Environment Bill

Lord Vaux of Harrowden Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as a farmer in south-west Scotland with forestry interests, as chairman of Fleet District Salmon Fishery Board, and as a director of the Galloway Fisheries Trust.

It is of course welcome that this Bill is finally here. It has taken some time, but there is much to welcome in it. However, it suffers from what seems to be a common feature of most Bills these days: there is limited actual substance. Much of the detail is to be added later by ministerial regulation. What this means, of course, is that the details will not be subject to the same level of parliamentary scrutiny as they would have been if they had been part of the Bill itself, even if they are subject to the affirmative procedure. This applies to the most fundamental parts of the Bill, such as the environmental targets, environmental improvement plans, the policy statement on environment principles and the strategy of the office for environmental protection. It would have been preferable if at least more of the principles were included in the Bill.

Almost all environmental actions involve trade-offs. Those might be simply financial; for example, the additional costs of more environmentally friendly boilers. They might be economic; for example, an action that adds a cost or regulatory burden to a whole industry. It is possible that an action affects a particular industry in the country so badly that it becomes uncompetitive, and we end up importing from less environmentally conscious countries. In other words, we simply end up exporting the environmental damage. There are many examples of that already. Plastics disposal in Turkey has already been mentioned; ship dismantling in Bangladesh is another example, but there are many more where products are manufactured more cheaply in environmentally less well-regulated countries. As far as I can see, that could happen even between the devolved nations. What happens if the different parts of the UK apply different environmental standards, perhaps exactly for economic advantage? There is also a risk that the interrelationships between the Agriculture Act, the Trade Act and the Bill could create just such a situation for agriculture, as others have mentioned.

The trade-offs can also be purely environmental, where an action intended to improve the environment in one way damages it in another. Let me give a couple of real-life examples. One environmental target, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is to increase tree planting, which is generally seen to be desirable—and I agree. However, where I live, in south-west Scotland, large-scale conifer planting has led to serious damage to watercourses, to the extent that some are now effectively devoid of life as a result, and a reduction in biodiversity in terms of moorland flora, birds and animals. Another example of an unintended consequence is the Clean Air Act 1968, which mandated higher chimneys for industries burning coal and other fossil fuels to better disperse sulphur dioxide. That improved air quality in urban areas, but it also led to increased acid rain in rural areas and in Scandinavia. The noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, mentioned biomass as another potential such example. It is to be hoped that we have learned from those past mistakes, but it would be foolish to imagine that unintended consequences will not occur again.

I am not trying to say that we should not take the necessary environmental actions—quite the opposite: we must take them—but it is important that we look at our plans and targets holistically when creating them. What is the overall impact of our plans? Do targets potentially conflict? There could well be situations where the negative impacts are large enough to make us want at least to amend the targets to achieve our aims less expensively or to mitigate unexpected damage caused. If we do not look at targets and plans holistically, there is a real risk that they will lose the support of the public.

There is little in the Bill to achieve that. Part 1 describes the requirements for the plans and targets, but there is no requirement to consider the costs or the economic or environmental impact when setting them. While there is a power in Clause 3 to revoke or lower a target if the circumstances have changed such that

“environmental, social, economic or other costs … would be disproportionate to the benefits”,

what if the circumstances have not changed? What if we got it wrong at the outset? Additionally, there is no requirement in the reviewing and reporting duties in the Bill to review and report on those costs or unexpected consequences. It is important that in creating any plans or setting any targets the Bill should require a full cost-benefit analysis to be carried out, which should be published as part of the plan or target. The review and reporting process should then be required to report on both the benefits and the costs, including any unintended or unforeseen consequences, and not just on whether the target has been met, as the Bill is drafted. Just stating whether a target has been met—when, for example, all we have done is export the problem or where the costs have turned out to be much higher than expected or the action has caused unexpected environmental damage in another way—is to give an incomplete and possibly misleading picture. The Bill needs amending to ensure that the full costs and implications are measured and taken into account. Without that, there is a real risk we might in some situations do more damage than good.