It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). Her commitment to environmental issues is beyond question, and it has been a pleasure to work with her on a range of them during the years in which I have been a Member of Parliament. It is also a huge pleasure to follow my right hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and for Newbury (Richard Benyon). Given that they said so much of what I wanted to say, I am now tempted simply to say, “What he said.” It was a joy to listen to both speeches, because they were absolutely brilliant.
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On Second Reading of the Bill, I placed great emphasis on the opportunities in Brexit not only to maintain the status quo, but to go much further. The obvious example, on which I went into some detail, is the regime that will replace the common agricultural policy. The CAP has in many respects been a disaster, and we will have an opportunity to do something very exciting with that same resource-package that we will repatriate when we leave the EU. However, tempting though the idea is of repeating what I said before, as it is one the most exciting environmental stories, I will not do so because it is somewhat ancillary to the issues we are talking about today.
Our starting point today in the context of the Bill has to be the need to protect those EU environmental laws that have undoubtedly helped us to clean up our environment. No one in their right mind would deny that that has been the case. No one can deny that our rivers and beaches are in a better condition today than they would have been without those regulations.
The Bill incorporates those EU environmental laws into British law, and that is a great thing. It gives a lot of people—a lot of my constituents, certainly—real reassurance, but on its own, as we have heard from almost every contributor, that is not enough. Indeed, the Secretary of State, who was in his place earlier, has acknowledged that as we transfer those laws from European law into British law there will still nevertheless be a governance gap; those are the terms he used. Existing agencies, such as Natural England and the Environment Agency, can take action against private bodies, but they do not have the power or independence to stand up to Government and hold Government to account. The Secretary of State has recognised that.
The other gap, which has been described in detail by many Members today, relates to the protections underpinned by the principles of environmental law—the principles of the polluter pays and the precautionary principle, and so on. They do not exist in UK law.
The amendments, including some which are in the books but are not being debated, collectively amount to an attempt to fill that gap. Many of them have been drafted by, or at least with the help of, a grand new coalition of green groups called Greener UK. I suspect every Member of this House has received letters either from constituents on behalf of Greener UK or from Greener UK itself. In fact, I see sitting up in the Gallery one of the brilliant Greener UK staff, Isabella Gornall, an ambassador for Greener UK, who I had the pleasure of working with for many years in my own office.
Alongside the drafting of the amendments, which has taken some time, there have been, as we heard from
my right hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset and for Newbury, in-depth discussions between Conservative Members, the Secretary of State and key representatives of that green coalition, and those discussions have not just been half an hour here and there.