Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th March 2023 Lords Chamber

It is slightly unfortunate that the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, is not in his place, but I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, and all the assorted Ministers we have had responding to the Bill, will commit to publish a weekly or fortnightly list of regulations which have been amended, repealed or replaced—and, I hope, also some which have simply been assimilated. That will allow us all to see how this work has progressed—not just in Defra but in other government departments; the MoD has claimed that it is practically finished—and enable us to judge the progress of this work and, indeed, to take a position and a view on the effectiveness of this review of EU legislation. I ask for that as a parting gift from Ministers as we come to end of Committee, at some stage this evening, we hope.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young, with whom I share the honour of serving on the Environment and Climate Change Committee, under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, whose amendment I wish to address. However, before I do, I say that I do not think that anybody in this Chamber wants to tear up necessary environmental protections that maintain the standard and beauty of our environment. Certainly I do not, and I do not think that the Government have any such intention.

However, some of us want to change those regulations in a way which would improve them and make them less onerous and less burdensome. I fear that the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, would prevent that, because it says in proposed new subsection (2):

“No provision to which this section applies may be made … unless … the provision … will contribute to a significant improvement in environmental protection.”


Therefore, no change may be made unless there is some improvement—even to a regulation which could be made less onerous but where there is no scope for improving the standard of environmental protection or where any additional environmental protection would be unnecessary and not cost effective. This could freeze the whole thing.

If the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, interprets her amendment in a way that she did not in her speech, that improvement can be making a law less onerous, then that would be an excellent and wonderful thing, because there is considerable scope for making environmental protection less onerous than it is now. Current rules can be cripplingly expensive, mind-bogglingly complex and hugely time-consuming. Moreover, those failings can prevent environmentally desirable developments.

My eyes were opened and the scales fell from them when I read an article by Sam Dumitriu—you only have to Google it and you will find it. He points out that the proposed Norfolk Boreas offshore wind farm, which is necessary and desirable for environmental reasons, as I am sure all noble Lords would agree, to reduce our emissions, needed to produce 1,961 documents just to get approval, with a total of 13,275 pages. That is more words than the entire works of Tolstoy and all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. That probably could be streamlined and made easier without undermining the protection of the bit of sea where that windfarm is proposed to be.

Let us take Sizewell C nuclear plant. Some people object to nuclear plants, but those who want to reduce carbon emissions think that they are a very necessary part of our energy mix. It will be built alongside an existing nuclear plant, so you would think that most of the environmental obstacles had been overcome. It is desirable to reduce CO₂, but it had to produce environmental applications running to 44,260 pages, most of which referred not to land but to any impact that it might have on the sea and maritime areas nearby.

It is difficult to put a cost on, because the people who have had to go through these processes are in the private sector, but a freedom of information request by New Civil Engineer magazine revealed that the highways agency, when applying to build a 23-kilometre road, had to produce 30,000 pages of environmental application, costing £267 million. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, does not want any extra roads, and I respect that, but I think that she would agree that if you are not going to build the road, then just stop it, save £267 million and spend it on something worth while rather than on a process of applying for environmental protection which is just mind-bogglingly expensive.

For each of those cases, I do not know how much regulation was imposed on us by the EU and how much by our own volition. From listening to noble Lords and noble Baronesses who have spoken in these debates, almost all assume that all environmental protection of a worthwhile and onerous kind comes from the EU. I would be grateful if the Minister, not necessarily in the reply to this debate but subsequently, can tell us to what extent EU law is feeding into these hugely onerous, costly and time-consuming things that prevent us doing what is necessary for the environment and would help us to meet net zero.