I thank my noble friend Lord Lindsay for beginning this Committee. I note the support for his amendment from my noble friends Lord Cormack, Lord Caithness and Lady McIntosh, the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Young, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Ritchie and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. In fact, a great many other speakers supported it as well and I will not continue to list them.
The amendments that my noble friend has tabled are, in effect, a summary of the Bill in its totality—it could not be a clearer summary, in a sense. The Environment Bill, as a manifesto commitment, sets a new and ambitious domestic framework for environmental governance. A resilient environment is essential for our own health and that of our planet. We recognise that the environment, unlike many areas of law where there are more clearly defined legal and economic interests, is often unowned. Environmental harms, including climate change, are necessarily, by their nature, more diffusely spread. That is why we have designed the Bill to create a comprehensive system of environmental governance that will put the environment at the heart of our policy-making and ensure clear and strong accountability.
The overall objective of the Bill is to deliver on the goals of the 25-year environment plan, and the environmental governance framework has been designed with the plan’s key objectives of environmental protection and the improvement of the natural environment at the forefront.
First, both targets and environmental improvement plans have the objective of delivering significant improvements to the natural environment—Clauses 6
and 7 being the obvious places for that. That objective provides certainty on the direction of travel; it will also drive long-lasting significant improvement in the natural environment. Clause 7 creates an ongoing requirement for the Government to have a
“plan for significantly improving the natural environment”.
The Government will be required to review that plan regularly and set out whether further policies are needed to improve the natural environment and achieve those targets.
Secondly, Clause 16 provides an objective for the environmental principles. It requires that the policy statement on environmental principles produced by the Secretary of State must contribute to the “improvement of environmental protection”, as well as “sustainable development”. When making policy, Ministers of the Crown must have due regard to the policy statement. These objectives will be integral to policy-making across government. This is the first time that Ministers across government will be legally obliged to consider the environmental principles in policy development wherever it impacts the environment.
Lastly, the OEP has the principal objective of contributing to environmental protection and the improvement of the natural environment. The OEP is able to undertake enforcement action against a public body’s breach of an environmental law that protects the natural environment, or to provide advice on a proposed change to an environmental law that improves the natural environment.
In summary, the Bill as a whole is designed to deliver the overarching ambition of our 25-year environment plan, which in many respects is reflected in the amendments tabled by my noble friend. The measures have been designed to legally work together with common statutory objectives to deliver the improvement and protection of the natural environment and to deliver the sustainable use of resources.
Before I come to the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I want to address some of the points made by noble Lords. My noble friends Lord Caithness and Lady McIntosh raised their concerns about the lack of clarity for the business community, particularly farmers, in relation to the big transition that is happening. There is no doubt that it is a massive and revolutionary transition. It is the first transformation of its kind and something that needs to happen all over the world if we are going to have any hope at all of closing the gap between where we are and where we need to be on biodiversity. I can say that officials in my department have been working closely, as have colleagues at ministerial level, with farmers’ organisations, from the very largest—the National Farmers’ Union—to smaller organisations, to ensure that the sector is very much walking in lockstep with us as we develop the proposals and as those proposals morph into an actual policy.
The principle is pretty clear: we are moving to a system where the things that are not currently recognised by the market but which are good will be paid for through subsidies. As noble Lords might expect, things that are paid for by the market, such as food, will therefore not be on that list. It is a straightforward
principle, although of course the effects will differ from farm to farm, and that is the beauty of solutions when it comes to the natural environment.
I should add that farmers, as a whole, are among the most entrepreneurial and dynamic people in this country. They are for ever adapting to circumstance and acting in response to market signals. The discussions, exchanges and engagement that we have been having for months now with the farming community suggest, and give me a great deal of confidence, that they will respond extraordinarily well to these new signals that the Government are going to be providing.
My noble friend Lord Cormack described with great sadness the decline of butterflies in his garden, and I know that that situation is duplicated all around the country and indeed the world. I say that we can still find room for optimism; if you give nature half a chance, it comes back extraordinarily quickly. I have had the privilege of seeing for myself, in areas that have been intensively farmed not particularly carefully for decades but have then been treated in a different manner—with organic farming or even, in some cases, rewilding—that nature returns extraordinarily quickly. That is what the Bill will do: it will give nature not just half a chance but a chance.
My noble friend Lord Moynihan talked about the critical importance of access to nature. If he does not mind, I will not go into detail on that issue because we will be discussing and debating it when we come to the fifth group of amendments—that might even be today, if we make some progress.
The noble Lord, Lord Young, discussed the comparisons between where we heading with the Bill and what we are leaving with the EU. We repeat our commitment, as we have many times, that the environment will be at least as well protected after this transition as it was under EU treaties. Many noble Lords will agree that those protections greatly exceed those provided by EU treaties, and that too is reflected in the Bill in numerous ways.
Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, raised the Dasgupta review, which I am pleased about; it needs to be raised at every opportunity, because it is so important. I have had endless discussions with counterparts around the world as part of our attempts to raise ambitions for COP and the CBD, and the Dasgupta review was part of almost every one of those conversations. It is globally recognised for its importance but, despite its length and sometimes complicated language, it has a fairly straightforward message: that our economies and our livelihoods need to be reconciled with the natural world, and everything we have comes from nature. I part company with the noble Baroness on her thoughts on the Government’s response. The response is not exhaustive, but was never the end of the story; it is the beginning. We must do an enormous amount to take heed of and internalise the message of the Dasgupta review in the way we govern. That applies to this Government, and successive Governments. The response was an enthusiastic nod to the principles with examples of the kinds of things we are doing, but without going into the level of detail which a Government would find difficult at this point.
Moving to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for which I thank him, I can reassure him that the Government absolutely are taking climate change and environmental concern seriously. There is an absolute recognition, both at a domestic level and in everything we are doing internationally, that the two are inextricably linked; as he said, you cannot tackle one without the other. A good climate COP will have good implications for nature, and a good CBD will have good implications for climate. We absolutely recognise the extent of the crisis which he and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, relayed to us. There is no doubt that the facts on the ground tell us that we are in crisis territory, and perhaps we will part company here with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. We debated the issue some time ago of whether or not we face a biodiversity crisis, and I will not repeat all the arguments I used, but she is right to be alert to the risk that any crisis can be used to justify authoritarianism and poor policy. It is therefore important that we get policy right but that does not take away from the facts, which paint a bleak picture of continued decline.
We have set out concrete steps towards reaching net zero by 2050, through the PM’s 10-point plan, which brought together £12 billion of government investment. The energy White Paper and industrial decarbonisation strategy will continue to demonstrate global leadership on climate change, and we will bring forward further bold proposals, such as the net-zero strategy, which will be published before COP 26. Again, nature is at the heart—although it is clearly not the only part—of our response to the net-zero challenge here in the UK, and is a critical part of our message globally. We have successfully changed the debate on the role of nature in tackling climate change internationally, such that most countries when they talk about their response to climate change talk about nature, in a way which they simply did not a year ago. It remains the case, however, that of all international climate finance, only 2.5% to 3% is spent on nature-based solutions. That really should be closer to half. That too is something which we hope to shift through our negotiations and discussions with other countries, and through our own example, where we have not only doubled our international climate finance but committed that nearly a third of it will be spent on nature-based solutions.
Of course, the Bill itself is a clear demonstration of our action to tackle the biodiversity crisis, including biodiversity net gain, local nature recovery strategies, and due diligence for forest risk commodities. I hope that this provides reassurance that the amendments, which have provoked a very valuable debate, are nevertheless not needed. I thank noble Lords for their contributions and suggest that the amendment be withdrawn.
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