European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 16th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

No, no, no. These protections are for our air, our food, our animals, our countryside and ourselves: it is for us that we are doing this.

I have had a lot of flak from people for voting for Brexit, and one of the biggest things that they are unhappy with—obviously I get a lot of green people emailing me—is the risk of losing our environmental protections when we leave the EU. It is something that I worry about as well. Currently, our Government are policed by the Commission and the European Court of Justice. But our Government cannot be trusted on environmental issues, on which they have routinely lost legal cases. Examples include ClientEarth forcing the UK to make good on reducing our lethal levels of air pollution, and the Commission forcing us to reduce the disgusting levels of human waste in the River Thames. So I agree with the criticisms levelled against me and levelled against Brexit. If we do not replace the legal powers of the Commission and the ECJ and maintain the environmental principles that underpin them, Brexit will be a disaster from an environmental point of view. This amendment is our chance to put that right.

The naysayers to this amendment—if there are many in the House—might suggest that the whole point of Brexit is to remove ourselves from EU institutions and so it is wrong to try to recreate their functions. This is plainly wrong. Parliament can, and should, determine what our environmental principles are and who should enforce them. It is perfectly right for Parliament to insist that a statutory body, with real enforcement powers, should hold the Government legally accountable to its national and international environmental obligations.

To me, the crucial part of this amendment is proposed new subsection (1). The Government have repeatedly promised us that leaving the EU would not mean any diminishment of rights, obligations and protections. But, clearly, if we do not pass this amendment, we will be diminished.

Other Members of your Lordships’ House have said how feeble the option is that the Government are offering us. The reason for this feeble environmental watchdog is probably because of the divisions in the Government. On the one hand we have a wonderfully ambitious Environment Secretary, whom one can almost imagine frolicking in a field of wheat. On the other hand we have an International Trade Secretary who dreams of GMO-fed beef and chlorinated chickens from factory farms in America.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

Really? Really?

[Viscount Ridley]

I am most grateful to the noble Baroness. Surely her speech and many other speeches would do very well as submissions to the consultation. The supporters of this amendment asked the Government for a consultation and they got a consultation. If they have criticisms to make of what has been proposed in the consultation, let them submit them to the consultation. Is that not how it is supposed to work?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

I thank the noble Viscount for his intervention. I will most certainly do as he suggests. That is a very good idea.

A compromise appears to have been reached between the Trade Secretary and the Environment Secretary. They seem to have said, “Okay, let’s have a watchdog but let’s make it toothless, so that it won’t actually have the powers and duties it needs to be effective”. So the Government propose that the new body will not be able to initiate legal action, will have no legal obligation to operate the current environmental principles—such as polluter pays—and will be kept out of anything to do with dangerous anthropogenic climate change. The consultation fails to propose anything close to what we have already.

The amendment is therefore inconvenient for the Government, so they will oppose it. Of course, a real environmental watchdog could not be anything but inconvenient to a Government. We want it to be inconvenient to a Government. We want it to actually hold them to account. We want it to stop them doing bad things. We want it to uphold all the principles of clean food, clean air and clean seas that we currently have.

The Minister has made good on his promise to put the issues out to consultation ahead of Third Reading, but it is simply too weak. It is weaker than the EU law that we have already and it could, of course, be weakened after the consultation. We have no guarantee that the issues will not be kicked into the long grass under the weight of other legislation coming through from Defra.

It is less than a year to Brexit day, and it is obvious that the Government’s promised Bill on the environment simply cannot be passed until long after we leave the EU. That means that there will be a governance gap, which we cannot afford. So I urge every Member of this House to vote for this amendment.