Environment Bill

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

I speak in favour of amendment 2, which was tabled by the Chair of the EFRA Committee, the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), and would put into law the World Health Organisation air quality limits.

I speak as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution. I introduced my own clean air Bill four years ago, in 2017, at which time the Royal College of Physicians had already reported that 40,000 people in Britain were dying prematurely every year, at a cost of £20 billion. The figure is now thought to be 64,000 people. Air pollution affects people’s brains, hearts and lungs. The mental and physical health of unborn children is affected, as is young children’s concentration. It can also affect people in terms of depression, anxiety and dementia—so the list goes on. In fact, the number of covid deaths is up 8% for each microgram of PM_2.5.

DEFRA claims that overall pollution has come down in the past 10 years, but the reason for that is that we have closed down our coal-fired power stations and exported our manufacturing. In urban environments, the deaths and the pollution are going up, and that is why we need these limits to be imposed universally. It is the poorest and most diverse neighbourhoods that are suffering most from the pollution and hence from the greatest levels of covid deaths. It is no good the Government saying that they will have average concentrations, where they average the amounts of concentration in a rural environment with those in a toxic urban environment. Those limits would not have saved the life of Ella Kissi- Debrah, who tragically died. The coroner’s inquest heard that the cause of death was the levels of air pollution that caused her asthma, which caused her to go into hospital 28 times in just three years before her tragic death. We want World Health Organisation universal limits applied so that thousands of children can be saved and protected.

It is everyone’s right to have clean air, and it is the Government’s duty to deliver that right. We therefore need amendment 2, which is a guiding light around which other targets can coalesce. It requires PM_2.5 to be 10 micrograms per cubic metre by 2030. We need all Government Departments and public bodies to work together to achieve this, as set out in new clause 6. Unfortunately, the Government are just saying that they will have targets in 2022. Those targets will not be legally enforceable and they will be able to be changed. That simply is not good enough. For Ella’s sake, for the sake of thousands of children up and down Britain, and for all of us, we need World Health Organisation standards in legislation, and I hope that that will be agreed today.

Finally, I turn to new clause 11, tabled by the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder). I sponsored a plastics Bill in 2018. The fact is that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050. UK supermarkets alone produce 114 billion pieces a year. We need the producers and the polluters to pay a tax on virgin plastic. I would certainly support that, because millions of birds and animals are dying. We are ingesting the microplastics that get into fish and inhaling plastic that is in our clothes and washing machines. In a nutshell, as we approach COP26 we should be showing leadership to the world in stopping our oceans choking, stopping our children choking, protecting our air, protecting our oceans and protecting our environment.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

This is a ground-breaking Bill. There is much of merit in it, although you would not believe it to listen to some of the contributions from the Opposition Benches. There are many good amendments, and I would single out new clauses 14 and 15 from my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) about linking housing targets and planning permissions.

In the limited time available, I want to talk about my amendment 5 on interim targets. Setting targets is easy. Governments like to set headline-grabbing targets, but too often the small print belies the ambition of the target, and the target date is in the dim and distant future. That can instil complacency and lethargy, because there is plenty of time to hit the mark and there is therefore no need to panic. When it comes to climate change, however, there is every need, if not to panic, at least to put our foot on the gas, metaphorically, and to act with urgency and immediacy.

The 2050 net zero target is almost 30 years away, and it should be a “last possible date by which”. It should be subject to a constant audit as to how quickly and by how far we can constantly bring that end date forward. It must also be an end date for a clearly set out progression to reducing harmful emissions and creating a net carbon environmentally benefiting economy. We need things to show a marked improvement from today, and so it should be with the natural environmental improvement targets in this Bill. My amendment is simple. It adds just four words in an additional subsection to clause 4, making it the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that “interim targets are met.” That amendment would guarantee continuous incremental improvements in the natural environment, helping to keep all things environmental high up the Government’s list of priorities. It would bring the Environment Bill target framework into line with the approach of the Climate Change Act 2008, where there are five-yearly legally binding targets as milestones to the long-term legally binding target of net zero by 2050.

At the moment, the only recourse for the Office for Environmental Protection, if the Government miss an interim target, will be to criticise them in its annual report. That could of course be ignored by Ministers and Governments until the long-term target was missed, when enforcement action would actually kick in. Frankly, the power of policing this has to have more teeth than the ability of the environmental policemen to shout, “Stop, or I’ll shout ‘stop’ again!” Friends of the Earth has said:

“If these targets are not binding upon the Secretary of State it would be a huge missed opportunity to ensure the EIP system drives sustained, tangible environmental improvement—and would undermine the rationale for setting such goals in the first instance.”

[Steve Brine]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Tim Loughton]

I do not think so, but my hon. Friend is very kind. It is only because Madam Deputy Speaker is looking daggers at me.

Five-yearly interim targets also need to be set in the environmental improvement plans. However, the environmental improvement plans are not legally binding—they are simply policy documents—and all the plans need to be reviewed and potentially updated every five years and reported on every year. This is not the same as legal accountability.