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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans he has to bring forward legislative proposals to make ecocide a crime.

This Government is committed to improving the environment in the UK and internationally. Environmental laws and other safeguards are in place and monitored by effective regulators and tiers of Government.

The Environment Bill will create a new, independent statutory body (the Office for Environmental Protection) with the principal objective of contributing to environmental protection and the improvement of the natural environment.

The Government is also consulting on a new law designed to prevent forests and other important natural areas from being converted illegally into agricultural land. If approved, this will require a relatively small number of larger businesses to ensure that the ‘forest risk’ commodities they use – commodities that can cause wide-scale deforestation – have been produced legally.