Environment Bill

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to say why I added my name to this amendment. The Bill currently lacks a coherent interlocking scheme, and these amendments seek to deal with that. It is right to warmly acknowledge the huge progress made by the Minister, but as he has said so clearly, the costs of much of this are not yet understood by the public and there are still obvious strong lobbies that will seek delay.

It is therefore very important that there be a coherent scheme with interlocking interim targets, environment improvement plans and long-term targets. I warmly thank the Minister that we have legally enforceable, long-term targets. It is good that we have them, but the really difficult decisions relate to interim targets. They do not easily fit into the short-term electoral cycle; they are not something a politician or decision-maker can say is for a future generation, years and years away. Interim targets are the here and now. Nothing much has changed, as one can see from the great Victorian novelists, “Yes, Minister” or, more tangibly, the targets that have been missed to date. That is why I so strongly support providing for the practical nature of legally binding interim targets.

There is another matter to which, as a legislature, we should have regard: we ought not to be passing aspirational, vague legislation, but legislation which is clear and sets clear duties so that people know where they stand and so that the Government can be held to account. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, has dealt eloquently with the arguments made by the Government. There is no need for me to add anything to her observations.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 11 and 14, but actually rise to speak to Amendment 13 in my name. The background to this is an amendment I put down in Committee specifically in relation to trees, tree-planting and tree health. It asked the Government to ensure that an annual report was made to Parliament on how far we had got in achieving the target set in the Bill. Obviously, what is applicable to trees is applicable to every target in this Bill—a whole range of targets will eventually be put forward and I will not go through them all.

The Bill as it stands now says there must be a review within five years of the first review. I suggest that the situation is now so urgent that Parliament needs to consider every year how far we have got towards achieving or failing to meet that target. We are all agreed that there is huge urgency to this, and we need to keep the pressure on year by year in Parliament.

I will never forget a meeting in Singapore in 2020, when one of the major issues facing the world was third-world debt. At the end of the meeting, people from the developing world looked at their diaries and said, “Perhaps we could meet again in three years’ time”, when suddenly a friend of mine—for whom this was literally a matter of life and death in his country—erupted with huge righteous anger which still echoes in my mind. I am not myself given to righteous anger, but I am sure that countries where people are literally now dying as a result of what is happening would have that same anger.

I will not divide the House on this as we have quite enough votes anyway. But I would like the Minister to consider seriously—sharing the sense of the urgency of this, as he does—bringing forward a government amendment to ensure that Parliament has a chance to look at the targets in this Bill every year in order to see how close we are to achieving them, or to what extent we are failing.