My Lords, I was pondering in bed this morning, as one does, about when the change of tone came from the Government on the watchdog and the principles and the commitment to the environment.
We have heard really quite encouraging statements from the Government over the past year. These have included a pledge to be,
“the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than we inherited”;
saying:
“We need to fill the governance gap”.—[Official Report, 8/1/18; col. 8.];
and promising to create,
“a new, world-leading body to give the environment a voice … independent of government, able to speak its mind freely”,
with “clear authority” and “real bite”. These are not my words, these are the Government’s words. They were not enunciated just by the Secretary of State for the Environment, whom you would expect to say things like that, but they were quite frequently enunciated by the Prime Minister as well. That was jolly welcome to us environmentalists, who believe that the environment is not about birds and bees and tweety things but is actually about the ecosystems on which all of human life and economic prosperity depend.
However, somewhere along the line the cracks in the Government’s commitment to their intentions and their fine words have appeared. The consultation
document which came out last week was total confirmation of that. There has been a huge watering-down of the status of the environmental principles to a policy statement, which the Government would only have to have regard to, on the basis that it would,
“offer greater flexibility for Ministers”.
I am not sure that that ought to be the objective of all this. Even though the Government promised that Brexit would not weaken our environmental protections, the way in which the principles are being dealt with in the consultation will not deliver that. As many noble Lords have said, the watchdog is more like a watchpoodle and simply will not do the task that has been carried out by the Commission and the European Court of Justice very successfully, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, has just pointed out.
The consultation was very late. We should have smelled a rat when it did not appear as promised in November 2017. As a former chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, I know about little birds and a little bird has told us that this is a sign of cold feet in a range of departments—BEIS, the Treasury, the Department for Transport and, indeed, No. 10. There is a total lack of cross-government agreement and that means that the consultation is late, the governance gap is opening up under our feet and there is no chance of getting even these weak proposals in place before Brexit day.
The Government have made a commitment to ensure legal continuity on day one of Brexit so it is vital that the principles and the watchdog are part of domestic law.