My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for her comments and questions. Having seen the document, my heart sank at its many pages, but in fact the framework is 50 pages and there are a lot of schedules. It is inevitably complex, but we want to get it right. It is important that it is part of a tidying-up exercise. I have no doubt that your Lordships and the other place will be considering other elements of the environment and environmental permitting in the years ahead. The noble Baroness is absolutely right. We want—as would any Government—the environment to be left in a better condition than the one we find it in now. That is a laudable aim, and we are working to that end with not only proposals in the 25-year plan for the environment, but many other aspects which perhaps we will debate at other stages in proceedings in this House.
On the question of the United Kingdom leaving the EU and the subject of environmental permitting, the first thing to say is that, as the Prime Minister has said, while we remain a member of the EU, the Government will continue to implement and apply EU legislation. Of course, the outcome of the negotiations with the EU will determine what arrangements apply in relation to EU legislation in future, once we have left the EU. The Government’s intention is to repatriate all the environmental permitting regulations into British law, as the noble Baroness said, via the proposed great repeal Bill. The environmental permitting regime will, as I say, remain under regular review, with proposed amendments to the rules expected between now and when we leave the EU. I see this very much as an evolving situation as we seek to work on the environment.
As I hope I have outlined, these are part of a continuum of updating the rules on permitting and putting them into a single piece of legislation—indeed, making them easier to find and to understand. We have made some changes which I believe improve the rules on the crushing of florescent lamps, and which will help us to protect the environment better, and a change has been made to reinstate the position for the Canal & River Trust and others with a statutory responsibility for dredging. As the noble Baroness has acknowledged absolutely, it is important that they will be exempt from the requirement to hold a permit for dredging because that is precisely part of their remit.
We wish these regulations to be part of our intention to leave the environment in a better condition than the one that we found. I commend these regulations to the House.