Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to the oral contribution of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of 24 January 2025 in the Climate and Nature Bill debate, what steps the Government plans to take to strengthen the narrative on imported emissions.
Answered by Mary Creagh - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This Government is absolutely committed to tackling the climate and nature crises and has agreed steps to take forward the spirit and substance of the Climate and Nature Bill with the Bill’s Sponsors. An update on these steps will be set out in a Ministerial Statement by the autumn.
Information about the Carbon footprint for the UK – including UK consumption emission figures from imported goods and services - is published by Defra and is available up to 2021 : Carbon footprint for the UK and England to 2021 - GOV.UK . Figures are due to be updated in the Spring.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to the oral contribution of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of 24 January 2025 on the Climate and Nature Bill, how his Department plans to improve collaboration between the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the Committee on Climate Change and the special representatives on climate and nature policy.
Answered by Mary Creagh - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
As part of the Government’s consideration of the Climate and Nature Bill, on 24 January 2025, I committed to strengthen relationships between the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) and the Special representative for Nature. There is already a strong working relationship between JNCC and CCC. We intend to build on this at a more strategic level and work has commenced to integrate the Special Representative for Nature into this engagement.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has made an assessment of the potential merits of extending the neutering deadline for XL bully dogs which are not currently medically fit to undergo a neutering procedure.
Answered by Mark Spencer
There are already extended deadlines by which owners must ensure that their XL Bully type dogs have been neutered. Dogs that were older than one year old on 31 January 2024, must be neutered and evidence received by 30 June 2024. Dogs that were younger than one year old on 31 January 2024 must be neutered and evidence received by 31 December 2024. We are considering whether a further extension to this is necessary. We will carefully assess the exemption scheme data on dogs that remain to be neutered to inform our decision.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to improve (a) access to and (b) safety in parks for women and girls.
Answered by Trudy Harrison
(a) As part of our commitment outlined in the Environmental Improvement Plan, we are actively working across government to ensure that everyone can live within a 15-minute walk of a green or blue space. This includes delivering policies such as completing the King Charles III England Coast Path, which will be the longest coastal walking route in the world and creating new open access land within the coastal margin; designating Wainwright’s coast to coast path across the North of England as a new National Trail; and Delivering the £9m Levelling Up Parks Fund to improve green space in over 100 disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
(b) The Government has invested £125 million through the Safer Streets and Safety of Women at Night Funds to make streets safer for women and girls, including in public spaces. The current round of the Safer Streets Fund, Round 4, focuses on tackling violence against women and girls in public places. It has allocated £50 million for 111 projects, supporting interventions such as enhanced street lighting, CCTV installation, bystander training programs, taxi marshals, and educational and awareness raising initiatives. These measures aim to create safer environments and enhance public safety, contributing to increased trust in the police and making communities feel safer. The Government is also supporting the Sex-Based Harassment in Public Bill which would make public sexual harassment a specific offence. The Department for Transport is revising the Manual for Streets guidance which will bring out more explicitly the role that measures such as better lighting and natural surveillance can play in helping women, particularly, feel safer.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if her Department will make an assessment of the impact of swift bricks on the swift population in areas where such bricks have been included in new build developments.
Answered by Trudy Harrison
Through the Environment Act 2021 we have introduced a mandatory duty for developers to deliver a ‘biodiversity net gain’, which will mean that habitats for wildlife must be left in a measurably better state than they were before any development. Specific biodiversity features, such as swift bricks, would normally be required of developments through either the relevant local plan or through the local authority’s development control team. There is currently little research into how swift bricks are used by swifts and what designs work best. As their use becomes more widespread, Defra and its agencies will continue to monitor swift populations and look for indications of positive effects.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the effect of glyphosate on biodiversity.
Answered by Mark Spencer
The Government’s first priority with regard to pesticides is to ensure that they will not harm people or pose unacceptable risks to the environment.
All active substances, including glyphosate, are subject to a scientific risk assessment, drawing on expert advice from the Health and Safety Executive and the UK Expert Committee on Pesticides. This includes an assessment of the toxicity to species that are not the target of the pesticide, such as invertebrates, mammals, birds, and aquatic animals. Pesticides that pose unacceptable risks are not authorised.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to help (a) tackle (i) urban and (ii) rural littering and (b) assess the effectiveness of litter reduction campaigns.
Answered by Rebecca Pow
Our Litter Strategy for England sets out our aim to deliver a substantial reduction in litter and littering within a generation. The strategy contains a number of commitments focused on three key themes, including education and awareness. Progress reports on delivering these commitments are available at: www.gov.uk/government/publications/litter-strategy-for-england-progress-reports.
We have also published a data dashboard to understand the extent of litter and littering in England. Further updates to the dashboard will be available in due course. The dashboard can be found at: www.gov.uk/government/publications/litter-and-littering-in-england-data-dashboard.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the impact of trends in the level of local authorities' budgets on litter-related enforcement action.
Answered by Rebecca Pow
The Department has not made any specific assessment of trends in local authority budgets on litter related enforcement action. Our new Anti-social Behaviour Action Plan sets out how we will support councils to take tougher action against those who litter, fly-tip and graffiti. This includes significantly raising the upper limit on fixed penalty notices, to £1,000 for fly-tipping and £500 for littering and leaving graffiti, and measures to help councils issue more penalties. Receipts from fixed penalties will be reinvested in clean up and enforcement.
We are also currently undertaking a research project on the effectiveness of the different enforcement options available to local authorities and the barriers they face in using these. The project is due to complete by the summer and the results will inform future policy development in this area.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether there are guaranteed minimum hours of work for people on the agricultural Seasonal Worker visa working in horticulture.
Answered by Mark Spencer
All recruitment operators for the Seasonal Workers Visa Route offer a guaranteed minimum number of hours for seasonal migrant workers, with most working in excess of these hours. Recruitment operators can transfer seasonal workers between farms to ensure these minimum hours are met and they also have welfare measures in place to ensure workers are not left without support.
Asked by: Nadia Whittome (Labour - Nottingham East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to help reduce the amount of plastic in the oceans.
Answered by Steve Double
The UK is committed to leading efforts to protect our marine environment, including fighting plastic pollution.
At the UN Ocean Conference in June, the OSPAR Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic, which the UK is party to, launched the second Regional Action Plan on Marine Litter that sets out the action countries will take to prevent and reduce marine litter.
The UK is proud to have supported the proposal by Rwanda and Peru that led to the landmark resolution to start negotiating a legally binding treaty to end plastic pollution. To continue to drive progress, the UK became a founding member of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution through which we will strive for an ambitious treaty that will end plastic pollution by 2040.
The UK's Environment Act enables us to change how we manage our waste and take forward proposals from our Resources and Waste Strategy, including tackling plastic pollution.
To tackle pollution from frequently littered items we have restricted the supply of plastic straws, cotton buds and banned drinks stirrers, and with the introduction of carrier bag charges, the use of single-use carrier bags in England has reduced in the main supermarkets by over 97%.
Additionally, our ban on microbeads in rinse-off personal care products has prevented billions of these tiny plastic beads from entering the ocean each year. Furthermore, we have consulted on proposals to ban the supply of single-use plastic plates, cutlery, and balloon sticks, and expanded and extruded polystyrene food and beverage containers, including cups. The consultation response will be published in due course.
Plastic packaging contributes to 55% to 70% of the UK's plastic waste. The introduction of extended producer responsibility for packaging and a plastic packaging tax this April, will incentivise businesses to produce more sustainable packaging and help address this problem, as will the plastic packaging tax on plastic packaging with insufficient recycled content.