The last time I checked, the environmental directorate of the EU had taken 34 cases against the UK Government, of which it had won 30. I did not want to interrupt the noble Lord, who was an absolutely first-class Environment Secretary. I know that because later I worked in planning with John Prescott, as he was then, and we were always referring back to the good work that he had done.
I would have asked the noble Lord: when he was Environment Secretary, how often was he assisted, in his dealings with the Treasury in delivering on our legal obligations, by the threat of infraction? The power to fine the Government that the Commission has does not exist anywhere in the UK. The Supreme Court does not fine the Government. I discovered, when I was at MAFF for two years, Defra for two years and the Northern Ireland environment office for a year, that the threat of infraction was a powerful sanction to the Treasury. When you were arguing about the money to do something—which we were required to do anyway but resources were short—the case to the Treasury was, “Enable us to do this, we will do a deal with our budget and everything else, because paying a fine is an absolute waste of public resources”, and that is what happened.
Most of our environmental protection today is as a result of being in the EU. Ministers wanting to deliver have been helped to do so by the threat of infraction. So the thing that is missing from all this—although the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, touched on it—is the governance and delivery of the sanction. If it is not delivered, what is the sanction? If it is not money, it will not work. The evidence is there. It has to be money. It cannot be the chair or board of whatever is set up saying to the Minister, “We don’t like what you’re doing. You’ve got to do something different”. The first time they use the nuclear option, they will not be on the board the following year unless their independence is locked in solid in legislation. The threat of a sanction of money is pretty important. Without that, the principles cannot be delivered.
5.15 pm
I do not want to speak for too long but I want to add to something that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, raised in the Select Committee this morning. It is the fastest way of getting something from a Select Committee to the Floor of the House that we have discovered. It is a relevant issue because again it is about an external body auditing what the UK is supposed to deliver. In this case, it is the audit report delivered in June 2017 on the landing obligations of the UK. This issue is pretty fundamental. The report stated said that landing obligations were not being respected by UK fisherman. I massively support UK fisherman, by the way, who are in a very dangerous occupation—but all through the audit report the EU auditors found that we were not delivering. Rates of non-compliance were high. There were low reporting rates. We export 80% of
what we catch and we import 80% of what we eat. If we do not continue to deliver EU standards, whether landing obligations or something else, there is always now the economic threat of the fact that we export 80% of what we catch. Sanctions could be imposed, so we have to deliver.
My question follows what the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said. When we have left the EU, who is going to do the audit? It quite clearly cannot be left to the UK Government, because this independent audit has discovered that the four countries have been failing anyway. It is crucial between England and Scotland—because most of the fishing fleet is based in Scotland—that we comply. Who is going to perform that function? Will it be an independent body with teeth or are the UK Government saying that we will carry on as we did before? Carrying on as we did before is a failure, and the EU might well use economic sanctions against us if we are not delivering. So there is the threat. The Government are well aware of this. This is no surprise to them, because it has been in the reports of EU Committees of this House—I think about 25 have now been delivered. Nothing new has come out in recent discussions that has not been in those reports. I wonder whether the Government have been reading them.