Brexit and Foreign Affairs — House of Commons, 2017-06-26
Topic: Environment
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I congratulate all those who have used today’s debate to make their maiden speeches. It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley), and I look forward to finding out even more about how the bin collections are going in the months to come There has been much discussion about the eight Brexit Bills in the Queen’s Speech, but a Bill on environmental protection is conspicuous by its absence. Given the significance of the EU’s role in environmental protection, I think that that is a particularly grave omission on the part of the Government’s Brexit team. Effective and robust environmental protection relies on well-funded and well-staffed institutions to monitor compliance with environmental law. It also needs powerful regulators and courts to ensure that breaches of the law are challenged and the law is enforced. For the past 40 years, that system of enforcement has been grounded in the legislation and institutions of the EU, notably the Commission and the European Court of Justice. That structure has meant that the UK Government can be held to account for their actions, and there are countless examples of that taking place. For example, since 1981, the Commission has received more than 200 complaints about the UK under the nature directives, thus protecting wildlife and habitats across the country. Let us be under no illusion: it is precisely the threat of fines from Brussels that has finally concentrated the Government’s mind on acting on issues such as air pollution. Domestic legislation simply did not go far enough to do that It is therefore rather astonishing that, beyond a few offhand comments from Ministers, we currently have no details of how this important system of checks and safeguards for the natural environment will be replaced. We do not yet know if the Government intend to rely on existing regulators to fill the gap, but if they do, let us remember that those agencies have seen their budgets slashed over recent years and their capacity to hold the Government to account has been greatly diminished When it comes to the repeal Bill, let us be clear that the process will be a lot more complicated than simply cutting and pasting a whole set of EU legislation into UK law. When the former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs appeared before the Environmental Audit Committee, she acknowledged that fully one third of environmental legislation would be extremely hard to transfer in that way. Moreover, once that material is transferred, it will become effectively unenforceable— so-called zombie legislation—due to an absence of monitoring and enforcement. Without the Commission and the European Court of Justice, we will not have the necessary legal architecture. People say, "Don’t worry, we’ll rely on the UK courts instead," but we must recognise that the threshold to access UK courts for judicial review is very high and involves considerable expense. That system will simply not be as effective as the current one Let us also be honest about the fact that a small but vocal part of the right wing sees Brexit as an opportunity for mass deregulation. A fight is coming, and it feels particularly necessary given that the new Environment Secretary has previously suggested that we scrap vital EU environmental protections and described one of the centrepieces of that legislation, the habitats directive, as "absurd". The right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) also has a track record that involves voting against measures to halt climate change and attempting to wipe the subject from the education curriculum. I hope I will be forgiven for not having much confidence that the environment will be safe in his hands post-Brexit That is why the amendment that I have tabled to the address asks for an environmental protection Act. Such an Act would cut through the political ideology on the right and the left that all too often sidelines the environment, and would instead require a long-term evidence-based approach. Crucially, it would do so via primary legislation, thereby guaranteeing a proper degree of parliamentary scrutiny and oversight. No one voted on 23 June last year to scrap our environmental legislation, yet there is a real risk of that happening unless we enshrine it in a new environmental protection Act.