination in the Chilterns caused by HS2, which the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, also raised. I am concerned about the non-disclosure agreements that people have to sign, which mean that all environmental data seems to be confidential. I am sure that many noble Lords would agree that environmental data does not need to be confidential. These poor people in the Chilterns could not even get the information they needed by making a freedom of information request, and they had to go to court. Of course, the documents have now come out saying that six public water suppliers may need additional treatments and asking who will pay for it. I have had similar problems trying to help the people of Wendover, a bit further up the line, get information out of the Government about why they will not talk about putting the railway in a tunnel rather than a viaduct. I have a little bit of experience with tunnelling, but it is still very difficult.

For me, the office for environmental protection needs many more teeth, as the noble Lord, Lord Duncan of Springbank, told us. I want it to be able to force government authorities to produce information, to take people to court, and to support judicial reviews and everything else which would make the concepts and principles in the Bill really work. If we do not do that, we are wasting our time, and it will just be a series of good words. I look forward to many more debates in the future stages of the Bill.

[The Deputy Speaker (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, have withdrawn. I call the noble Earl, Lord Devon.