Before I start, I want to send condolences and thoughts on behalf of Plymouth to Sir David Amess’s family, his staff and his community. We have seen our fair share of tragedy over the summer in Plymouth, and Plymouth stands with Southend at this time.
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We are in the middle of a climate and ecological crisis, and we need bolder and more urgent action if we are to address it. When this Bill was first debated in the Commons—which seems a very long time ago, because it was—I described it as bland, a bit beige, “a bit meh”, as I put it. It does make some difference; there are some good bits in there; but it does not rise to the scale of the crisis that we are facing, and it needs to. It smacks of the dreary managerialism and the pedestrian pace that have overtaken DEFRA in recent years. I want to encourage the Ministers to find more ambition and more urgency with the measures they are introducing, which is why I want to focus now on the hard-won gains from the Lords on bees, water, habitats and trees.
I bloody love bees, Mr Deputy Speaker. That was picked up by the Evening Standard when I said it at a fringe event during the Labour party conference, and I hope it is a sentiment shared by many other Members on both sides of the House. Because we all love bees, I think it worth noting that we need proper measures to protect our pollinators. I should declare an interest at this point: my family keep bees on their farm in Cornwall.
Since 1900 Britain has lost 13 out of 35 native bee species, and we risk losing more if we do not take action to protect them, in particular, from bee-killing and bee-harming pesticides. They are essential to the future of our planet, to pollinating our crops and to the rich tapestry of biodiversity that we have as a nation, but the loss of bees has become symbolic of the decline in nature in our country. Lords amendment 43 inserted a new clause to regulate pesticides, and proposed that the use of pesticides should be assessed on how they impact our pollinators. It is amazing that the impact of pesticides on pollinators is not already assessed before approvals are given. This is a simple amendment that could have a positive effect on bees, and I am disappointed that the Government do not see the value in it.
When the Bill was last here, Labour tabled an amendment to ban bee-killing pesticides, but sadly the Government whipped Tory MPs to vote against it, and I suspect that that will happen again today. The chemical approval system that Ministers seek to protect is far too secretive and not transparent enough. If it is to be robustly defended by a Government three-line whip, I urge Ministers to look more carefully at how it can be made more transparent, clearer and more environmentally friendly. I know that there is concern about this issue on the Tory Back Benches, and I encourage those Members to continue to put pressure on their Front Bench. We need to ensure that our farmers are able to support and protect their crops, but we need to protect our pollinators at the same time.
Let me now turn to a matter that shames our nation: the state of our rivers. Not one English river is in a healthy condition, not one meets good chemical standards, and only 14% meet good ecological standards. The state of our waterways has not improved since 2016, five years ago. England has the worst river quality in Europe. The World Wide Fund for Nature reports that rivers in England are “used as open sewers”, and that targets for 75% of them to be healthy by 2027 are “very unlikely” to be met. More recent research has found that the rate of unlawful discharge of sewage into waterways could be up to 10 times higher than the rate suggested by the Environment Agency’s prosecutions.
It will be impossible to have clean rivers with the pedestrian approach that Ministers are currently taking, which is why the cross-party concerns that we have heard during this debate and throughout the passage of the Bill should be taken more seriously. However, it is not only Ministers who are to blame for the poor state of our rivers; we must hold water companies responsible too. Research by The Guardian has found that raw sewage was discharged into rivers across England and Wales 200,000 times in 2019, for a total duration of 1.5 million hours. I think we would all have sympathy with the Minister’s argument that in extremis, in the event of severe weather, raw sewage discharges into rivers should be permissible, but we need to ensure that that happens only in extreme circumstances. This is a daily, regular, continual occurrence, and it is unacceptable.