Environment Bill

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB) [V]]

My Lords, as industrialisation in the 19th century increasingly damaged the environment, a few people, including Alexander von Humboldt, Emerson, Thoreau and John Ruskin, spoke out. The cry of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins speaks for all those prophetic past voices and for the billions today who suffer the effects of pollution, poor air quality, dirty water and soil deprivation:

“What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

Sixty years ago, those cries became more urgent, with Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring on the effect of pesticides and EF Schumacher’s warning on the dangers of continuous growth. Within the Church of England, Hugh Montefiore, the Bishop of Birmingham, uttered similar warnings. Many in my generation were slow—too slow—in really hearing what those and others were saying. I exempt the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury and wish him well for his future work in this area, but I include myself among them. If there can be an excuse, it was that I was worried that focusing on the environment might be too much of a distraction from pressing human rights issues. What is quite clear now, however, is that the two are indivisible: a concern for the environment is also a concern for the rights of those who suffer now, especially the poor, and the right of future generations to be born into a habitable world. As Pope Francis put it in his wonderful 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’:

“Today … we have to realise that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”


A particularly striking and egregious example of failure is, of course, the deforestation that is taking place in the Amazon, resulting in the indigenous people losing their homes and their way of life. A statement by the national institutions of the Church of England puts it in a very balanced way:

“The whole creation belongs to God. As human beings we are part of the whole and have a responsibility to love and care for what God has entrusted to us as temporary tenants of the planet. We are called to conserve its complex and fragile ecology, whilst recognising the need for responsible and sustainable development and the pursuit of social justice.”


If the issue was seen to be urgent by a few 60 years ago, how much more urgent is it now? I am glad to say that this sense of urgency has run through the debate. The Bill is a landmark opportunity to get things right and show how serious we are about it, not just in the business of making the right noises. This means being clear about the targets to be set in each area, the agency responsible for monitoring them and that they are enforceable. Only through clarity, accountability and enforceability in all the relevant areas can we show that we are serious. The question, of course, is whether the Bill as it now stands provides that. It is clear from the speeches this afternoon that there are many ways in which it needs to be tightened up. One example is the need for interim as well as long-term targets; and crucial points were made by the noble Lords, Lord Anderson of Ipswich and Lord Krebs.

It is quite clear that we have plenty of monitoring and a range of agencies dealing with environmental issues, but they are failing badly. You could take any one of a dozen areas: the quality of bathing water in this country has always been poor by European standards and last year it was the worst of all; whereas other countries including east European ones have improved in recent years, ours have failed to keep step. This is linked to another problem, the quality of river water, as mentioned by so many of your Lordships. Since 2019, raw sewage has been dumped into our rivers on more than 20,000 occasions, with millions of tonnes going back on to our beaches. Or take the state of our trees. Ash dieback is absolutely devastating our ash trees from one coast to the other with significant blight on our oaks, chestnuts and other trees. Or there is the failure of our tree-planting programme. The Committee on Climate Change has said that we need to raise our current 3% forest cover to 17% by 2050 if we are to have any chance of meeting our climate goals. That may need to be increased further if the Government continue to miss other targets along the way. At the moment the Government are missing their tree-planting targets by 40 years; if we continue at this paltry rate of tree planting, the Government’s own 2050 targets will not be met until 2091. Finally, take air pollution. In 2020 the UK was ranked 92nd for air quality out of 104 countries—as a result of poor air quality, people suffer ill health and die.

The good news is that, in all these areas, there is now monitoring by a range of independent and official bodies. We have the indicators; what we lack are really effective systems of accountability and enforceability. I believe that the Bill gives us an invaluable opportunity to ensure that, in the future, we will have these systems, and I will be supporting a range of amendments to that effect.