Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question, and he is absolutely right. Much of what we need to do to tackle climate change and restore nature involves rewilding or natural regeneration. A growing number of projects around the country are already delivering vast benefits. For example, at Knepp Castle in West Sussex, agri-environment funding has helped to create extensive grassland and scrub habitats, with huge benefits for declining bird species such as the turtle dove and the nightingale. As he says, the new environmental land management scheme will be transformative, because it will make subsidies conditional on the delivery of public goods such as biodiversity, woodland and flood management. It really could be the big thing that improves biodiversity in this country, which of course means increasing tree cover and encouraging natural regeneration.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

T6. May I join colleagues in thanking you, Mr Speaker, for everything that you have done to stand up for our democracy?The Government’s Environment Bill does not actually include targets; it only requires Ministers to set them. Those targets could be 15 years in the future, they could be lower than current standards and they need be nothing more than aspirations. The Prime Minister has said that he would “enshrine the highest standards” in law. Obviously, nobody believes a word that the Prime Minister says, but does the Minister agree that there should be a legislative commitment to non-regression from current environmental standards?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)]

The Environment Bill sets out a duty to set targets—actual targets will all be set in secondary legislation, as has been quite clearly stated—and it has had a lot of support from many organisations across the board. The whole system will be overseen by the Office for Environmental Protection, which will have to look at the five-yearly targets and review them annually. There is a very strict set of regimes in there. The Government have given very clear indications about not reducing our environmental standards—that is absolutely not the direction this Government would ever intend to go in—and that includes comments made just last week by the Prime Minister about non-regression.