Environment Bill

Report (2nd Day)

My Lords, before we begin proceedings today, I think we can all agree that we did not make as much progress as we had hoped on Monday. May I make a few points about the rules of engagement for Report in the hope that we can make things a little swifter today? I remind the House that on Report, apart from the mover of an amendment, who may reply to the debate on the amendment, Members should not speak more than once to an amendment, save with the leave of the House to explain some material point in their speech. Only the mover of an amendment may speak after the Minister. Other Members speaking after the Minister may do so only to ask short questions of elucidation. I should be very grateful if we could all adhere to these rules.

Clause 5: Environmental targets: reporting duties

Amendment 11

11: Clause 5, page 4, line 5, at end insert— “(d) interim targets are met.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment places a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to meet any interim targets they set.

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 11 and will speak to Amendment 14 in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman of Ullock and Lady Parminter, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. Both amendments are designed to ensure that the important environmental plans and targets established by the Bill drive strong and effective action. The Bill introduces an important suite of legally binding, long-term environmental improvement targets and provides for these to be guided by five-year interim milestones. Unlike those in the Climate Change Act, these interim milestones are not binding requirements.

In Committee, the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, Lady Hayman, Lady Young of Old Scone and Lady Parminter, the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, made a persuasive case for these interim targets to be statutory. They cited evidence—lists of non-statutory targets missed, such as those for biodiversity, contrasted with the success and focus of the Climate Change Act. They highlighted human behaviour; a statutory duty in five years’ time will get more focus than one in 20 years’ time—or, as Allegra Stratton, the No. 10 climate spokesperson, has said, 2050 is “too far away”,

“we have to feel the … urgency of now.”

They stressed the need for urgent action. Nature takes time to respond, and there is no hockey stick from new technologies enabling back-ended action. They emphasised the value of transparency; statutory interim targets make progress more visible and the OEP’s role more effective. They quoted business, with the Aldersgate Group’s support for statutory interim targets that give business certainty to invest and act. In short, they outlined a compelling case.

However, the Minister was not persuaded. He responded that interim targets would

My Lords, I rise very briefly to say why I added my name to this amendment. The Bill currently lacks a coherent interlocking scheme, and these amendments seek to deal with that. It is right to warmly acknowledge the huge progress made by the Minister, but as he has said so clearly, the costs of much of this are not yet understood by the public and there are still obvious strong lobbies that will seek delay.

It is therefore very important that there be a coherent scheme with interlocking interim targets, environment improvement plans and long-term targets. I warmly thank the Minister that we have legally enforceable, long-term targets. It is good that we have them, but the really difficult decisions relate to interim targets. They do not easily fit into the short-term electoral cycle; they are not something a politician or decision-maker can say is for a future generation, years and years away. Interim targets are the here and now. Nothing much has changed, as one can see from the great Victorian novelists, “Yes, Minister” or, more tangibly, the targets that have been missed to date. That is why I so strongly support providing for the practical nature of legally binding interim targets.

There is another matter to which, as a legislature, we should have regard: we ought not to be passing aspirational, vague legislation, but legislation which is clear and sets clear duties so that people know where they stand and so that the Government can be held to account. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, has dealt eloquently with the arguments made by the Government. There is no need for me to add anything to her observations.

My Lords, I support Amendments 11 and 14, but actually rise to speak to Amendment 13 in my name. The background to this is an amendment I put down in Committee specifically in relation to trees, tree-planting and tree health. It asked the Government to ensure that an annual report was made to Parliament on how far we had got in achieving the target set in the Bill. Obviously, what is applicable to trees is applicable to every target in this Bill—a whole range of targets will eventually be put forward and I will not go through them all.

The Bill as it stands now says there must be a review within five years of the first review. I suggest that the situation is now so urgent that Parliament needs to consider every year how far we have got towards achieving or failing to meet that target. We are all agreed that there is huge urgency to this, and we need to keep the pressure on year by year in Parliament.

I will never forget a meeting in Singapore in 2020, when one of the major issues facing the world was third-world debt. At the end of the meeting, people from the developing world looked at their diaries and said, “Perhaps we could meet again in three years’ time”, when suddenly a friend of mine—for whom this was literally a matter of life and death in his country—erupted with huge righteous anger which still echoes in my mind. I am not myself given to righteous anger, but I am sure that countries where people are literally now dying as a result of what is happening would have that same anger.

I will not divide the House on this as we have quite enough votes anyway. But I would like the Minister to consider seriously—sharing the sense of the urgency of this, as he does—bringing forward a government amendment to ensure that Parliament has a chance to look at the targets in this Bill every year in order to see how close we are to achieving them, or to what extent we are failing.

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, because I know from my experience as chairman of the Climate Change Committee why it works. It works because there are statutory targets to be met within reasonable times. If the target date is 2050, no Minister presently serving will have to be responsible for it. Indeed, I remind my noble friend that when a former Labour Party Administration announced a date for net-zero houses which was some 10 years later, there was ribaldry on the Conservative Benches on the basis that that would mean that they would not have to do anything during their period of office.

I am afraid I am long enough in the tooth to recognise that the Climate Change Act ensured that no Government could put off the actions they had to take until a more convenient time arose. The brilliance of the Act was to bring together two very different timescales. One is the democratic timescale of four or five years for the renewal of mandate and the other is the continuing timescale of fighting climate change. A democratic society has somehow to bring those two together. The cleverness of it was that by ensuring that Parliament agreed on the interim budgets and therefore they were democratically voted on, the Climate Change Committee was then able to hold the Government to them. They could not be changed without their agreement. That brought these two things in line.

What surprises me about my noble friend’s—and he is a noble friend—reply during the previous debate was his suggestion that somehow everything that is true about the Climate Change Act does not count in the Environment Bill. He does not believe that because he is a great supporter of the Climate Change Act. It is just not possible to hold those two views. I fear that this is the result of some apparatchik somewhere who does not want anybody to be held to anything. All of us should recognise how dangerous that is from the news today. Despite everything that has been said at this Dispatch Box and a similar Dispatch Box in the other House, the Government have bent over to the Australian Government and removed from the agreement the commitment to meeting the climate change figures and temperatures in the Paris Agreement.

My Lords, I fully support Amendments 11, 13 and 14. I simply ask: what is the point of having targets if there is no duty to meet them?

My Lords, I want, very briefly, to support Amendment 11. The whole point of this Bill is that it is going to be ready for the COP 26 meeting. It is a model Bill. It is something that we hope that other countries will adopt as a method of dealing with very difficult problems.

It seems to me in business experience that if you have long long-term targets, interim targets are very helpful. Therefore, as a necessary logical consequence, one would want the model Act to have such interim targets as well—the exemplar we would want other countries to follow. As I am sure we will be managing the thing in a logical way and therefore managing it with interim targets and would want other people to do that as well, it is logical that we should have these targets.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, for her excellent opening remarks. As she rightly said, a number of us spoke at some length on this matter in Committee. We have had excellent expositions from her and supporting evidence from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, of the merits of this case and why we need these statutory targets. It is not just this House that is calling on them —business is calling on them. This is what it needs to make the changes in the future for our country and for the sustainability of companies. Given that time is tight, if the noble Baroness were to press this to a vote, she would have the support of these Benches.

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendments 11 and 14 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, to which I have added my name. I thank the noble Baroness for her introduction.

In Committee, we tabled an amendment to place a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to meet any interim targets. We were very disappointed that the Government did not agree that this is important if we are to make genuine progress in improving our environment. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, today that if she chooses to test the opinion of the House, she will have our support.

It has been made clear in the debate today, as it was in Committee, that we really need to make sure that the interim targets are going to be met. Amendment 14 would strengthen the EIPs to do this and link them to the targets to make them legally binding, as opposed to their current standing, which is really being nothing more than policy documents.

As I said in Committee when I provided your Lordships’ House with a number of examples of how voluntary environmental targets had been badly missed or even abandoned on a number of occasions, this really only emphasises the need to make sure that the interim targets are as legally binding as the long-term ones.

The Government have seen fit, as we know, to bring in a legally binding species abundance target for 2030, which we welcome and support. This shows that the Government do not, in principle, object to legally binding short-term targets and, indeed, accept that they can drive progress in that area. It seems very inconsistent, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said earlier, that they are not doing it in this case. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, strongly explained, the Climate Change Act 2008 has been very successful in holding the Government to account on their interim targets. I have heard no compelling justification for why there should be this critical difference in the Environment Bill.

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate. Beginning with Amendment 11, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, the Bill’s robust statutory cycle of monitoring, annual reporting and five-yearly reviews, combined with the OEP and parliamentary scrutiny, ensures that meeting interim targets is taken seriously, without the need for them to be legally binding. We discussed this in detail in Committee, but I would like to outline the Government’s position briefly once more.

The OEP will scrutinise the Government’s progress on targets, including those interim targets, and it can make recommendations on how to improve progress, to which the Government have a duty to respond. It would be both unnecessary and detrimental to our targets framework and our environmental ambitions to introduce legally binding interim targets, as the approach risks undermining the long-term nature of the targets framework, which we have designed to look beyond the political cycle of any one Government and to avoid action solely focused on short-term wins. As I mentioned in Committee, it is undoubtedly a natural temptation for any and every Government working to legally binding five-year targets to set eye-catching, short-term measures in their manifesto, even if those are not necessarily the most effective measures for meeting the longer-term targets.

However, everything we know about the complexity of the environmental targets—indeed, everything we know about natural systems—shows that they transcend any one Administration or five-year period. We are talking about living, non-linear systems, where there will be plenty of measures whose effects will take many years to bear out. For example, for certain habitats, such as peat bogs, native woodlands and elements of the marine environment, significant change is very unlikely to occur within a five-year period, no matter what we do now. We would not want to have to deprioritise key aspects of the environment with longer recovery times to meet a legally binding target in five years.

I thank the Minister for allowing me to interject briefly. He makes the point that restoring and maintaining natural systems is a long-term process. I would agree with that, but does he not also accept that a key element of meeting the targets is to build resilience of natural systems—that is, their ability to withstand shocks and to recover from events such as extreme weather or infectious disease outbreaks? One can tell, from decades of ecological research, at an early stage whether the right steps are being taken to build the resilience of natural ecosystems. Therefore, that could be identified as a shorter-term target to achieve the long-term aims.

I agree with the noble Lord; building resilience into our natural environment—into the natural systems on which, ultimately, we depend—is clearly a priority, and I think that is reflected throughout the Bill. It is certainly reflected in our soon to be newly introduced 2030 biodiversity target. But I do not think that takes us away from the fact that, if we are measuring progress on the basis of a longer-term plan, you would end up in some cases with a very dramatic hockey stick, which would be difficult for a Government to explain in the way that would be necessary in the context of legally binding targets.