Civil Procedure (Amendment) Rules 2017 — House of Lords, 2017-09-13
Topic: Environment
Robin Teverson (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I have the privilege of chairing your Lordships’ EU Sub-Committee on Energy and Environment. It is in that capacity that I make my comments Earlier this year, we took evidence for and produced a report called Brexit: Environment and Climate Change. We went through the normal areas of devolution and the complexity of bringing environmental legislation back into the UK, our influence on climate change policy, policy stability and a lack of EIB investment. What took all our members by surprise was that many of our witnesses felt the most important issue was that the Government’s environmental action could be called to account—by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice—at present and that would disappear following Brexit. They also felt there were difficulties in replacing that authority. I quote our witness, Maria Lee, professor of law at UCL, who said of environmental legislation: "It sounds so far-fetched to say that we might replace the Commission, but we have taken the Commission’s role in supervising compliance completely for granted for 40 years, and that will go. We should think about whether it is feasible to replace that with a parliamentary body, a government body or some other sort of public body that will supervise government and agency compliance with the law. It sounds ambitious in the current climate, but we have had this for 40 years and we are about to lose it. It is important" At the end of our evidence sessions, and when we wrote the report, we made two recommendations of the whole committee: "The importance of the role of the EU institutions in ensuring effective enforcement of environmental protection and standards, underpinned as it is by the power to take infraction proceedings against the United Kingdom or against any other Member State, cannot be over-stated. The Government’s assurances that future Governments will, in effect, be able to regulate themselves, along with Ministers’ apparent confusion between political accountability to Parliament and judicial oversight, are worryingly complacent" That was the conclusion of the committee. It went on to say: "The evidence we have heard strongly suggests that an effective and independent domestic enforcement mechanism will be necessary, in order to fill the vacuum", left by the Commission, "in ensuring the compliance of the Government and public authorities with environmental obligations. Such enforcement will need to be underpinned by effective judicial oversight, and we note the concerns of witnesses that existing domestic judicial review procedures may be inadequate and costly" That was before these measures came in The Government responded by saying: "The UK has always had a strong legal framework for environmental protections, and will continue to have a system of judicial review by UK judges after EU Exit. The judicial review mechanism enables any interested party"— any interested party— "to challenge the decisions of the Government of the day by taking action through the domestic courts" The committee felt that judicial review was a very weak substitute for current mechanisms, but it would certainly be disappointed if that judicial review procedure, which it sees as the right way forward post Brexit, has been weakened to this very considerable degree.