This may sound breathtakingly naive to some Members, but I think there is an opportunity to reboot the debate on immigration. I think what concerned many of our constituents was the inability to control the numbers coming in. Now that they, rightly, believe there is an opportunity to have that control, it is up to us, on all sides of the House, to make the case for the reasoned and controlled immigration from which our economy and society benefits.
I rise to talk about environmental measures. In all the weighty subjects discussed today, some may say that is a trivial issue by comparison. I would say that it is not trivial at all: it is about the air we breathe, the rivers from which we get our drinking water and the kind of society we bequeath to future generations. The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who is sadly not in her place, is a magnificent champion of the environment. She and I started on this issue from exactly the same point: we felt there was a lacuna, a vast hole or governance gap as some have called it, in the Bill.
In my few remarks on Second Reading, I talked about the importance of putting into British law the regulations and laws that have seen our beaches cleaned up and our rivers start to get to a stage where we can be proud of them, where they are achieving what they are supposed to as functioning ecosystems. We are protecting landscapes and doing something to reverse the disaster, the tragedy and the crisis of species decline. We need to replicate, in a bespoke British way, the kind of measures we have benefited from in recent years. The Lords had a pretty good pitch at it, but there were flaws in their amendment.
5.45 pm
I want to take this opportunity, which might be my last, to say that what we have done here is scrutiny. We have done our job. We as politicians and Members of Parliament have held the Government to account and scrutinised the Bill. This is not some fifth-column activity, as one peer said, or a betrayal of Brexit. This is improving the Bill. The crucial environmental principles will be in the Bill thanks to the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), which I am happy to be associated with and for which we have the Government’s agreement, the Secretary of State having now signed it.
Not only does new subsection (2) set out the principles on which our environmental protections have been laid, but we have a detailed description of what this public body will look like. The crucial point, however, and the one where I differ from the hon. Member for Wakefield, and perhaps the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), is that the amendment sets a framework on which we can build, as legislators, under future legislation, such as the environmental governance Bill that the Government have announced will soon be laid before Parliament. I think we have got it right, therefore, and I urge Members to support amendment (c) in lieu of Lords amendments 3.