Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether the Environmental Land Management Local Nature Recovery scheme will support (a) floodplain restoration and (b) other measures on productive land.
Answered by Baroness Prentis of Banbury
This is a devolved matter and the information provided therefore relates to England only.
The Local Nature Recovery scheme will pay for locally targeted actions to make space for nature in the farmed landscape and the wider countryside, alongside food production. This could include, for example, managing and creating habitats, adding trees to fields, or restoring peat, wetland areas or flood plains in appropriate areas of a farm. We set out more information on the themes Local Nature Recovery will initially pay for in the January 2022 Policy Paper on Local Nature Recovery.
We will publish more details on the full list of land management activities the scheme will pay for later this year.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what the average response time was for his Department to respond to an enquiry from an MP once an enquiry had been received by the MP (a) hotline and (b) account management team in (a) 2019, (b) 2020 and (c) 2021.
Answered by Baroness Prentis of Banbury
The Government attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of correspondence from MPs, either directly or on behalf of their constituents.
Defra does not have an MP hotline. The average response time for enquiries received by the Rural Payments Agency’s MP hotline was 37 days for 2019, 22 days for 2020 and 17 days for 2021.
Defra does not have an account management team, and the Defra correspondence team does not hold information on the average response time to enquiries from MPs, as correspondence performance is monitored by the percentage of correspondence responded to within the target response time set by the Department.
Data on the timeliness of responses to correspondence from MPs and Peers for 2019 and 2020 is published on Gov.uk here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-on-responses-to-correspondence-from-mps-and-peers. Data for 2021 will be published by the Cabinet Office in due course.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what discussions he has had with representatives from the brewing and beer industries on the potential impact of an industrial carbon dioxide shortage on that sector in the coming months.
Answered by Baroness Prentis of Banbury
We are aware of the issues faced by the brewing and beer industry due to the shortage and are working closely with them to provide support and advice. We have had extensive meetings with representatives from food and drink sectors, and those conversations are continuing to further explore impacts and discuss potential solutions.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to ensure that harmful chemical products are not used in disposable and reusable period products.
Answered by Rebecca Pow
Period products are regulated under the General Product Safety Regulations 2005 which require that only safe products are placed on the market. Producers are responsible for the safety of the products they place on the market and have to provide relevant information and adequate warnings so that that the risks can be assessed.
Both the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety and the Swedish Chemical Agency have carried out studies that have considered the safety of these products. Both studies concluded that the risks were low.
If there were significant concerns about the presence of hazardous substances in a product, then there are measures in the UK REACH legislation, such as a UK REACH restriction, that could be taken to address this. However, we would need to be convinced that there was clear evidence before considering such action.