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European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

As I said, the DEFRA consultation on the new enforcement body must be published urgently; I agree with the NGO community on that, and Members on both sides will want to encourage the Environment Secretary to do exactly that. I also agree that our ambition should be that the new Bill to establish this new body, and to make the UK’s environmental ambitions post-Brexit clear, should be passed through Parliament by March 2019. We will all want some reassurance from the Secretary of State in the near future that that is indeed his ambition.

Earlier, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset spoke at much greater length than I intend to on the detail of this, but he is absolutely right that the Environment Secretary is clearly meeting the ambitions of everybody who is contributing to this debate from an environmental perspective. Some might choose to put their fingers in their ears, say it cannot possibly be so and seek to manufacture disagreement where there is none, but the Environment Secretary—in this Chamber, in the press, in the speeches he has been giving to the environmental community, and in his meetings with NGOs, I believe—has been very clear about what he intends to do.

Seeking to amend the Bill simply for the sake of amending it does not add anything to our ambition for stronger environmental regulations post-Brexit. We can be very confident that the Government are leading us in the right direction on environmental regulation. They are going far further than the EU currently does, and that is the key point: we should see current EU regulation merely as the floor for UK environmental regulation post-Brexit, not the ceiling. I am confident that the Secretary of State has every intention of doing that.