European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, there are plenty of people around to go into the Lobbies tonight, so it is terribly important that the Minister responds very clearly to my noble friend Lord Deben and the others who have spoken.

We must not be complacent about this. We are a land not without litter; we are a land which still has polluted waterways; we are a land with beaches that are, frankly, a disgrace. Much has been achieved, and much that has been achieved has been because of standards laid down by the European Union. We wish to go not backwards but forwards. I made two long journeys yesterday: I drove from Lincolnshire to Staffordshire and from Staffordshire to London and, as always when I am driving, I was deeply depressed by the amount of litter in our countryside. We want a body to be set up that has real teeth, we want regulations and real penalties, and we want a land that we can all be proud of, even those who believe that mistakes have been made over the whole issue of the European Union.

As my noble friend Lord Deben so eloquently said, this ought to be an issue on which we can all unite. The amendment is extremely good, and I hope the Minister can assure us that something very like it will be in the Bill before we send it back to another place.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to give strong support to this amendment and assert the need for an independent environmental institution. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, this is entirely in accord with what Ministers have said they want. However, it is really important that, when the actions are put on to the words, we get the real protections that we require.

I well remember when the coalition Government came in in 2010; I was chairman of the Environment Agency at the time. The then Secretary of State for Defra made it very clear to me that she welcomed private advice from the Environment Agency about the condition of the nation’s environment, but she did not want us to make waves in public—she did not want us to give public, independent advice. It is absolutely crucial that, whatever body is established after the Bill passes, it will give public, independent advice and be effective in holding the Government’s feet to the fire to make sure our environmental protections are safeguarded.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

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

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, that the irreparable damage that may be done is damage to our environment and our health if we lose the safeguards and protections that we have for our environment.

[Lord Framlingham]

Will the noble Lord—

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

No, I will not. I am sorry. The crucial part of the amendment is subsection (4), which talks about,

“an independent body with the purpose of ensuring compliance with environmental law by public authorities”.

When I was chairman of the Environment Agency, action was taken on some of the major issues affecting our environment—such as the fact that we discharge raw sewage into the River Thames 20 times or more a year, and the lethal levels of air pollution in our cities—only because of the prospect of infraction proceedings from the EU. If we lose that lever, we lose the ability to tackle these major environmental issues. It is essential that we insist—not just as part of the consultation but now—that the powers of the new environmental watchdog include the ability to take that sort of legal action.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I was pondering in bed this morning, as one does, about when the change of tone came from the Government on the watchdog and the principles and the commitment to the environment.

We have heard really quite encouraging statements from the Government over the past year. These have included a pledge to be,

“the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than we inherited”;

saying:

“We need to fill the governance gap”.—[Official Report, 8/1/18; col. 8.];


and promising to create,

“a new, world-leading body to give the environment a voice … independent of government, able to speak its mind freely”,

with “clear authority” and “real bite”. These are not my words, these are the Government’s words. They were not enunciated just by the Secretary of State for the Environment, whom you would expect to say things like that, but they were quite frequently enunciated by the Prime Minister as well. That was jolly welcome to us environmentalists, who believe that the environment is not about birds and bees and tweety things but is actually about the ecosystems on which all of human life and economic prosperity depend.

However, somewhere along the line the cracks in the Government’s commitment to their intentions and their fine words have appeared. The consultation document which came out last week was total confirmation of that. There has been a huge watering-down of the status of the environmental principles to a policy statement, which the Government would only have to have regard to, on the basis that it would,

“offer greater flexibility for Ministers”.

I am not sure that that ought to be the objective of all this. Even though the Government promised that Brexit would not weaken our environmental protections, the way in which the principles are being dealt with in the consultation will not deliver that. As many noble Lords have said, the watchdog is more like a watchpoodle and simply will not do the task that has been carried out by the Commission and the European Court of Justice very successfully, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, has just pointed out.

The consultation was very late. We should have smelled a rat when it did not appear as promised in November 2017. As a former chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, I know about little birds and a little bird has told us that this is a sign of cold feet in a range of departments—BEIS, the Treasury, the Department for Transport and, indeed, No. 10. There is a total lack of cross-government agreement and that means that the consultation is late, the governance gap is opening up under our feet and there is no chance of getting even these weak proposals in place before Brexit day.

The Government have made a commitment to ensure legal continuity on day one of Brexit so it is vital that the principles and the watchdog are part of domestic law.