Air Pollution

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government plans to tackle air pollution.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. There is no safe level of air pollution. I will say that again: there is no safe level of air pollution. Of course, life is not risk-free. Every year, almost 250 people die from knife crime and, rightly, people demand action. Every year, almost 1,600 people die in road traffic accidents and, rightly, people demand action. Every year, approximately 43,000 people die prematurely from air pollution, yet there is silence. Well, no more—the public are finding their voice about this silent, invisible killer. This morning in Parliament Square, doctors, nurses, academics, carers, mothers and babies came together with the Healthy Air Coalition, the National Heart and Lung Foundation, Mums for Lungs, trade unions, and Asthma + Lung UK to demand that Parliament act. Eighty-two of them represented the 82 people whose lives are cut short by air pollution every day.

We have a public health emergency on our hands and the response from successive Governments so far has simply not been adequate. We have no co-ordinated national plan to get key pollutants down to safer levels that are aligned with the World Health Organisation limit values. Sadly, the annual data released this week shows that things are going in the wrong direction. Two days ago, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published new air quality statistics for 2025; note the words “air quality”—it should be “air pollution” statistics. It found that

“annual mean concentrations of PM2.5 showed an increase of 12 per cent at urban background stations and an increase of 14 per cent for roadside stations compared to 2024.”

It also found that

“annual mean concentrations of PM10 showed an increase of 12 per cent for urban background stations and an increase of 8 per cent for roadside stations compared to 2024”

and that annual mean concentrations of nitrogen dioxide increased by

“3 per cent at urban background stations”

although they did show a 1% decrease at roadside stations.

I hope that everyone notices the irony that DEFRA insists on calling this “air quality” instead of air pollution. Let us be clear about the health impacts of air pollution. Polluted air is linked to up to 43,000 deaths in the UK every year. Let us imagine the reaction if a new covid variant was having such an impact. Imagine if knife crime was linked to hundreds of deaths every week, or if we saw 82 deaths on our roads every single day. Air pollution is the second leading risk factor for death in children under five and it is the largest environmental risk to public health, yet it remains the silent killer—the invisible killer—because it is often masked by other diseases that it has aggravated. We have had just one case where the coroner’s certificate reports air pollution as a cause of death: that of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, where the coroner concluded that Ella had

“died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.”

He said it “made a material contribution” to her death. I pay tribute to Ella’s mother, Rosamund, and to all those who have campaigned for clean air as a human right. Rosamund was in Parliament Square this morning with all those campaigners. The work that she has done to bring this matter to public consciousness should be respected by everyone in Parliament.

Scientists have found links between air pollution, almost every organ system in the body and the major diseases that affect them. That includes the brain, lungs, cardiovascular system, kidneys, liver, gastrointestinal tract, bones, skin, reproductive system and even the central nervous system, where air pollution increases the chance of developing dementia. The current health evidence, based on more than 60,000 studies, links air pollution to more than 700 illnesses.

Although the scientific evidence base grows every year, we know more than enough to realise that current efforts fall far short of what is needed. Indeed, here is what we know about the state of air pollution in the UK: air quality targets and the legal air pollution limits are not sufficient to protect public health. There is no Government-wide action plan to bring down levels of air pollution to below World Health Organisation guidelines. Funding and resources for local authorities to deliver air quality programmes are inadequate, and public awareness of outdoor and indoor air pollution is far too low.

Seventy years ago this month, when the UK published the Clean Air Act 1956—the first Act of its kind—we really were a world leader in tackling air pollution. We can no longer make that claim. After the great smog that killed 4,000 people in a week—with a total death count estimated at 10,000 to 12,000 in the penumbra—the Government passed the 1956 Act. Politicians then rose to the challenge. Today, they must do so again. Other jurisdictions are moving ahead with more ambition and urgency. Before we consider doing that, we should distinguish between a target and a limit value.

The Government are fond of setting targets. A target is something that is aimed for. A limit value is a threshold that should not be crossed. In 2021, the WHO updated its guidance for one of the key pollutants: PM_2.5. Its guidance is a level of no more than 5 micrograms per cubic metre. The UK’s legal limit value was set in the Air Quality Standards Regulations 2010; it remains four times higher than the WHO value, at 20 micrograms per cubic metre—that is the legal limit.

The recent environmental improvement plan introduced a new date to achieve a target of 10 micrograms per metre cubed: 2030—it had been 2040. That sounds like good news, a target that will be achieved 10 years earlier, but do not be fooled. The target for PM_2.5—that is, the aspiration rather than the legal limit—is still double the WHO guideline. It actually represents no progress at all. In DEFRA’s 2024 monitoring data, all but one monitoring site just met the 10 microgram target. Those are the sort of targets that DEFRA loves: ones where nothing has to be done to achieve them and everything can be left as bad as it has always been, but it looks as though action is being taken.

We need not a target, but a legally binding limit value that is the same as the WHO’s guideline of 5 micrograms per metre cubed. We need a wider plan to get PM_2.5 exposure down across the UK to below WHO guidelines in the near future. The same and more can be said of the nitrogen dioxide target. On that, the WHO guidelines are 10 micrograms per cubic metre, but the UK lags behind with a legal limit value set in 2010 at an annual exposure of 40 micrograms. When it comes to nitrogen dioxide, the Environment Act 2021 did not even set a long-term target, so action on that key pollutant is not included in the Act’s delivery plan.

It makes no sense for the Government to treat nitrogen dioxide any differently from PM_2.5. We should have a far tighter limit value and a far more ambitious plan for driving nitrogen dioxide levels down to below WHO guidelines. On our current trajectory, some parts of the UK will not be compliant with the current inadequate limit value of 40 micrograms until 2045. My right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) will be aware that the latest DEFRA figures show that Manchester has the worst nitrogen dioxide pollution in the country, with a level of 55 micrograms per cubic metre—more than five times the WHO guidelines. As a result, it is thought that air pollution contributes to one in 20 deaths in the region each year.

Moreover, national-level statistics can mask local authority-level data, as exposed by the work of Asthma + Lung UK. Its research found that local authorities are breaching the legal limits of nitrogen dioxide, even when national Government have determined them to be under such limits. That is because of the disjointed approach we currently take to air pollution, in which national data weirdly excludes local authority monitors despite local authorities being mandated by the Government to collect data.

So we have situations such as the one in my Brent West constituency, where three local authority monitors accurately record illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide despite the Government saying that Brent, and London as a whole, supposedly meet legal limits for nitrogen dioxide. At the corner of Wembley High Road and London Road, the annual mean for nitrogen dioxide was 40.92 micrograms per cubic metre; at the corner of Wembley High Road and Ealing Road, it was 41.76; at the junction of Forty Lane and Kings Drive, it was 43.5. Each of those is more than four times the WHO guidelines, and each is right next to or in walking distance of a school. This is toxic, illegal air pollution that my constituents are exposed to, yet if they read what the Government say, they would not even realise it.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

This week, Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust declared a “critical incident” after prolonged extreme heat led to increased demand, with more patients suffering dehydration and heat-related illnesses. As my hon. Friend will know, hot spells often go hand in hand with poor air quality. Does he agree that there is an imperative to address poor air quality, and that that imperative is growing as a result of the changing climate?

[Barry Gardiner]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and he is absolutely right. The heat dome that we have been experiencing interacts with pollution and gives us extra ozone and causes huge health problems. I do not know—perhaps the Minister can tell us, if his officials are on the ball on this—just when the number of excess deaths caused by last week’s high temperatures will be known at a disaggregated level; it would be extremely interesting to get those.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I did not want to interrupt the flow of my hon. Friend’s speech, but now that he has been interrupted, I might as well. He too is a west London MP, so he is aware that Heathrow, in my constituency, is one of the most persistent air pollution hotspots. In the previous Government’s assessment, any expansion at Heathrow would have a significant impact on air quality. The latest airports national policy statement says it will have “significant negative effects” on air quality. We are one of the worst areas for nitrogen dioxide pollution, so does my hon. Friend agree that Heathrow expansion cannot go ahead?

[Barry Gardiner]

How did I know that my right hon. Friend would be introducing that subject? I excised it from my speech because I knew he would. He is absolutely right, and he will have seen the assessment that came out just 10 days ago, which said everything he and I have been saying about the pollution caused by the third runway expansion at Heathrow. Whatever we think about the economy—as he knows, the assessment was not too hot on that either—it is a disaster for public health.

I do not decry the real progress on nitrogen dioxide that has resulted from the ultra low emission zone expansion. What the mayor has done has been really significant; the correlated reduction in admissions to hospital has been huge, and we really welcome that. But air pollution action must be targeted at hotspots. Even if the hotspots dipped below the 40 microgram legal limit, that would still be four times the World Health Organisation guidelines.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentions the Mayor of London, who has made substantial strides, but I refer him to the matter of emissions from buses and the only partial electrification of the fleet in London and elsewhere. Pollutants from diesel buses are a continuing problem, especially when buses are allowed to idle at bus stands close to residential property. That is of particular concern to my constituent Kate Hollis, whose 12-year-old son, Jack, tragically died from bone cancer, the spread of which the family believes was caused by pollutants from a bus terminus next to their house in my constituency. Does my hon. Friend, who knows a great deal about these issues and who, like me, is a London MP, share my and the Hollis family’s concern that electrification is going too slowly, with potentially dangerous consequences?

[Barry Gardiner]

I give my condolences to the Hollis family for the tragedy they have suffered. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the electrification of the bus system must go further and faster, but it is not just a London problem, as he knows: it affects areas across the country. It is absolutely vital that we roll out the electrification of vehicles. He knows—I will come to this later—that it is not simply the exhaust that is the problem with those large vehicles; it is also the particulate matter that heavier vehicles produce on the roads.

Although the focus is often on particulate matter and NO₂, we are falling behind on other pollutants. Ammonia, which is highly reactive, forms secondary PM_2.5. The UK is not projected to meet its 2030 reduction targets until at least 2035. We have made essentially no progress in ammonia reduction in 20 years. In the Netherlands, regulatory controls on agricultural ammonia contributed to a 64% reduction in ammonia emissions between 1990 and 2016. This is possible—other people are doing it— so the question is: why are we not?

Ozone—O₃—levels continue to be higher in rural and suburban areas, with long-term objectives remaining off track. Alongside particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, ozone is the biggest contributor to outdoor air pollution, with higher concentrations on hot summer days. Achieving long-term objectives for ozone is not even legally mandatory.

There are two more categories of particulates that are of growing concern: ultrafine particulate matter—UFP—which comprises 90% of airborne particles, and black carbon, or soot, formed from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass. There are currently no regulations on safe levels of UFPs, despite research linking them with an even wider array of health problems than PM_2.5 and PM10.

The current official advice from the UK Health Security Agency that the health effects of UFPs are “adequately covered” by the particulate matter air quality standards is simply outdated. Black carbon is a major contributor to climate change and poses a significant health risk as a universal carrier for a wide range of toxic chemicals that find their way into our bloodstreams. We need a comprehensive monitoring system and specific targets for UFPs and black carbon as the evidence of their severe health impacts grows.

However, it is not just what we pollute; it is where we pollute. The focus to date has largely been on outdoor pollution, yet we spend 80% of our time indoors—in our homes, offices and schools, or commuting between them. Indoor air pollution is poorly regulated, with no legally binding national standards, and its key sources, such as wood burning, are woefully under-addressed. Indoor air pollution is absent from the recently updated environmental improvement plan, and we lack a comprehensive estimate of the health burden from indoor air pollution. Poor housing conditions that create damp and mould are deadly, as we know from the tragic death of Awaab Ishak. Far too many children experience prolonged exposure to black mould, and that can kill.

In some cases, concentrations of certain pollutants indoors exceed those outdoors. For example, biological aerosols, carbon monoxide and many volatile organic compounds are often present at significantly higher concentrations indoors. NO₂ levels can spike in homes because of gas cookers and poor ventilation. Approximately 36 million people in the UK are exposed to dangerous indoor air pollution from gas hobs and ovens that exceeds limits of pollutants permitted outdoors.

Around half of all homes in the UK still use gas hobs for cooking, which for most people will be the biggest source of NO₂ pollution in their home. Yet gas cookers and hobs have been left out of home decarbonisation policy, and are totally ignored in the warm homes plan. If we want to protect people’s health from air pollution in the home and fully remove their reliance on fossil fuels, we need a policy pathway to transition to electric cooking in the home, such as the one developed by Global Action Plan and CLASP in partnership with experts and academics.

Pollutants such as radon gas are linked to 1,000 lung cancer deaths annually. In not only our homes but our workplaces, we are exposed to dangerous levels of pollution, some of us much more than others. As it stands, the Health and Safety Executive’s workplace exposure limit for inhalable dust, which includes PM10, is 10,000 micrograms per cubic metre for an eight-hour exposure. The WHO guidelines for PM₁₀ are 45 micrograms—not for an eight-hour exposure, but for a 24-hour exposure. The Health and Safety Executive limit is more than 650 times higher than the WHO guidelines.

This is a matter of not just public health, but inequality. Let us be honest: who lives on the busiest, most polluted streets? Who works in the dirtiest factories? Who lives in poor-quality housing? The answer is those who have no choice. They are trapped. Air pollution is an issue for this Labour Government because people who are poor are much more likely to die from it as they do not have the means of escape. It is a fundamental breach of their human right to breathe clean air.

Tackling air pollution is not just a DEFRA issue; it should span every aspect of our Government and every aspect of our lives, as air pollution does our homes, our schools, our travel and our work. We need a co-ordinated national action plan. At present, action on air pollution is structurally skewed towards urban NO₂ sites, because those are where the Government have faced the strongest legal pressure. That means that progress on other pollutants, as well as indoor air pollution, has stalled.

We must bring forward legislative proposals on clean air that unify and update existing laws in a new clean air Act. That was recommendation 34 of the joint report, “Improving Air Quality”, by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, the Environmental Audit Committee, the Health Committee and the Transport Committee. That report published nine years ago, in 2017. All those Committees made that recommendation—in 2017. If it had been taken on, imagine how much further on we could be in tackling this issue and how much more progress we could have made.

That recommendation stands today, in the year that marks the 70th anniversary of the very first Clean Air Act. Just as we have the Climate Change Act 2008, under which the Government produce and can be challenged on legally binding carbon budgets, we need a clean air Act under which the Government set out detailed, thorough and demonstrably achievable plans to bring down the levels of pollutants. With legally binding pollutant budgets, the Government could set a graduated timeline by which the UK would have to meet the WHO guidelines for a comprehensive list of pollutants, building on the 2030 targets and with limit values for perhaps 2035 and 2040.

The Clean Air Fund suggested to the Select Committees that our target for meeting WHO guideline levels for most pollutants should be 2040. I do not know whether that is the best target; I would like to see it brought forward. However, if we set that as the goal, just as we have set net zero by 2050 as the goal, we could at least be making progress towards it. Co-ordinating a national action plan on air pollution under a new clean air Act would ensure that air pollution is no longer relegated to being just a DEFRA issue. In reality, it affects, and is affected by, every single Government Department.

Mr Efford, there is so much more in my notes that I could say, but I am getting exhausted and I can see that others in the Chamber wish to contribute. I welcome the fact that the Minister has stepped in for the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy); she has spoken to me, so I know she was unable to be with us today for her own very good reasons, and I accept that. I am grateful to the Minister for stepping in for her today, but will he please go back to the Department with this message? I know he is a new Minister in the Department, but new Ministers come in with new ideas. They can come in and say to the boss, “For God’s sake, I’ve just been in Westminster Hall, and I can’t believe what it is that we are doing.” Will the Minister try to make the case for us and for the 43,000 people in our country whose lives are being cut short every year? Let us do something imaginative, something bold and something worth doing: let us pass a clean air Act.

[Clive Efford (in the Chair)]

I want to bring in the Front Benchers at 3.58 pm, so Members can work out for themselves that it is roughly seven minutes for each Back Bencher who is on their feet.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barry Gardiner]

It has been a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Efford. Thank you for giving me the nod earlier to curtail my remarks. It only goes to prove that we do not need to say everything: often, we think—at least I do—that we need to get everything in, but what was lovely about this debate was that I did not manage to get in everything that I wanted to say, but then all my hon. Friends did it for me.

I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who mentioned the £27 billion impact that this clean air Act could achieve, which would have come later in my speech. That is a huge impact on our economy. He talked about public awareness. The Royal College of Physicians did a poll with YouGov in which 95% of people did not know there was a link between air pollution and diabetes, and 85% of people did not know about the link between air pollution and stroke, heart disease or poor foetal health. The hon. Member was absolutely right to raise the importance of public awareness; it was an important contribution to the debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones) spoke with deep knowledge from her days as a shadow Minister and as a medical practitioner, as she told us. She stressed the social inequality that toxic air brings, and the need for a new clean air Act with a national framework. That is really important—that it is a national framework for appropriate support to be delivered to local authorities. The point that she stressed was reinforced by what the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), said about the need to do this and bring it together.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford and Bow (Uma Kumaran), who spoke of her work for the mayor and of the 40% reduction in nitrogen dioxide that has been achieved there. I am so pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes), who serves with me on the Environmental Audit Committee, spoke of the impacts on wildlife and nature, because that is absolutely fundamental. He also raised wood burners, but of course the Minister will know—if he does not, his officials will—that the DEFRA labelling standards, by DEFRA’s own lights, will reduce pollution by only 2%.

I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Manuela Perteghella), who spoke movingly about Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah. She mentioned the modal shift to public transport, and spoke about important things such as local solutions and school streets.

[Gordon McKee]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Barry Gardiner]

Can I give way in a winding-up speech?

[Clive Efford (in the Chair)]

Order. Obviously, this is meant to be a brief summing up by the hon. Gentleman—

[Barry Gardiner]

I just thought I had a wee bit of time.

[Clive Efford (in the Chair)]

There is certainly not scope for giving way in his couple of minutes for summing up.

[Barry Gardiner]

Okay. I will be very brief, and I will not give way.

I really enjoyed it when the shadow Minister was on the Environmental Audit Committee with us. He made a very valuable contribution then, but he lost his way when he went over to the Front Bench. How can he at the same time extol the £27 billion that will be brought into the economy and then say, “But actually we can’t afford to do it”? He talked about a 35% reduction in population exposure—great, but he had no baseline when he did that, so he did not know what he was reducing by 35%.

I thank the Minister very much for standing in. The Secretary of State

“may have failed, and be continuing to fail, to comply with relevant duties under the”

air quality standards regulations

“to ensure that such plans are drawn up and implemented.”

That is not me, but the Office for Environmental Protection in January.

What is not to like? Clean air, less congested, safer, quieter roads, more active travel, better public transport, better insulated, less mouldy homes that run on cheaper energy, healthier workplaces, less cost to the NHS and £27 billion to the economy—for God’s sake, let’s just do it.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered Government plans to tackle air pollution.

Thames Water

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, I think, for his support for my statement today, although it was slightly half-hearted. He is right to say that there have been serious pollution incidents in different water companies, but especially in the Thames, and that is of grave concern to the public and to Thames Water’s customers in particular. I point out to him that there are two types of special administration regime. An insolvency SAR is an insolvency process and is for the company directors to determine. A performance SAR would be triggered if a company was in serious breach of its statutory duties or if the company breaches an enforcement order in a way that is so serious that it is inappropriate for the company to retain its licence. The Government stand ready for all eventualities, including a SAR.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State confirm that, in the event of a special administration regime, any compensation would be based on appropriate value as set out in the case of Lithgow v. the UK, not on regulated capital value, as suggested by the shadow Secretary of State. For Thames Water, appropriate value would take account of the £23 billion in infrastructure repairs needed to meet condition P of its licence and comply with its statutory obligation, as well as the £13 billion of dividend and debt interest already paid to creditors. Appropriate value would therefore be nil. The Secretary of State said that Ofwat is responsible for taking the decision to modify the licence. I urge her to read section 12A(7) of the Water Industry Act 1991, because she has the power to overrule.

[Emma Reynolds]

I think there were a number of questions there. As I have said, there is obviously a difference between a special administration regime and nationalisation. My hon. Friend refers to regulatory capital value, and he is right to suggest that the price of any company is a complicated matter, but in the event of a special administration regime, the state would seek to recoup the investment it had made upon SAR exit. Nationalisation would be a different matter.

Environmental Protection and Biodiversity

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

The speech by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) was one of the finest on the environment that I have heard in this House for a long time. One day, the Government will see sense and he will become Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

I will cut most of what I wanted to say. The national security assessment, mentioned by my hon. Friend, says:

“Cascading risks of ecosystem degradation are likely to include geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict migration and increased inter-state competition for resources.”

Why is that not the subject of a great debate in Parliament? Yesterday, we had the Prime Minister’s vital statement on Iran. The whole House sat in a packed Chamber to discuss the US bombing of that evil regime and the security implications for the world. Yet we have our own national security assessment telling us that global ecosystem degradation and collapse is one of the most serious threats to UK national security, and we still have had no debate on it.

The collapse of biodiversity over my lifetime is not a matter of spreadsheets. It is felt in silent fields that were once singing meadows, in poisoned waters that were once shimmering streams, in children who have grown up in a depleted world without knowing how much has been lost, or how abnormal is the world they inhabit. The monitoring and enforcement system currently in place under environmental regulators lacks capacity and is chronically poor.

Take our water sector: of the 2,778 serious pollution incidents reported in 2024, officials downgraded 98% as “minor incidents”, yet only 496 were actually attended or inspected before being downgraded. There can be no doubt that the regulatory system is as rotten as the pipes the water companies have abandoned since 1989. I welcome the Red Lines for Nature campaign as far as it goes, but that is scarcely far enough when it talks of no further weakening of environmental protections and no funding cuts to environmental bodies.

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. Sorry, Mr Gardiner.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

I congratulate the mayor; he is a trailblazer both nationally and internationally through his climate and nature work. I know that Justin Beaver and his wife—I cannot remember her name, but it is a similarly cringeworthy pun—are living happily ever after. Actually, I do not know whether beavers live happily ever after; I think they are quite mean to each other. But they are definitely living happily in Ealing and providing those natural ecosystem services that we need—they are nature’s original ecosystem engineers.

In December, we published our 2025 environmental improvement plan, and over the next five years, it will accelerate progress towards those Environment Act targets. I gently say to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Dr Hudson), that some of those targets do not have a baseline. When I was talking to our chief scientific adviser yesterday, I asked how we will meet some of those species targets, and we will have a baseline developed by 2028-29. It is all very well legislating, but it is also about how things are measured. As a former Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, I am all about how we measure it, because that is how the Government are held to account. I want to hold to account myself or any future Minister, whoever it may be.

[Barry Gardiner]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mary Creagh]

I will just finish my point. Over the next five years, we will improve species abundance, reduce species extinction risk, and restore or create more than 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich land. We are also delivering our international commitment to protect 30% of the UK’s land and sea by 2030, which will help us to tackle the climate and nature crises while supporting growth.

We have heard a little about housebuilding versus infrastructure, and the system we inherited was too slow and too fragmented. Across the country, we have more than 164,000 homeless children living in temporary accommodation. In my city of Coventry alone, 2,000 children wake up to that reality every day—we have one of the highest rates of child homelessness outside London. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) also has about 800 homeless children in his constituency.

Those realities of nature loss and homeless children have a similar root cause: political short-termism and the ducking of big decisions on land use, investment and environmental recovery, leaving the nature and housing crises to deepen. Politics has failed both, and the nature restoration fund can unlock stored housing and infrastructure while still achieving enormous, tangible environment outcomes. We want more for infrastructure and more for nature, not less.

[Barry Gardiner]

rose—

[Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)]

rose—

River Habitats: Protection and Restoration

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

Nothing shapes a landscape more than a river. Nothing brings a landscape to life more than a river. If we ask ChatGPT, “What is a river?”, it will tell us:

“it is a natural stream of flowing water that moves downhill across land”—

and that tells us precisely why Members of Parliament should never use ChatGPT. A river is life—abundant life. Rivers are not just streams of water; they are amazing ecosystems. Globally, rivers are home to over 140,000 specialist freshwater species.

We think of water as being everywhere, but 99% of the water on this blue planet of ours is unusable by humans. Of the remaining 1%, which comprises freshwater, almost seven tenths is locked up in ice caps and glaciers, leaving just three tenths of 1% of the water on our planet in lakes, marshes and rivers. It is strange that something so vital to all life on our planet should be so scarce and so vulnerable.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Lloyd Hatton) on securing this debate to focus the House’s attention on how we can better protect and restore our precious riverine habitats. Others have set out the dire statistics. Sadly, it is true that 87% of rivers outside our national parks do not meet the minimum ecological standards set out in law. Even inside the supposed protection of our national parks, only four out of every 10 riverine systems meet those legal minimum standards.

With a new water Bill, the release of the land use framework and updates to the environmental land management schemes, 2026 is a particularly significant year for the health of our rivers. I welcome the publication of the water White Paper last week and the fact that it commits to implementing many of the recommendations of the Cunliffe review. Chief among those is a commitment to shift the focus of water companies towards pre-pipe solutions for water pollution. The Government say that they

“will ensure legislation, funding streams, and regulatory mechanisms”

to tackle the root causes of pollution, but those must be properly funded and backed up by a regime of thorough monitoring and swift penalty enforcement for infringements.

We politicians have made much of the failures of the water companies over the past few years and the totally disgraceful exploitation of bill payers to line shareholders’ pockets while companies fail to address pipe leakage, combined sewers and sewage outflows. Equally, I entirely support the outrage expressed by my hon. Friends the Members for South Dorset and for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) about Wessex Water and its motley leadership crew. However, they are not solely responsible; there is also the agriculture sector, whether that is chicken farms on the River Wye or eutrophication from nitrogen fertiliser run-off. The Government must drive the solutions to river habitat restoration.

ELMS is the key part of that. When it was first launched by the previous Government to replace the EU’s agricultural subsidies, the £2.4 billion was to be split into three equal funding pots of £800 million a year. Landscape recovery was one of those pots, but last month’s environmental improvement plan set out the new headline commitment of just £500 million for landscape recovery projects. Now, £500 million is a lot less than the £800 million initially promised, but wait: that £500 million is not a year, like the £800 million; it is £500 million over 20 years. That is a paltry £25 million a year, making a total mockery of the idea that the Government are taking landscape recovery seriously.

Will the Minister therefore publish the evidence and modelling showing how the combined ELMS offer will add up to deliver the Government’s environmental objectives and legal commitments on water? Can she direct me towards evidence that demonstrates that £500 million for landscape recovery is sufficient to deliver the Government’s environmental objectives and legal commitments, in terms of both our 30 by 30 commitments and our longer-term EIP and Environment Act 2021 targets?

Will the forthcoming water reform Bill go further than the water White Paper and put nature-based solutions at the core of tackling water pollution, including actions to prioritise and fund catchment-based measures at scale? Will the Government consider embedding an overarching commitment, within the Environment Act delivery plans, to create a national river corridor network that prioritises the restoration of river habitats, along the lines proposed by the Making Space for Water campaign? Finally, when will the Government deliver on their commitment to update the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 so that protected landscapes are given stronger powers and clear duties to drive nature recovery, including river habitat restoration?

The water Bill must embed the use of nature-based solutions in a way that has not happened so far. The water White Paper’s comments on exploring the use of green bonds to help investment in nature-based solutions is therefore welcome, but we cannot simply leave it to private investment to get us to where we need to be. The Government should empower the new super-regulator’s chief engineer to direct companies to prioritise and scale up nature-based solutions, mandating, wherever possible, a change from grey infrastructure to green. The ministerial directions to Ofwat and Natural England during the transition phase should pave the way for that—[Interruption.] Excuse me.

[Lloyd Hatton]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Barry Gardiner]

I would be very grateful to my hon. Friend if he intervened.

[Lloyd Hatton]

My hon. Friend is making an eloquent speech about the importance of cross-society working between Government, regulatory bodies and the stewards of our riverways and countryside. Does he agree that, unless we have that collaborative approach, we are unlikely to see the change we both so desperately want in order to restore the health of our riverways and allow nature recovery to take root in environments across the country?

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend— I did not know his constituency was the manufacturer of Benylin. It has certainly worked on my cough on this occasion, so I thank him very much.

Nature-based solutions are the cost-efficient, multi-benefit, long-term solution. They recognise that enabling nature to thrive is the best way to restore our rivers, our wetlands and our riparian habitats. I particularly want to single out the work of the West Cumbria Rivers Trust and the West Lakeland farmers group. With their work on the Rivers Irt and Bleng, they have shown that the shade offered by restored riparian woodland brings river temperatures down to safe levels for threatened native species such as Atlantic salmon and brown trout. That shows how the health of a river is about not simply what toxins are put into it, but the whole natural ecosystem and how it is managed. Riparian woodlands also stabilise riverbanks, reduce erosion, and control sediment and nutrient input from adjacent land. Looking at the whole ecosystem, not just the river itself, is so important.

I commend the Making Space for Water campaign, which provides an evidence-driven framework for river restoration, and I urge the Government to support it fully—indeed, I know they do. The Rivers Trust, National Trust, Woodland Trust and Beaver Trust are all calling for support to create a network of connected nature-rich river corridors that include river buffers, river wiggling, beaver reintroduction, which has been mentioned, and wetland restoration.

It has been my privilege to canoe down some of the most wonderful rivers in the world. My great desire, before I shuffle off this mortal coil, is to canoe down all the great rivers of the world. I have done the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Congo, but there are so many more to do. Rivers are an incredible joy in life; we really must understand them, promote them and restore them, and we must ensure that we give them health—because they give us life.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Thursday 18th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Solicitor General]

I am delighted that the Minister for Safeguarding, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), will today announce a landmark cross-Government strategy to halve violence against women and girls. This Government are introducing structural reforms as well as investment, including half a billion pounds-worth of support for victims—including victims of rape and serious sexual assault—so that we can support victims and deliver swifter justice.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

The Solicitor General is absolutely right to say that justice delayed is justice denied. My constituent Qesser Zuhrah has been on remand in prison for over a year. Two other constituents, Heba Muraisi and Lewie Chiaramello, have also been on remand, awaiting trial. None of the offences of which they are accused are offences of violence against the person. All three are now on hunger strike. Would it not make much more sense, be much more efficient for the criminal justice system and, quite honestly, be a humanitarian gesture to allow these three to be released, with tagging and appropriate monitoring, to face trial in due course?

Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

It has been almost 19 years since I first met Professor Alex Rogers at a two-day conference at Somerville College, Oxford, convened by the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment. The subject was international law on the high seas. The young postdoctoral fellow inspired us about the amazing biodiversity of our global ocean— I use the singular deliberately—but he also frustrated us by explaining that the international community lacked any legal framework to protect it.

The ocean accounts for 99% of our planet by volume and nearly two thirds by surface area. Every second breath we take is supplied to us by the ocean. Some 90% of the excess heat in the climate system has been absorbed by the ocean. The ocean is our greatest nature-based solution to climate change, and it is only by restoring the health of our marine ecosystems that we can deliver on our promise to meet the 30 by 30 target in the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework. The BBNJ treaty is the missing part of the jigsaw. That is why today’s debate is so important, and why the Bill is so important.

The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill is welcome and necessary, but we must recognise what the treaty is and what it is not. We must do so not in order to understate what the Bill does, but to understand clearly what action we must take following its passage. We will need secondary legislation to implement the treaty, and—dare I say this before the Budget statement?—it will require adequate funding. The treaty creates a framework for the establishment of protected areas on the high seas, but it does not, in and of itself, create those protected areas. It is therefore important that the Government start to develop proposals for high seas MPAs, especially in regions of the world where the UK is a party to the relevant regional fisheries management organisations.

I commend DEFRA for the work that it has already done in its stocktake of area-based management tools in areas beyond national jurisdiction. This is a really important baseline. I ask the Minister to set out in her response to the debate what further work is planned to identify, support and deliver specific MPAs. I am particularly keen to hear how she might develop the supplementary report that has already been prepared on the Sargasso sea. Will she confirm that this internationally significant ecosystem is a priority for the development of an MPA? It has now been 13 years since the Sargasso sea was recognised as an ecologically or biologically significant area, having met all seven EBSA criteria.

Our country’s history has left a legacy. That legacy is our exclusive economic zone, which is the fifth largest in the world, largely due to our remaining overseas territories, but that legacy brings responsibilities with it. I pay tribute to the work of the previous Conservative Administration, who expanded the blue belt programme to nominally protect more than 4 million sq km of ocean, from Anguilla in the Caribbean to Pitcairn in the Pacific ocean. In the last year, the programme took satellite imagery of more than 100 million sq km of UK overseas territory waters, providing crucial monitoring and surveillance to crack down on illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing activities. It is this very tangible knowledge and expertise that the UK should be at the forefront of delivering through the first BBNJ COP, which will take place within a year of the treaty taking force, from 17 January 2026.

I welcome the announcement, following the spending review, that the blue belt programme will receive increased funding for 2025-26. However, given that £2 million of this £8.6 million comes from official development assistance, which itself is being cut, I hope it will not seem churlish if I ask that the programme be ringfenced for the future.

For much of human history, we did not need the BBNJ treaty. The high seas were protected from the worst impacts of human activity by the simple reality that they were so far from land and too difficult to access. The dawn of the industrial age and motorised ocean-going vessels changed all that. Even species that lived their whole life hundreds or thousands of miles from land were no longer safe from human exploitation.

Nothing epitomises that sad reality more than the slaughter of the great whales. Industrialised whaling caused the deaths of nearly 3 million whales. Even the blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, had its numbers reduced by more than 90%. Whales’ size and the fact of spending most of their lives in inhospitable and hard-to-reach parts of the open ocean had kept them safe for millennia, but the introduction of new and more powerful technologies meant that even they became the victims of massive over-exploitation. Today, there are fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales left in our ocean. And why was it called the right whale? Ironically, it acquired its name because it was rich in blubber and baleen, it moved slowly and it floated after being killed, so it was easily towed in to be butchered—so it was deemed the “right” whale to hunt.

The history of these great mammals shows just why we now need the BBNJ. Biodiversity is no longer protected by its remoteness from land. Human greed will destroy it wherever it is found on our planet, unless we act decisively to regulate our most destructive activities. Today, although the international whaling ban is still ignored by a few countries, whales are no longer threatened by hunters, on the whole, but they are killed by ship strikes and they are entangled in fishing gear.

I emphasise the importance of the international ban not just because I believe that it is one of the most important conservation achievements of the 20th century, but because it was a great achievement of multilateralism —something that is not much in vogue at the moment. It shows how, by acting in concert with other nations, we can mobilise popular support around environmental objectives with both a clear ecological and a clear moral purpose, and we can achieve results. I regard it as an inspiration and a template for what we are now doing in the BBNJ.

The huge factory ships that once slaughtered whales have largely gone, but in their place, equally large factory ships now plunder the ocean as if it were a bottomless pit of profit. There are longliners setting fishing lines tens of kilometres long, each with up to 15,000 hooks, and huge purse seiners using nets that are 2 km long and 200 metres deep. Imagine a net that is twice as deep as Big Ben—the Elizabeth Tower—is tall, and which stretches out so far from this House of Commons that it takes in the whole of Buckingham Palace and most of its gardens. These fishing enterprises devastate the very populations that they are targeting. That is why we need this Bill.

Earlier this year, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science—the Government’s own marine experts—found that more than half of the UK’s key fishing quotas were set above the levels recommended by scientists. Overfishing has led to a 98% collapse in Celtic sea cod populations since 2012, with an 84% collapse in haddock, an 85% collapse in whiting and an 80% collapse in herring. Just two weeks ago, the scientific assessment of mackerel showed that the species has declined by 78% in the past 10 years. Despite continued advice from scientists to reduce catch quotas, that reduction has not happened.

While the UK has been a world leader with the blue belt programme, at home we continue to practise the opposite of what we preach, most notably through disastrous sustainable catch limits and quotas. Worse, we have driven out small fishing fleets, leaving our seas vulnerable to the monstrous mega-ships whose bottom-trawling scrapes away the existence of all life in their path. The inequitable quota allocation that was formalised in 1999 has resulted in more than 90% of the quota for mackerel, herring and blue whiting being held by just 20 companies, most of them not even British. Half of the English quota is held by Dutch, Icelandic and Spanish interests, more than half of Northern Ireland’s quota is held by just one trawler company, and 85% of Wales’s quota is held by Spanish companies.

The system has been rigged against the UK’s inshore fleet and its independent fishers. All of this was done by UK companies selling their quota abroad, but it is the awful consequence of the privatisation of a public good—our fisheries—and the UK taxpayer has received not a penny in benefit as a result. If the UK is truly to be a leader in the implementation of the BBNJ and to demand of other nations that they curb their rapacious plundering of the high seas, we must at the very least begin to stop the over-exploitation of our stocks at home. Our ability to make our voice heard internationally will sound hollow if we continue to ignore the science and set politically led quota allocations at home.

High seas fisheries often have unimaginably high levels of bycatch. This is particularly true of tuna fisheries, because tuna often school with other pelagic species, such as dolphins, manta rays and billfish. Indeed, many tuna species inhabit the same surface mixed layer of the ocean that is inhabited by vulnerable species such as silky sharks or turtles. It is estimated that 100 million sharks are caught every year—most as bycatch in high seas fisheries—so it is no wonder that the number of large open ocean sharks has declined by at least 70% in the past 50 years, almost entirely due to high seas fishing, where they are either targeted or caught as bycatch beyond the reach of national jurisdictions.

The leatherback turtle, the largest turtle in the world, is threatened with extinction because it is so often caught as bycatch by purse seine fleets of fishing vessels on the high seas. In the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of endangered species, published just last week, only one of the 22 species of albatross is not threatened with extinction through being caught as bycatch on hooks on longline fishing fleets in the open ocean.

Distance from land once provided protection for many species in the pre-industrial era, and the same can be said of the deep seas. Until recently, the deep ocean was out of reach for human activity. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Industrialised fishing fleets are now able to fish deeper and deeper, but many deep sea species are slow-growing. An orange roughy reaches sexual maturity only between the age of 20 and 30—much older than shallower water fish. These factors make deep sea species uniquely vulnerable to overfishing, and as many of the deepest waters are on the high seas, we need to ensure that the BBNJ agreement protects them and their habitat better.

Deep sea fishing, especially on seamounts, poses an existential risk to many deep-sea ecosystems, and bottom trawling, which is devastating in coastal and shallow seas, is arguably even more so on the high seas. Bottom trawlers tend to focus on seamounts, as these underwater mountains act as biodiversity hotspots in the open ocean. I seek the Minister’s assurance that, in considering the next steps after ratification, establishing protections around seamounts on the high seas will be one of the Government’s priorities. I ask for the same assurance in relation to the issue of deep seabed mining—I trust that the Government will continue to oppose any developments of this on the high seas.

The Bill before us is excellent. It will delight the now Professor Alex Rogers, who I suspect is not at his desk either in Oxford or at the National Oceanography Centre, where he is now the science director. Most probably, he is out somewhere in the Antarctic ocean in a submersible exploring the deep ocean, as he has been doing for more than 30 years. If he were to take a break from his mission to discover 100,000 new marine species in the deep ocean in this decade and send us a message, I suspect that it would emphasise the importance of getting this Bill enacted quickly. If we do not ratify the treaty at least 40 days before the first COP, the UK will not have a seat at the table; we will merely be a spectator as others set the ambition, or the lack of it, as they roll out the implementation of the treaty.

I congratulate the Minister on bringing the Bill to the House for its Second Reading, and trust that we are able to see the whole ratification process completed in time for the UK to make strong proposals at COP1 next year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that important intervention.

The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) raised the importance of mainstream media. We are grateful for her apology to my hon. Friend the Member for Romford for misinterpreting his drive about the importance of the Chagos islands.

It is disappointing that the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), who is no longer in his place, felt that not enough of my colleagues were in attendance, but those of us who were here have stayed here—Mr Speaker has commented on many an occasion that I can often be more than enough. The hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) pointed out how little we know about the oceans. That is an important point. It has often been said that space exploration gets lots of coverage and we talk about it very much—indeed, we are talking about manning the moon again, and maybe using it as a launch pad to go to Mars—yet so much of our own planet is completely unknown and unexplored.

That brings me to the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), who has a genuine interest and expertise. He gave a wide ranging and important speech and made an important point about the ocean being one of the biggest solutions to climate change. He is indeed right that the European economic zones are a legacy from the days when we owned half the world. One of the great achievements of the last Conservative Government is the work we did on the blue belt and on ensuring that we protected important marine environments. I do not know whether he will expand on this in later debates, but I noticed that he did not appear to be fully supportive of giving up on the fisheries from the EU with the EU reset. I wonder whether he may have things to add to that debate at another time, but perhaps now is not the time and place. However, he does make an important point that we can only do what we have to do as a country if we have the ability to do it in those waters.

The way that the hon. Member for Ely and East Cambridgeshire (Charlotte Cane) approached the subject of the Conservative party’s record in this area was a real pity. I am proud of some of the work we did on the blue belt, including working on this Bill, and as we have seen during the debate, there is wide support for it across the House.

The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) pointed out her genuine delight in the fact that this House has so many experts to speak on such an important issue. She echoed the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Romford on what will happen with the Chagos Bill. I do not want to go into great detail on that, because we are going to be here a long time on Monday evening debating that Bill, but I think she was driving at the fact that the assurances in the Chagos Bill do not go far enough in protecting the blue belt. I welcome her clarification that my party has raised the issue of the blue belt. She comes with expertise and deserves to be listened to when she is raising these important points.

The Minister opened the debate by talking about the urgency and importance of this moment. That is true. When my hon. Friend the Member for Romford spoke, he made some very serious points, not least about how we can ensure that the responsibilities that the United Kingdom has always taken towards marine fisheries do not get overridden if we cannot control our work entirely. He made the point that, in the scheme of things, we must ensure that we do not hand over the ability to other countries to stop us doing that work.

The reality is that—again, I will touch briefly on this because it is not part of the debate—the UN Security Council, set up for a reason, finds it hard to react to what is happening in Ukraine because Russia can override anything with its veto. We must ensure that we have the ability, as a Government and a country, to employ the laws and protections that we need to put in place. We will raise these areas in Committee, even if that is through probing amendments, because we want to ensure that the Bill can do exactly what it intends to do.

The reality of the Bill also comes into some of these situations that we see on the horizon. We know about the opening up of the Arctic, the melting of the sea ice and the opening of the north-east passage, which for many months—certainly weeks—of the year is fully navigable; the ice has gone away by that much. At the same time, we know that President Putin and the Russians have said that there are hydrocarbon resources in that ocean that they want to mine. That would be devastating for the fragile ecosystems that exist in that unique area of the world, which is almost completely untouched.

I had the pleasure back in May of being part of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly visit to Svalbard. The University Centre in Svalbard has dozens of countries, universities, academic institutions and hundreds of nationalities studying that region, climate change and the effect it has on the Arctic, and the effects on ecosystems. It is absolutely vital, as we see the geopolitical tensions forming in areas where they have not been before, that we have those strong protections in place.

[Barry Gardiner]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I was about to finish, but I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Barry Gardiner]

The right hon. Member is absolutely right to talk about the opening up of the Arctic and the geo-strategic threats that we face there. In that respect, would he support my earlier call that the Government should release the Joint Intelligence Committee’s report on the link between biodiversity, sustainability and national security?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I will not be drawn quite into that trap about releasing Joint Intelligence reports. However, the hon. Gentleman makes an important point, because there is no doubt that we are talking about sovereign security if we do not get this right, and that applies to all countries around the world. If we allow climate change and not the protection of valuable ecosystems, as has been described by many hon. and right hon. Members across the House, it is all of us who will suffer.

We have our concerns about some areas of the Bill. We will be tabling some amendments in Committee and probing those areas, but on the whole we hope that we can support the Bill, and it is important to carry on the work that our Government started.

Global Deforestation

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 30th April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government policies to limit global deforestation.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair for this debate, Mr Vickers. I know how important these matters are to your constituents in Brigg and Immingham, as they are to mine in Brent West.

It may seem strange to start a debate on policies to combat deforestation by speaking about rivers, but I want to pose a challenge to colleagues this morning, to see whether any of them can name the largest river on the planet. I will happily give way to anyone who thinks they can.

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

Is it the Plate?

[Barry Gardiner]

No, it is not the Plate. It is not the River Nile, and it is not the Amazon, but if anyone thought it was the Amazon, they are getting close. The river I am speaking of is actually, for the most part, invisible and airborne. Every day, 20 billion cubic metres of water—that is 20 billion metric tonnes of water—is pushed up into the atmosphere by the forests of the Amazon basin. That water does not stay in the atmosphere; it is not like evaporation from the oceans. It is generated by a unique combination of the organic forest interacting with the inorganic atmosphere. It is seeded with microscopic spores of pollen and fungi. These make the Amazonian clouds heavy, which means that all that water rains back down across the continent, replenishing the forest and irrigating a land mass that otherwise would probably be a desert. The Amazon river as we know it—all 4,000 miles of it—pours just 17 billion tonnes of water into the Atlantic ocean every day, so the invisible river of transpiration beats it by 3 billion tonnes a day. Imagine the power it takes to push 20 billion tonnes up into the atmosphere.

On Brazil’s border with Paraguay is the Itaipu dam, the second most powerful hydroelectric power station in the world after the Three Gorges dam in China. Itaipu’s capacity is 14 MW. That is about four and a half times the capacity of Hinkley Point C, if Hinkley ever manages to get built. We would need 5,000 Itaipu power stations to push the 20 billion tonnes of water up into the atmosphere that that forest does every single day.

Forests are amazing. The Amazon is not alone, of course. The second lung of our planet is the Congo basin in Africa, and while we are talking about famous dams, it is worth noting that the Aswan dam, some 2,000 miles away, relies for 85% of its power on water that the Congo forest transpiration has deposited into the Ethiopian highlands, coming down through the Nile to Aswan.

Forests are amazing, or, to be a little more scientific about it, forest ecosystems provide critical and diverse services to human society. They are a primary habitat for a wide range of species. They support biodiversity and conservation. Forest growth sequesters and stores carbon from the atmosphere. It contributes to regulation of the global carbon cycle and mitigates climate change. Healthy forests produce soil and conserve it. They stabilise stream flows and water run-off, preventing land degradation and desertification. Forests reduce the risks of natural disasters such as droughts, floods and landslides. They contribute to poverty eradication and to economic development by providing food, fibre, timber and other forest products for subsistence and income generation. They are a key genetic source for the pharmaceutical industry, contributing to global human health, and they even serve as sites of aesthetic, recreational and spiritual values in so many cultures.

Forests may be home to 80% of land species, but they are also vital to the survival of our own. They produce 40% of the oxygen we breathe, support 1.6 billion livelihoods and play a crucial role in holding back a climate disaster on a massive scale.

What about deforestation? That has been happening for a long time. In fact, since the end of the last ice age, the world has lost one third of all its forests—that is about 2 billion hectares, or two United States of Americas. But even though it has been happening for about 11,000 years, the rate of acceleration is rather recent and incredibly alarming. More than half of all the forest lost since the Pleistocene has gone in the last 125 years—1.1 billion hectares gone.

The drivers of deforestation are well known. Agricultural expansion remains the single largest cause, and according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, is responsible for 88% of global deforestation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that it contributes 11% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Similarly, in its report on deforestation in January last year, the Environmental Audit Committee identified what we might call the seven deadly sins of deforestation—the seven commodities that are driving 90% of global deforestation: beef and leather, soy, timber, palm oil, paper, rubber and cocoa.

However, the EAC was only picking up on the Global Resource Initiative taskforce’s recommendations from 2020. I commend the previous Conservative Government for establishing the GRI taskforce under the chairmanship of Sir Ian Cheshire as part of the 25-year environment plan. Sir Ian realised that if the market was to transition to sustainable commodity supply chains, it would need Government to adopt a strategic, co-ordinated approach to align and accelerate action.

The Government’s response to the taskforce’s 14 recommendations showed real understanding of the issues. They said:

“When nature’s free services fail, the poorest people suffer first and worst. Over a billion people rely directly on forests for their livelihoods—including indigenous peoples who look after around 80% of biodiversity.”

They continued:

“Protecting and restoring mangroves, forests, and peatlands could provide around a third of the most cost-effective climate change solutions we need, while supporting species and helping communities adapt to become more resilient. Shifting towards more sustainable forms of agriculture would not only protect the planet’s lungs, but it could add a further $2.3trn in productive growth to the global economy and create a further 200 million jobs by 2050…We know that there is no pathway to Net Zero emissions—or indeed the Sustainable Development Goals—that does not involve protecting and restoring nature on an unprecedented scale. But despite the huge contribution nature can make, it attracts just 3% of global climate finance.”

I suspect that the excellence of that written response is directly attributable to the noble Lord Goldsmith. But an excellence of understanding requires an excellence of follow-through, and that was less excellent.

It is true that in response to the taskforce’s recommendation to mobilise

“a global call for action to tackle deforestation and build sustainable commodity supply chains in the lead up to COP26”,

the Johnson Government did deliver a call to action—but a call to action and action are two different things. Yes, more than 100 global leaders signed up to the pledge to halt deforestation by 2030, and, yes, 30 financial institutions, managing nearly $9 trillion in assets between them, promised to disclose the

“deforestation risk and mitigation activities in their portfolios”

by 2023, and to eliminate harmful practices from their portfolios by 2025. But ’23 has come and gone. Today it is 2025, and we are still not eating the

“guilt free chocolate…that’s carbon not calorie guilt free”,

that Boris Johnson boasted about. We are nowhere near on track to halting forest loss by 2030.

One of the things that fuels people’s disillusionment with politics is that so much fanfare surrounds policy announcements, but so little of the hard graft of delivery gets done after the announcements have been made. The public understand that our diets and supply chains are deeply entwined with this issue. We may not see the bulldozers or the farmers who are eking out a living with slash and burn, but the products we consume every day, from chocolate bars to cooking oils, link us directly to the deforestation that we say we want to stop. If we told the public that we had just destroyed the entire New Forest, they would be horrified, yet that is the area of forest that our failure to enact the due diligence recommendations has eradicated since 2021. With that knowledge comes the understanding that we are complicit.

But there is only so much that people can do through their individual action and choices. That is why the taskforce’s recommendations about a due diligence obligation were so important. It said that the Government should “urgently” introduce

“a mandatory due diligence obligation for companies that place commodities and derived products that contribute to deforestation on the UK market”,

and that they should take action to ensure that similar principles are applied to the finance industry. That due diligence obligation would require companies to analyse the presence of environmental and human rights risks and impacts within their supply chains, take action to prevent or mitigate them, and publicly report on actions taken and planned. The financial sector would also be covered by a similar mandatory due diligence obligation, requiring it to exercise due diligence to ensure that its lending and investments do not fund deforestation.

The taskforce demanded action, and in the Environment Act 2021 it got a pale version of it. The Act introduced measures to prohibit UK businesses from using commodities grown on illegally deforested or occupied land. At the COP28 summit in Dubai in 2023, the UK delegation announced the list of commodities that could be included in environmental law and explained that businesses with more than £50 million in global annual turnover that use more than 500 metric tonnes of commodities a year would need to source from land they could prove was not illegally deforested.

Although well intentioned, by focusing on legality, the Act failed to hold out an absolute standard of whether the supply chain was in fact involved in deforestation. It ignored the fact that politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro would simply change their domestic legislation to grant legal status to what had previously been illegally deforested land, and so get round the Act’s intention.

The failure to impose adequate due diligence on companies, banks and finance houses and institutions has meant that, since the Glasgow declaration, UK banks have provided more than £1 billion to companies that present a forest risk. Last July, UK investors still held £1.4 billion-worth of assets and shares issued by these companies. The largest 50 of those investors make up 99% of the total UK forest-risk investments, yet 18 of them were actually signatories to the net zero asset managers initiative. Sadly, just eight have made any clear public commitment to eventually removing deforestation from their portfolios. That leaves 42 that should be ashamed of themselves.

Three names stand out, but for all the wrong reasons: HSBC, Barclays and Standard Chartered. Between them, those three banks have provided 97% of the £4.5 billion-worth of credit lines for forest-risk companies since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. It is not just in government where there is a gap between policy and action. In 2017, HSBC committed

“not to provide services to customers either directly or indirectly involved in deforestation”.

In fact, it has provided credit lines amounting to £1.9 billion to forest-risk companies such as JBS, the world’s largest meat company, which, despite a record of corruption and forest destruction, just last week was approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission to list on the New York stock exchange, giving it access to new sources of finance and capital markets. It is, of course, just a few months since JBS dropped its net zero by 2040 climate pledge, claiming, “Well, it was never a formal commitment.”

The Environment Act was an important marker that the UK takes seriously its role in the global supply chain, and that it wants to lead the way and manage the responsibility that comes with it. But a marker only stands in place of action for so long. Four years later, it has become an ironic sign of failure.

UK financial institutions continue to bankroll deforestation. Trade agreements lack meaningful environmental safeguards, and indigenous land defenders face daily violence and intimidation. Unsustainable logging fuels forest destruction; weak governance and corruption continue; and infrastructure projects and mining operations further encroach on forested lands, fragmenting ecosystems and threatening indigenous territories. Land tenure insecurity, poor enforcement and a lack of economic alternatives all conspire to make deforestation a systemic problem.

There can be no one silver bullet but, my goodness, there must be a desire to start. With COP30 this November being hosted in Brazil, there is a compelling case to move from intention to delivery. First, the Minister knows only too well that we must urgently expand the due diligence regime to cover all forest-risk commodities, whether legal or illegal, under producer country law. We should introduce criminal liability for companies knowingly profiting from deforestation, and require UK banks and investors to disclose their deforestation risk.

There will need to be a phased timeline, but my question is not when it will be done but why it has not been done already. If we understand where the blockage in the machinery is, perhaps we can help apply a bit of pressure to assist the Minister in getting it done. I know she will be keen to do so. Some say the blockage is in the Cabinet Office, some say Northern Ireland and the Windsor framework. I would point out to the Minister and her ministerial colleagues that the strong due diligence measures of the European deforestation legislation are due to come into force in December this year. It would be best if the regulation of the whole of the UK were consonant with that. Will the Minister set out a clear timeline for the full implementation of schedule 17 to the Environment Act?

Secondly, the UK must champion a trade model that values environmental protection and human rights. As the UK is in advanced trade negotiations with the EU and India, and to a lesser extent with the USA, what discussions has the Minister had with her colleagues in the Department for Business and Trade about the need to embed deforestation safeguards and environmental standards in all future trade agreements? I immodestly recommend to her the blueprint set out in the Labour party’s green paper of 2018, entitled, “Just Trading: What would a just trading system look like?”, when I was shadow Trade Secretary.

Thirdly, the tropical forests forever facility—TFFF—championed by Brazil, will inevitably assume centre stage as we progress towards Belém and COP30. By using arbitrage between the cost of long-dated Government bonds and loans and the returns of a more diversified portfolio, the TFFF fund seeks to provide a long-term payment for conservation and restoration of tropical forests. The facility would help to address a significant market failure, placing a value to the ecosystem services that those forests provide, and returning that to the forest communities that curate them.

Will the Minister tell us how the UK will be involved in the TFFF? What conversations has she had with colleagues in international development? How will the fund prioritise and reward the role of indigenous and traditional knowledge partners in forest stewardship? She knows that indigenous peoples need specific legal protections, recognition and direct funding. Forests thrive when indigenous rights are upheld. Our aid and climate finance must prioritise those locally led solutions. That is fundamental, not just for nature and climate mitigation, but for justice, for addressing poverty and for human rights.

The establishment at the convention on biological diversity COP16 meeting in Rome of the Cali fund, which commits 50% of its resources to indigenous communities, was an overdue recognition of their role as custodians of forests and the nature and biodiversity that make them. I ask the Minister to update the House about the steps our Government are taking to help operationalise that fund, and to ensure that its resources reach those local communities quickly and without loss. Can she tell us whether and how indigenous communities are represented on the fund’s board of management, and how the Cali fund will work alongside the TFFF? Is the UK planning to invest in the TFFF, and now with the 40% cut in official development assistance from 0.5% to just 0.3% of GNI, what will happen to the £11.6 billion that was ringfenced for climate in ICF3, and the £3 billion within that that was further ringfenced for nature?

After years of declining indicators, we now have an opportunity to reverse the trend of deforestation. I am proud of the direction that our Labour Government have taken since July, from creating a special envoy for nature to committing to deliver three new national forests. Domestically, the Government are investing up to £400 million in tree planting and peatland restoration over 2024-25 and 2025-26. However, if we are to lead globally we must also act globally, and that includes how we mobilise capital. Public funding is crucial, but on its own it is not enough. We need to unlock private finance to support conservation and sustainable development, especially in regions safeguarding the planet’s remaining great forests, and that means scaling up tools such as green bonds, blended finance and debt-for-nature swaps. The City of London can and should be a hub for that kind of innovation, not only for climate finance, but for nature-positive finance.

We sometimes hear the environment and the economy pitted against each other, as if nature is a subset of the economy. Of course the truth is the other way round, because without nature and the ecosystem services that it provides, there is no economy, and the most vital part of that nature is our amazing forests.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) on securing this debate on such an important issue, and on taking us to the Amazon forest and its atmospheric river. That was a brilliantly poetic way to talk about the aerial rivers that forests produce, and an important way of explaining ecosystem services. We sometimes talk about the forest as if it is an economic asset, which of course it is, but we are not very good at the poetry.

We know that trees bring us peace, shade and joy, as well as all the other stuff. It is important that we talk about the emotional and spiritual connections that trees bring to people and to places, and the threats that they face from deforestation, whether legal or illegal. I very much take my hon. Friend’s point about illegal versus legal deforestation, which is an observation that I also noted about the previous Government’s approach.

This nation is afforesting, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones) stated. We are planting a new national forest, the Western forest, which the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young) mentioned. Indeed, I was delighted to go there and plant a crab apple tree as part of the agroforestry part of that. The forest will deliver flood prevention services and, critically, link up ancient woodland, which has become fragmented in the landscape. It will stretch from the Forest of Dean right down to the Mendip hills—a truly massive undertaking.

We are here to talk about deforestation, which is an issue that touches on many different Departments, including the Departments for Business and Trade, and for Energy Security and Net Zero—I have a DESNZ official with me in the Box, as well as officials from DEFRA. That three Ministers are responsible for international forestry—those from FCDO, DESNZ and myself—shows the complexity around this issue, and explains why I have about 25 different notes in my hand. I do have a prepared speech, which I will try to deliver, but I will also try to answer questions as we go along. If Members feel that we are getting to five to 11 and they have not had satisfaction, I ask them to intervene on me, but I will try to get through my notes.

First, tackling the climate and nature crises is central to the UK’s national interest, for both security and prosperity. Our forests are a strategic asset, and protecting them is fundamental to achieving the Government’s vision for a world free from poverty on a liveable planet. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West said, nature is the monopoly provider of everything that we need to exist. It is not a subsection of the economy; the economy is a subsection of nature.

More than 1 billion people rely on forests for sustenance and their livelihoods. We have heard, in the many passionate and brilliant speeches from colleagues, that forests provide food, energy, water and medicines worldwide and play a vital role in global economic resilience. They host most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, including the slightly terrifying giant otters from the Amazon that we can see at Chester zoo. I have never seen anything like them—they are utterly terrifying animals, like something out of “Jurassic Park”, the size of a Great Dane and quite terrifying for those of us who are used to the more manageable British otter.

Forests contain rare and endangered species and, of course, plants that are essential for modern medicines. Almost everything we have, whether aspirin from willow or heart medicines from foxglove digitalis, has come from ancient herbal and medical practices. The biodiversity COP’s Cali fund is an important statement and an important way for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and beauty companies—who profit from those discoveries and now have access to the data sequenced internationally —to make a contribution to protecting and preserving the future discoveries of medicine and the beauty and cosmetics industry—because their future innovations are literally on fire.

I am pleased that UK officials led the establishment of the Cali fund, as hon. Members know. We will officially launch it at London Climate Action Week in June. I hope we will be able to say more about that in due course. We are also hosting the conference of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services—IPBES, the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for nature—in England in February 2026, and we hope to make an official announcement about that. Next year will be a very big year for nature.

We know that forests are major carbon sinks: 662 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 15 years of human-made emissions, are stored in them. They cool our planet, providing up to 1° of cooling at mid latitudes. Hon. Members have made brilliant speeches, so they do not need to hear from me about the problems of deforestation, but time is running out. Deforestation is pushing critical biomes such as the Amazon towards potentially catastrophic tipping points, from which they will not recover. We are seeing annual Canadian wildfires, and even wildfires in our own country, with peat fires. All that is putting a massive strain on forest ecosystems.

I am just as concerned about the collapse of the Russian and Canadian boreal forests, to use another slightly jargonistic word; those northern forests are as important to our ecosystem services and our wildlife as the tropical mega-forests. It is essential that we protect, restore and manage forests in a cost-effective way to tackle climate change while supporting livelihoods. Often, the forest is seen as less economically valuable than other land uses such as cash crops, agriculture, infrastructure and urban development. I remember, on a visit to the eastern Congo in 2008, seeing the Batwa forest people living in a tea plantation. Their forests had been cut down as a cash crop, and they were living among those tea bushes because of the disastrous security situation obtaining in South Kivu at that time.

To halt deforestation, forested communities and countries need money to conserve forests. It must become more positive to conserve them than to clear them. That means three changes: an economic shift that values forests and rewards sustainable practices, governance reforms that support effective forest stewardship and tackle illegal activities, and market transformation here in this country to grow green enterprises, protect nature and enhance local livelihoods—not only livelihoods in forested countries, but changing the way that we as consumers purchase. We have heard about consumer demand leading to 35,000 hectares of forest loss overseas.

We import 45% of our food and 80% of our timber; we are the second largest importer in the world after China. That creates resilience problems for the future. Many sectors are underpinned by forest goods and services. A loss of forest will disrupt UK supply chains and businesses, pushing up prices for consumers and undermining our national resilience.

On the point my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West made about the financial industry, I had a meeting yesterday with Sacha Sadan of the Financial Conduct Authority—not specifically on deforestation, but about the sustainability branding of investment managers. I am pleased to say that the FCA, as the regulator, is taking strong and firm action to clean up greenwashing. If they are called sustainability funds, they have to comply with a series of rules and recommendations. That is why many funds have pivoted to “stewardship”, because they can no longer use “sustainability”. I say that for us all to understand what is happening in the financial context.

We are setting significant steps to protect and expand our domestic forests. Our key achievements include a legally binding target to increase tree cover to 16.5% of England’s land area by 2050, and planting more than 21,000 hectares of woodland across the UK between 2023 and 2024, including 5,530 hectares in England, the highest rate in a generation. When we see this year’s figures, they will be even higher. That is good news on the England tree-planting target. There has been some fallaway in Scotland and a slight change in the mix.

I take on the board the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones) to increase our conifer planting, because that is the productive forest we need. I am going to visit a factory constructing timber housing in Kenilworth and Southam on Friday; I am coming to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) for a three-day visit, because it is so difficult to get to, and to see the brilliant timber production that is going on there, as well as enjoy a midsummer night sky. I have much to do and look forward to.

Internationally, the previous Government persuaded partners to commit to halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. We want a just transition for forest-positive economies. That means securing development and the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and local communities, while tackling climate change and protecting nature. Through overseas development assistance, we support stronger forest governments.

I have been asked about ICF. We continue to support Brazil in its development. To begin with the TFFF, we are also supporting Brazil in its development. We cannot commit to an investment while work is still being done to develop the mechanism, but we will, of course, consider it in due course. Forests are a pillar of the UK-Brazil partnership, and we will support Brazilians ambitions for COP30, including through co-chairing the forest and climate leaders’ partnership, which I believe is covered by my colleague, the Minister for climate change.

On UK-China relations, we continue to work with key partners, including Indonesia and China, to support the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change global stocktake objective to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. On TFFF, we are providing technical assistance. We are involved in all the technical workstreams on environmental criteria, financial mechanisms and governance. From what I have seen, that seems to be similar to the Cali mechanism, which tries to crowd in funding from the private sector as well as public finance, because there is a limit to how much public finance can support this.

[Barry Gardiner]

If the Minister could clarify whether indigenous communities are represented on the board of the Cali fund, that would be really helpful.

[Mary Creagh]

I am afraid I have absolutely no idea; I will have to write to my hon. Friend. That is genuinely not my area.

We welcome the positive conclusions to the COP in Rome. The key outcome is the launch of the Cali fund, which will drive benefit sharing from the use of DSI—digital sequence information—on genetic resources, allowing companies using this information to direct funds towards indigenous people and local communities who safeguard biodiversity. At the biodiversity COP, for the first time we created the process by which IPLCs now have a seat at the table, which is very important.

My hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd) mentioned the UK-Indonesia joint energy transition. As I have said, we will continue to work with key partners, including Indonesia and China, on the stocktake that supports the objective of halting and reversing forest loss by 2030. Future ICF is subject to business planning this year and to the spending review from next year. I am meeting the Minister for International Development this afternoon to discuss our approach on that; this is all work that is happening at the moment.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a particularly important region, but it has received less attention and less climate finance than the Amazon and south-east Asia. We are committed to working with others to secure the next phase of support, which will be announced at COP30, for the forests, people and biodiversity of the Congo basin countries. That will sit alongside the pledge for IPLCs’ land tenure. We know that communities are better able to protect ecosystems when their land rights are secure, and that areas managed by IPLCs are better protected than any other areas. The Foreign Secretary has already announced that the UK will lead on this IPLC land tenure pledge.

[Mary Creagh]

I am coming to that. Legislation complements the measures I have described. The UK timber regs aim to eliminate demand for illegally harvested timber, and the EU’s timber regulation continues to apply, unamended, in Northern Ireland. Both regs require operators that place timber on the market to implement due diligence and review their supply chains, and a recent review of the UK timber regulations demonstrated that they have led to a reduction of illegal timber in UK supply chains.

Over the past 12 years, our delivery partner, the Office for Product Safety and Standards—which, again, is part of the Department for Business and Trade, so not my area—has reviewed the due diligence systems of more than 600 businesses and issued 100 warning letters and 100 notices of remedial action. Recent notable enforcement by OPSS includes the prosecution of luxury yacht maker Sunseeker International, which received a fine of £360,000 plus prosecution costs in relation to illegal imports of timber from Myanmar and Africa.

At home, the Government must also abide by the rules we have made. The Government’s timber procurement policy requires all Government procurers and suppliers to prove the legality and sustainability of timber. We will only accept sustainable timber, and we have a wider approach to encouraging legal and sustainable forestry domestically and internationally. We are currently reviewing the timber procurement policy, with the aim of securing better recognition of British certification schemes such as Grown in Britain and FLEGT—forest law enforcement governance and trade—licensed timber.

We are at a critical moment for forests, and the international community must go further and faster to deliver our ambition. We need to tackle nature loss and enhance planetary stewardship. We are working to unlock more finance for nature, promote deforestation-free agriculture and reform global supply chains. Supporting indigenous rights and access to finance are also vital, and require targeted efforts across all tropical forest basins.

COP30 in Brazil, home to the world’s largest rainforest, will be a pivotal moment. We are working closely with Brazil and other partners to ensure that forests and nature take centre stage. We are partnering with Guyana as co-chairs of the forest and climate leaders’ partnership to build a valuable forum for driving wider ambition.

Agricultural expansion, particularly for a few key commodities, is the primary driver of illegal deforestation worldwide. As colleagues have said, the Environment Act made provision for the Government to bring forward legislation to exclude commodities. We recognise the urgency of the task to ensure that UK consumption of those commodities—

[Barry Gardiner]

Before the Minister runs down the clock, I just want to say that it is clear from Members across the House that we will not accept any further delay to the due diligence regulations, and that they must be placed not just—

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).

Water (Special Measures) Bill [Lords]

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

Ofwat has said that it believes that the right level of debt should be 60%, yet it has taken no action against those companies whose level of debt has risen to as much as 80%. Can the Minister assure us that under the Bill, Ofwat will not only have the power to act when companies’ debt levels are too high, but will use it?

[Emma Hardy]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I know how much he cares about this and many environmental issues. Amendment (a) refers only to the reporting arrangements for levels of debt rather than specifying the levels of debt that would be acceptable. It is about increased transparency, whereas his points fall more into the remit of the water commission, which is looking at all those issues as part of its wider work. I stress that the amendment is just about how information is reported and transparency.

The information must be made available in a prominent place on the water company’s website, ensuring accessibility for members of the public. Subsection (4) of proposed new section 35E also provides Ofwat with the power to determine the information that a water company must publish, as well as the ability to review requirements on financial reporting from time to time. That addition will ensure that reporting requirements keep pace with changes in the expectations and needs of bill payers. I would like to be clear, however, that the Government expect the power to be used to ensure that reporting requirements remain relevant, rather than to dilute or diminish the ambition of reporting requirements.

Financial reporting will also continue to be underpinned by pre-existing statutory obligations and licence conditions. In line with other requirements brought forward in clause 1, this new requirement will commence on Royal Assent. These amendments will help to rebuild public trust in the sector and provide the public with the levels of openness and transparency that they deserve.

I turn to the other Government amendment, which relates to the requirement for Ofwat’s rules to be confirmed by way of affirmative statutory instrument, as reintroduced by the motion tabled by Lord Blencathra in the other place. While the Government recognise that there were calls in the other place for increased parliamentary oversight of Ofwat’s rules, we have significant concerns that a requirement for Ofwat’s rules to be finalised through an affirmative statutory instrument would delay the rules being implemented.

We are clear that Ofwat’s rules should be brought forward as soon as possible. That will ensure swift and meaningful improvements in the performance and culture of water companies as they begin to deliver on the largest investment package in the history of the water sector. Requiring the rules to be confirmed by statutory instrument would risk delay to the rules coming into force. We also maintain concerns that the Lords amendments would compromise the independence of Ofwat, because they would require Ofwat’s rules to be confirmed through legislation prepared by the Government. That independence must be protected if we are to ensure investor confidence in the water sector.

The Government are confident that the Bill already provides for sufficient scrutiny of Ofwat’s rules as it is required to conduct a statutory consultation on the rules before they are finalised. Separately, Ofwat has already concluded an initial policy consultation on a draft of the rules and how they will apply. It received 11,700 responses on the rules through its consultation, which it is actively considering. As such, the Government are seeking to reverse the requirement and to introduce provisions in its place that will require Ofwat to provide its first set of rules in draft to the Secretary of State at least seven days before they are issued. I hope that hon. Members across the House will support that change, which will ensure that Ofwat’s rules are put into place as soon as possible following Royal Assent, in addition to the Government’s amendments to introduce new financial reporting requirements.

Avian Influenza

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for her important questions. First, I reassure her and the House that the individual in question is, in my understanding, making a full recovery, but obviously we want to ensure that no one is put at undue risk. The advice is clear: the only people at risk are those who are in very close proximity. People should follow the guidance and advice.

On mitigating sector supply, my understanding is there is sufficient supply within the system. Although the right hon. Member is absolutely right to raise the point that it was a significant and large producer that was affected, we are confident that supply is secure. On working with the devolved Administrations, my officials are in regular contact, as I said in my opening statement. The situation is being constantly monitored.

The right hon. Member will be familiar with the compensation arrangements because they are the same as when she and her colleagues were in government. They are designed to control the disease, but of course they are also absolutely important to secure cash flow for farmers.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

My recollection from previous bouts of avian influenza is that there were serious problems with delays and with compensation, because farmers who were trying to do a preventive cull of their birds had to wait for an inspection to take place, and if that inspection had not taken place, compensation would not be given. Therefore, some birds died from avian influenza that should have been culled, and some birds did not die but the compensation was not paid. I would be grateful if the Minister updated the House on exactly what the new arrangements for compensation will be.

[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He will recall the terrible outbreak a few years ago when exactly those questions were raised and, as the shadow Minister, I asked similar questions at the time. The compensation arrangements were changed by the previous Government in a beneficial way, and I am absolutely confident at the moment that the delays we saw before are not happening. But he raises an important point: anyone who has a suspicion of an outbreak should report it as soon as possible, and they should not be concerned that they will suffer detriment from so doing.

Environmental Protection

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I will make some progress, and I will perhaps come back to the hon. Gentleman later.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and commend the excellent work that she did on this subject as Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. I think another Select Committee then looked at this subject in 2022, and the Government at that stage said that they would implement a deposit return scheme. Does my hon. Friend accept that over 200,000 people responded to the consultation that was then run, and 84% of respondents said that they agreed with implementing such a scheme?

[Mary Creagh]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. This move has overwhelming support from the general public, who are sick to death and fed up of seeing their streets and rivers blighted by litter. Slovakia implemented a scheme in 2022, and that country now has a 92% return rate; it is right up there with countries that have had schemes for decades. We know that we can do the same in the UK; just look at how behaviour has changed since the introduction of charges for carrier bags in shops. That led to a rapid change in people’s habits. Imagine where we would be if the previous Government had focused on recycling plastic bottles, rather than smuggling champagne bottles in suitcases into Downing Street.

The deposit return scheme is one of the three strands of our packaging reforms, along with extended producer responsibility for packaging and the simpler recycling programme for England. We estimate that, together, the packaging reforms will support 21,000 new green jobs in our nations and regions, and stimulate more than £10 billion of investment in recycling capability over the next decade. CPRE, the countryside charity, estimates that the deposit return scheme will deliver 4,000 of those new jobs. It is also estimated that the reforms will save over 46 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2035, valued at more than £10 billion in carbon benefits.

The deposit return scheme will end the epidemic of litter on our streets and restore pride in our communities. It will improve the countryside, preserve our wildlife and protect our beaches and marine environment. I have spoken to several fantastic organisations that were part of the huge campaign that my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) mentioned, including the Marine Conservation Society, the Aylesbury Wombles and, in my constituency, Destination Ball Hill. There are so many people spending so many volunteer hours dealing with this pollution problem, and doing their best to keep their area looking nice.

The brilliant charity Keep Britain Tidy estimates that littered drinks bottles and cans along our roadsides are killing millions of our native mammals every year. If we drive along the M1 motorway, we see buzzards and birds of prey circling, and that is because our national highways have become nature corridors. They are a very important habitat for RES—rare and endangered species—and much-loved small mammals such as shrews, bank voles and wood mice, but we are finding more and more of them becoming trapped in plastic bottles carelessly discarded along our highways. We must act to protect these precious creatures. We want less Mr Toad and more Moley.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. We have been engaging extensively with the Association of Convenience Stores because it is imperative that they do not miss out or else we will end up with a scheme run by large retailers for large retailers. It is in the design of the scheme that the deposit management organisation which this instrument sets up must have representatives from large and small retailers on its board to ensure that the full voice is heard. In fact I am about to tell my hon. Friend and the House about the details of this.

A person who is supplied with drink in a container that is in scope of this instrument pays a deposit which can be redeemed when it is returned for recycling. The design is informed by well-established international examples and extensive industry engagement over many years—about seven years. Industry partners have shared their experiences delivering these schemes across the world and the scheme will be centrally managed by an industry-led, not-for-profit organisation: the deposit management organisation.

The instrument applies to England and Northern Ireland. My officials have worked closely with the Scottish Government, who are amending their existing legislation so that we can launch compatible schemes simultaneously across England, Northern Ireland and Scotland in 2027. The Welsh Government have withdrawn from the four-nation DRS approach; however, we are keen to remain in close working partnership with them as they make decisions regarding a DRS in Wales. We are keen to keep the door open, to provide as much interoperability across the UK as possible.

I acknowledge the work of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which draws this instrument to the special attention of the House on the grounds that it is politically or legally important and gives rise to issues of public policy likely to be of interest to the House.

The instrument sets out the scope of the scheme and places obligations on drinks producers, importers and retailers. Producers of drinks in plastic and metal containers will be obligated to label products and charge a deposit when supplying the drink into England and Northern Ireland. They must also pay the deposit to the deposit management organisation along with the producer fees to fund the scheme.

Retailers across England and Northern Ireland will be obligated to participate in the scheme by charging a deposit on plastic and metal drinks containers, taking the containers back and refunding the deposit. They are also required to pass the collected containers to the deposit management organisation for recycling and to display information to consumers so that they understand how the scheme works. Those obligations on producers and retailers across England and Northern Ireland will start from launch in October 2027. To administer the scheme, the instrument requires the appointment of a deposit management organisation. The instrument allows for certain provisions to come into force on the day after it is made that are necessary for the appointment of the deposit management organisation and the establishment of the administrative arrangements.

[Barry Gardiner]

The Minister has been most generous in giving way to Members. She mentioned that the scheme will apply to plastic and metal drinks containers. What discussions has she had, or what information have her officials gathered, about the potential for manufacturers to switch their containers to glass and the impact that might have on use of resource and climate change?

[Mary Creagh]

There has been talk of that, and I met with the glass industry recently, but so far we have seen no evidence of manufacturers switching. Manufacturers must be part of the deposit management organisation, so they will pay under either EPR—extended producer responsibility for packaging—or DRS. Glass has been excluded from scope on the basis of extensive consultation.

The DMO will be appointed in April 2025. It will be obligated to: meet collection targets; pay return point operators for collecting containers; recycle the collected containers; and pay national enforcement authorities. The instrument provides powers for the deposit management organisation to set deposit levels, prescribe labelling, interact with other schemes, set producer fees, calculate handling fees for return points and exempt some retailers from hosting a return point.

Under the “polluter pays” principle, it is the responsibility of businesses to bear the costs of managing the packaging they place on the market. Through specific return point exemptions based on store size, proximity to another return point and suitable premises grounds, this instrument will also protect small businesses across England and Northern Ireland, which we recognise are vital to our high streets and communities.

Further information has come to light since the question asked by the hon. Member for Strangford. I am in contact with Minister Muir as we progress, but Northern Ireland has given DEFRA responsibility for delivering the scheme, so this statutory instrument has Northern Ireland’s consent. I hope that answers his question.

Finally, the instrument makes provision for monitoring and enforcement activities by the Environment Agency and by local authority trading standards officers to ensure obligated businesses and the deposit management organisation are compliant. This deposit return scheme will improve recycling rates and provide better quality material for recycling. [Interruption.] Was I asked to give way? I do give way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the Government’s position. Let me place on record the substantial achievements of the last Conservative Government on recycling. This Government do not like the facts, but let me give them some. In 2010, 25,000 tonnes of waste were sent to landfill. By 2022, the last year for which figures are available, that was just 13,000 tonnes—a reduction of almost half. The Conservatives introduced new, straightforward and simpler—Labour will welcome simpler—guidance on recycling by creating standardised rules on what can be recycled to deliver that substantial achievement.

Some love to talk, while others quietly act and get on with the job. In my constituency in 2023, Conservative-run West Sussex county council delivered a recycling rate of 53%. For the same period, the Green and Labour-led Brighton and Hove council, just next door, delivered a rate of only 30%. Who would have thought that socialists would struggle to clean up their own mess? Thanks to Conservatives, local authorities are now required to collect a consistent set of recyclable waste and to ensure frequent collections, underpinning a new recycling economy. Let us be clear: Labour-run local authorities deliver the lowest levels of recycling in this country, so the Government could fix this problem without coming to this place to pass legislation.

[Barry Gardiner]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Griffith]

Communities in Conservative-controlled local authorities are three times less likely to be subjected to fly-tipping than in Labour-run areas. The Conservatives have a proud record of recycling, and the hon. Member clearly wishes to applaud that, so I give way.

[Barry Gardiner]

I applaud any movement in the right direction. The hon. Gentleman compares local authorities, but does he accept that many Labour local authorities have high-rise and tenement buildings, where collection is infinitely more difficult than in leafy suburbs with individual detached houses?

[Andrew Griffith]

The hon. Gentleman knows of what he speaks, and of course I accept that there is wonderful variation across our whole country. That is precisely why I chose two neighbouring authorities. What could be easier than collecting from dense urban areas, compared with the challenges and costs of having to collect waste across far-flung rural communities such as those I represent? Perhaps later we will hear the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) explain exactly why that council, which drove itself into the ground, has such a poor record on recycling.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barry Gardiner]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Griffith]

I give way to the hon. Gentleman, who will hopefully speak about the aggressive nature of these proposals.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am slightly puzzled. In the Conservative Government’s response to the previous Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report, they committed to putting these measures in place by 2025. Why have the Conservatives changed their minds so dramatically? Given that it appears that the hon. Gentleman would reject these measures, how does he propose to achieve the target set under section 1 of the Environment Act 2021, which his Government brought forward and for which I commend them, which is supposed to reduce the number of kilograms of residual waste per capita by half, from 577 kg to 287 kg?

[Andrew Griffith]

When the facts change, we change our minds. The Conservative party is under new leadership and we will be unafraid to speak up for those in the economy who create the growth we so desperately need. If the hon. Member would like me to do so, I would be very happy once again to go through the impact of Labour’s Budget on business—that growth-destroying, jobs-killing, economy-sapping Budget. I would be very happy to go through that all night long, but I will make some progress.

The cost of this measure is highly regressive and the Conservatives are not alone in voicing concerns. Industry bodies, including the Association of Convenience Stores, UKHospitality and the British Soft Drinks Association, have raised objections to the cost of the scheme and its implementation. But it is not just business: the Scottish Government have also raised substantial concerns. More tellingly, the Minister’s Labour colleagues in Wales have announced that they will pursue their own separate scheme. How astonishing—nice to see two Labour-led Governments working so very well together! I was not entirely clear what the situation was in respect of Northern Ireland, notwithstanding the Minister’s attempt to clarify that, but she certainly conceded in her remarks from the Dispatch Box that the schemes will not be interoperable on day one. Well, 16 million people live within 50 miles of the border. For businesses, it is unconscionable that they are compelled to deliver multiple schemes in multiple areas without any guarantee or clarity about interoperability.

I read in the weekend papers that all Ministers received a note instructing them to cease anti-growth measures. The Minister and her colleagues will have an abundance of anti-growth measures to pick from. In fact, I cannot think of a single measure or policy that this Government have so far put forward that is at all pro-growth. In respect of this particular measure, it seems as if her Department did not read that memo, or if they did, they simply did not understand what it meant. The country needs a Government who focus on doing their key functions well rather than rolling out more red tape, however well intentioned.

As the official Opposition, it is our responsibility to speak up for businesses and our constituents when the Government get it wrong. The Conservative party is under new management and we are unafraid to champion those who take risks, generate wealth and create the prosperity to pay for the public services that those on the Labour Benches are so keen on funding so well. The United Kingdom has a strong and proud record on recycling and the environment, building on work undertaken by the previous Conservative Government, but circumstances have changed or have been changed by this Government, and when the facts change, so too must our policies. Businesses are currently being subjected to a barrage of anti-growth measures and policies, destroying investment, jobs and growth. This policy is, I am afraid, the wrong scheme at the wrong time. For that reason, those on the Conservative Benches will be opposing today’s statutory instrument.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

I commend the previous Government for much of the work they did. I commend the fact that they put in place the Environment Act 2021. I do so because it is really important that we adopt a bipartisan approach to these matters. When we are talking about the environment and climate change, yes in this Chamber we can have some political point scoring occasionally, but it is much more important that we create the bipartisan platform that means successive Governments can build and work from it.

I commend the Minister for introducing the measure so quickly. It is long overdue, and it will make an appreciable difference. I would love to know by exactly how many kilograms of residual waste per capita it will reduce our output, but given that each of us is producing 577 kg of residual waste every year, which is over half a tonne—and some of that is toxic waste—it is very important that we get on with this job. Just a month ago we saw a report from the Office for Environmental Protection which showed very clearly that we are not on track to meet the targets set in the Environment Act 2021 by 2042. Although I commend the Government for the action that they are taking now and the urgency with which they have got on with this measure, I want to quote what the report said under the heading “Progress in the reporting period”, which was 2023-24:

“The scale and pace of actions does not align with the challenge. While flagship waste management policies have been developed, their introduction has been delayed and they largely focus on end-of-pipe action. There is a lack of action focused on circular economy.”

I am delighted that the Minister is introducing this measure and I commend the Government for doing so, but we need even more, and we need it more quickly.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.