Environment Protection: Crime

(asked on 14th October 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how serious breaches of environmental law will be enforced in the time period between the end of the transition period and the Office for Environmental Protection becoming legally operational.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 22nd October 2020

Members of the public will be able to submit complaints about alleged failures of public authorities to comply with environmental law from the start of next year to Defra’s Interim Environmental Governance Secretariat, which will be passed to the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) once established. The OEP will then be able to use its legal powers to investigate complaints reported to the interim arrangements from 1 January 2021, and could take enforcement action against serious failures if necessary. It will therefore be possible for the OEP to hold public authorities to account in relation to any failures alleged to have occurred after the end of the transition period.

The role of the interim arrangements is to provide this continuity, not take legal decisions. These will then be matters for the OEP to determine, as an independent legal entity, in accordance with its legal powers.

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