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

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the new independent body to replace the EU’s environmental enforcement mechanisms will have power to initiate legal action should they fail to meet its commitments; and what tools it will have to ensure that the UK complies with environmental goals after Brexit.

On 10 May we published a consultation on a new, independent, statutory body to hold Government to account on environmental standards once we have left the EU, and on a new statutory policy statement on environmental principles to apply once we have left. This will support our long term ambition to be the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than that in which we inherited it.

In order to ensure we have robust systems in place to facilitate the successful implementation of environmental law, we currently propose that the new body should have three main functions: providing independent scrutiny and advice; responding to complaints about Government’s delivery of environmental law; and enforcing Government’s delivery of environmental law where necessary.

The proposed enforcement function would involve giving the new body a remit and powers to be able to take action against Government in cases where it considers that environmental law is not being properly applied. We believe that advisory notices should be the main form of enforcement, and should always be applied in the first instance before any further steps are considered. Beyond such advisory notices, there may be a case to introduce other enforcement mechanisms and the Government is seeking views on this through the consultation.