Lord Redesdale

The Government welcomes independent recommendations to help limit global warming to 1.5C and to reach net zero. The Government has set ambitious targets to reach net zero by 2050, has overachieved on Carbon Budgets one and two, and is on track to deliver Carbon Budget three. The Climate Change Committee has stated that their confidence in the UK meeting Carbon Budget four has increased in the last year.

The Government’s Carbon Budget Delivery Plan is a dynamic long-term plan, setting a course to reach net zero by 2050. The Plan demonstrates the UK's commitment to play a leading role in tackling climate change, with a domestic target and Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) both consistent with the Paris Agreement temperature goal to limit global warming to well below 2°C and pursue efforts towards 1.5°C. The UK over-achieved against the first and second carbon budgets, and latest projections show that the UK is on track to meet the third.

Since 2009 Historic England has provided grants to enable churches and other religious denominations to employ support officers to advise, encourage and help local congregations to maintain and repair their places of worship and remove them from the Heritage at Risk Register. In 2022–23 the nine support officers in post directly supported 234 congregations and ran 22 training events, attended by 355 delegates, in addition to tailored training at individual places of worship.

Historic England architects, surveyors, engineers and technical advisers are also available to provide advice to help congregations address specific structural and repair problems across England. As a statutory consultee in both the national planning and ecclesiastical exemption processes, Historic England also provides formal advice on proposals for works to historic buildings, including informal advice pre-application and statutory responses in both legal frameworks. This expertise and assistance helps to remove places of worship from the Heritage at Risk Register.

HM Government makes available £42 million per annum through the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme. This reimburses VAT on eligible repair works over £1,000.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund invests Lottery players’ funding to sustain the UK’s heritage. The Fund runs open-access grant programmes, to which local churches can apply, providing their project meets its four principal investment themes: saving heritage, protecting the environment, inclusion access and participation, and organisational sustainability. Applicants must take all four principles into account in their application, although the strength of focus and emphasis on each principle is for them to decide and demonstrate.

Historic England provides grants for churches in specific circumstances: where the congregation has a long-standing moral objection to Lottery funding and can provide evidence of that; where the building is not eligible for any National Lottery Heritage Fund grant programme; where it relates to exceptional emergency funding to stabilise the condition of a place of worship; or to prevent further deterioration in the next two years and where the applicant can demonstrate that discussions have already begun with the National Lottery Heritage Fund. To be eligible for a grant, a place of worship must be a grade I or II* listed building, or a grade II listed or unlisted building within a Conservation Area or London Borough.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has funded church buildings through the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme, which makes available £42 million per annum. This scheme provides grants towards VAT paid on repairs and maintenance to the nation's listed places of worship.

In the period from 2022 to 2023 a total of £16,949,526 was provided to local churches, excluding cathedrals, for conservation and maintenance work from this scheme.

Additionally, the National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded £15,759,986 to places of worship in England over the same period.

Historic England also provided public funding in this period for local churches through different funding programmes. A total of £218,286 was granted for urgent emergency works to church buildings in England in use for worship. In addition, grants were made through Historic England to churches, chapels and one tabernacle which are no longer in use for worship to a total of £902,453.

Of the 4,871 entries on the 2023 Historic England Heritage at Risk Register, 943 are places of worship. Two other entries are also assessed as buildings or structures which affect places of worship.

The Heritage at Risk Register aims to protect and manage the historic environment. Historic England works with owners, ‘friends of’ groups, developers, and others to find solutions for historic places and sites at risk across England, ensuring their survival for the benefit of present and future generations.

His Majesty’s Government has not commissioned any specific such research, but the International Passenger Survey (2019) found that 21% of inbound visits to the UK included visiting religious buildings, which are an important part of our national heritage.

Additionally, as part of the Discover England Fund, VisitEngland supported the National Churches Trust to create a number of new visitor experiences and to help them work more closely with destination management organisations to improve their visibility in the visitor economy. A number of these experiences and things to do, in and around the Trust’s churches, were held on the Explore Churches website (www.nationalchurchestrust.org/explore). Visit England continues to support and work closely with the National Churches Trust.

Defra are aware of some developments, such as in Cambridge and North Sussex, which are seeing objections to planning concerning water availability and the impact on the environment. Defra is working closely with DLUHC to identify solutions to overcome these barriers to enable growth.

The UK, as party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is committed to meeting a global target to reduce the overall risks from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals by at least half by 2030, as agreed at COP15 as part of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Individual countries will be starting from different baseline positions in making their contributions to the overall global target and the UK will need to update and submit its National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans by the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, in 2024.

The UK is also committed to publishing a National Action Plan for the Sustainable Use of Pesticides (NAP), which will outline how we will take action to minimise the risks and impacts of pesticides to human health and the environment, while ensuring pests and pesticide resistance can be managed effectively.

We are developing a cross-government Chemicals Strategy to frame the work we are doing across chemicals and put us on a path towards improved chemicals management. It will set out our priorities and principles for taking regulatory action to protect human health and the environment. Internationally, the UK is participating in negotiations for a new global framework for the safe and effective management of chemicals, to replace the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management.

The Government has taken an ambitious approach to tackling plastic pollution. We have already banned microbeads in rinse-off personal care products, as well as banning and restricting commonly littered plastic items – including our upcoming restrictions on single use plastic plates, cutlery, balloon sticks and expanded and extruded polystyrene food and drinks containers from October this year. Our single use carrier bag charge has reduced the use of single use carrier bags by 98% in the main retailers and in the Plan for Water, we recently announced that we will change the law to ban the sale of wet wipes containing plastic subject to public consultation, which will be launched in Autumn 2023.

The UK Government is also proud to have supported the proposal by Rwanda and Peru that led to the ambitious resolution to start negotiating an international legally binding treaty to end plastic pollution, agreed at the United Nations Environment Assembly in March 2022. The UK is proud to be a founding member of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, a coalition of like-minded Governments that are committed to achieving an ambitious international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution. The High Ambition Coalition has agreed a common ambition to end plastic pollution by 2040, underpinned by strategic goals and deliverables.

The Environment Agency's (EA) National Permitting Service is dealing with the application from Fenix Recycling Ltd as a priority.

This application is for the recovery and disposal of hazardous waste and this type of facility and activity has the potential to cause significant harm to the environment and local community. The site is near residential properties and the applicant's submissions so far do not include enough information to satisfy the EA potential risks are understood and will be minimised.

The application was submitted on 15 February 2021 and allocated for assessment on 21 April 2021. The application did not contain enough information and the EA was only able to begin assessing the application on 27 May 2021 once additional necessary information was received from the applicant. A public consultation was held from 29 June to 19 August 2021.

The EA's assessment and the public consultation responses raised concerns about the operator's approach to specific risks that were not addressed by the information provided in support of the application. The EA requested more information from the applicant on 17 December 2021 to address this and is still awaiting their response.

Environmental permitting regulations specify statutory timescales for the Environment Agency (EA) to consider permit applications and the EA also has its own performance measures and is subject to corporate reporting.

The EA communicates with operators through sector bodies and on individual applications about its timescales to enable them to make their applications in time for projects to proceed. The EA also provides an enhanced pre-application service to applicants which helps improve application quality and applicants’ understanding about the time it will take to obtain a decision. The EA also works with applicants to consider prioritising applications that are time-sensitive or critical. Environmental permits are often one of a number of permissions and measures that an operator will need in place prior to commencing a project.

To fulfil the EA’s statutory duties, it must be satisfied that the risk to the environment and communities from proposed activities is minimised and managed. Activities that are higher in risk, complex, or novel take longer to determine.