Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-14
Topic: Environment
Sheila Masters (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who always raises such interesting points. I agree with him that it is rather odd that his clause stand part debate has been grouped with my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s amendment. I will concentrate my remarks on my noble friend’s amendment, to which I have added my name. I have not hitherto taken part on this Bill, though I have sat in a few times and read quite a bit of the record of proceedings in Hansard, but my noble friend’s Amendment 297A has tempted me in from the sidelines Bills such as this one, which are full of good intent and focused on issues that some are passionate about, often get very little scrutiny of their costs and the consequences of actions taken under them. At Second Reading there was very little focus on that. There were just two shining exceptions. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, emphasised the need for government policies to be prioritised and to ensure that actions taken under the Bill did not, for example, harm economic growth policies. The noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, drew attention to the fact that actions taken in the interests of the environment involve trade-offs and that there was a lacuna in the Bill in respect of considering economic impacts when setting targets under it. I know that my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has several times raised the issue of the costs and benefits of the Bill in Committee, and I am glad that she has tabled Amendment 297A to ensure that regulations made under the Bill’s powers are rigorously assessed My noble friend’s amendment gives the Government the benefit of the doubt for the first regulations laid under what will be an Act, and I know that my noble friend the Minister has said several times during Committee that full impact statements will be prepared for each of those regulations. The trouble is that impact statements are narrowly defined by the Cabinet Office and suffer from many defects. They commonly understate costs or do not cast the net wide enough to capture all of them. The analysis is typically based on identified persons or bodies, or groups of them, and hence fails to capture whole-system impacts, such as macroeconomic impacts. Impact statements often overstate the benefits or take a macro-level calculation of benefit and use that to frank all the micro-level actions, as the impact statement for this Bill does in respect of a global assessment of potential biodiversity gain. They are also generally optimistic about things such as new opportunities for businesses to innovate. The huge impact statement issued for this Bill suffers from most of these defects and is not decision-useful for assessing its impact I very much doubt that the final impact statements for individual regulations will be much better because of these structural deficiencies. The virtue of my noble friend’s amendment is that she allows a five-year period—capable of extension—to gain evidence of the impact of measures. In addition, the amendment calls for a broad evaluation, not a narrow Cabinet Office-style impact assessment, before any regulations are allowed to continue, and it includes the economic impact—on economic growth—and social impact. Concentrating on these would go a long way to remedy the usual deficiencies of impact statements My noble friend’s amendment is a modest and proportionate attempt to get some rigour into the parliamentary scrutiny of environmental policy-making, and I hope it will find favour with my noble friend the Minister.