I have a large degree of agreement and sympathy with what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) has just said. So far as animal sentience is concerned, I suspect we may find that there is more on that already in UK law than she is allowing, but I wait to hear from the Government about that. However, I do agree that, one way or another, we need it to be present in UK law at the end of this, and I think the Secretary of State is probably pretty convinced of the same thing.
I want mainly to talk about the question of new clauses 60 and 67, or more precisely what they are aiming at and how best to achieve it, because the point at which I disagree with the hon. Lady is not one of ends but one of means. It is a rare thing to happen in the House of Commons, but I hope I might at least half-persuade her by the end of my remarks that it would be better for her to adopt a different view of the mechanics than she is suggesting.
Let me begin with this: I agree with the hon. Lady wholeheartedly that, in the light of schedule 1, we cannot possibly rely on clause 6—even as I hope it will subsequently be adjusted—and still less on clauses 2 and 3 to do the heavy lifting that she rightly wants to get the precautionary principle and other critical principles into UK law. She is absolutely right about that.
The question that the hon. Lady and I are both asking is, how best can we get over that problem and get to the position where the UK courts and the UK Administration as a whole—the Government and their agencies—carry on applying those principles in a sensible and serious way to our environmental protection over succeeding decades? This is obviously a matter not just of a minute or a day or a year, but of a long period over which we want a settled, continued policy being carried on by succeeding UK Governments of different persuasions.
If that is the question, clearly one route would be some variant of new clause 60, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), or new clause 67 or some other variant. I completely admit that that is a route, but I want first to explain why I do not think it is an optimal route and then to explain why what has been talked about by the Secretary of State is a better route.
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The reason I do not think it is an optimal route is that—this has a slightly familiar ring from yesterday’s debate about clause 6—it puts in the hands of the courts a very uncharted set of decisions. I do not think it is a failure of drafting. In new clauses 60 and 67, as in the TFEU, where actually they are procedural principles—they are not actually drafted into a form that makes them ordinary law, so to speak—those general, vague principles leave courts very much in charge of how they will apply. That, of course, might be very good from the viewpoint of environmentally concerned people. It could be that the courts will—they sometimes have—judge that these principles are very powerful things, with very definite results that push our whole law towards protecting the environment better; but of course we cannot rely on that, because courts are courts, and they can do all sorts of things with general principles. At one time they might be going in a direction that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion and I would both regard as constructive, but another time not. They may over-egg the pudding and create reactions, and although our judges are fine judges, and they are well protected—much better protected than the Members of this House—against public opinion and threats, and all the rest of what has happened to some of our Members, regrettably, in just the last few days, nevertheless actually judges are very sensitive to public opinion, and if there is a reaction we may find the courts swinging away and producing different kinds of judgment.