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Environment Bill

I will not for time’s sake.

You cannot build back better if you are struggling to breathe.

Secondly, let me to turn to the Office for Environmental Protection. The Bill should have been passed by the end of the Brexit transition period, and the OEP should be up and running now. Labour offered to work with Ministers to ensure that that happened, but here we are with that date passed and the Bill still unlikely to become law until autumn, which is a year too late. That means the UK is now without an environmental watchdog, as the OEP has not yet been set up. We are concerned that it will be a weak watchdog with no real teeth. Calling it tough will in itself not make it tough. The OEP needs to be vigorously independent. That is why our amendment would delete a clause that would allow the Secretary of State to give guidance to the OEP and effectively let the Government mark their own homework. It is backed by the cross-party Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which concluded that we should make sure that

“every step is taken to ensure the Office for Environmental Protection is as independent from the Government as possible”.

Although I think many of us would have preferred an out-and-out environmentalist to be leading the OEP, the appointment of Dame Glenys Stacey is welcome and I hope the board members she is now recruiting will look a tad greener. But I must say to the Minister that, as a south-west Member of Parliament, I am deeply concerned that the Government have just robbed the

south-west of the Office for Environmental Protection. She will know it was announced in October 2019 that it would be going to Bristol. She knows that the expectation was that this would be a south-west-based regulator and she knows of the anger—the anger—that this will cause in the south-west on finding out it has been sent to somewhere that she claims is near Bristol. Worcester is nowhere near Bristol and that promise is nowhere near being met. The south-west has been robbed of a regulator and I think that is deeply, deeply worrying.

Let me turn briefly to bees and Labour’s amendment to prevent the Government from lifting the ban on bee-killing chemicals. I am a fan of bees; my family keeps bees on a farm in Cornwall. Since 1900, the UK has lost 13 out of 35 native bee species. Bees are essential to the future of our planet, to pollenating our crops and to our rich tapestry of biodiversity, so bee health is non-negotiable. That is what MPs on both sides of the House say in good times, so I expect them to say it now. Labour’s amendment would oppose the Conservative plan to lift the ban on bee-killing pesticides. If bee health really is non-negotiable, the ban must not be set aside just because it is convenient to do so now. There is no doubt that sugar beet farmers have been hit hard by crop blight, but lifting the ban is not the solution. Improved sugar contracts, compensation and accelerating blight-resistant varieties are a much better answer.

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Labour backs our British farmers. We stood with them against the Government over food standards, and we do so again in relation to the risk to small family farms from the new farm payment support scheme. Conservative Members will no doubt talk about how many European nations have also sought to lift the ban on bee-killing chemicals, but this is about England. It is about what we do as a country and whether we take the tough calls to address the ecological crisis or make excuses about going backwards. Today, Labour MPs will vote to save the bees, and the Government will whip Conservative MPs to allow the ban on bee-killing pesticides to be lifted. In the year that Britain hosts COP26, when we should be a showcase for environmental best practice and shine as a force for good—a beacon nation—we will be allowing more bees and pollinators to be killed by neonicotinoid pesticides. We should save the bees and back amendment 39.

Labour will not vote against the Bill today. We will not do anything to frustrate our fight against the climate and nature emergency. Even go-slow action is better than no action at all, but we will push our amendments to a vote because the Bill really should have been better and bolder. It should embed an insatiable drive and a green passion at the very heart of the Government, but it does not. I am proudly red on the outside and green on the inside. Instead of being a deep green, the Bill is merely a bland beige—necessary and needed, but pedestrian in its ambition. It needs more focus and priority than the Government have offered to date.

Labour will also be supporting amendments from my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on the state of nature and the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), with whom we

have common cause in the climate and ecological emergency. The Bill does not do enough, and neither is it fast enough. I genuinely want us to build back better, but if the Bill was insufficient before the pandemic, it is wholly inadequate now that the pandemic’s horrors have been laid bare. I encourage the House of Lords to get the Bill to where it should be, and I urge Members of this House to put our planet, our precious habitats and our vulnerable species first and to vote for the amendments.