I thank the noble Viscount for his intervention. I will most certainly do as he suggests. That is a very good idea.
A compromise appears to have been reached between the Trade Secretary and the Environment Secretary. They seem to have said, “Okay, let’s have a watchdog but let’s make it toothless, so that it won’t actually have the powers and duties it needs to be effective”. So the Government propose that the new body will not be able to initiate legal action, will have no legal obligation to operate the current environmental principles—such as polluter pays—and will be kept out of anything to do with dangerous anthropogenic climate change. The consultation fails to propose anything close to what we have already.
The amendment is therefore inconvenient for the Government, so they will oppose it. Of course, a real environmental watchdog could not be anything but inconvenient to a Government. We want it to be inconvenient to a Government. We want it to actually hold them to account. We want it to stop them doing bad things. We want it to uphold all the principles of clean food, clean air and clean seas that we currently have.
The Minister has made good on his promise to put the issues out to consultation ahead of Third Reading, but it is simply too weak. It is weaker than the EU law that we have already and it could, of course, be weakened after the consultation. We have no guarantee that the issues will not be kicked into the long grass under the weight of other legislation coming through from Defra.
It is less than a year to Brexit day, and it is obvious that the Government’s promised Bill on the environment simply cannot be passed until long after we leave the EU. That means that there will be a governance gap, which we cannot afford. So I urge every Member of this House to vote for this amendment.
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