On 29 October 2022 the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Therese Coffey, announced that the UK government was unable to meet its own statutory deadline of 31 October 2022, set in its own Environment Act 2021, for setting the minimum number of key environmental targets required by that legislation. It is apparently still working through the 180,000 responses from the public about its earlier consultation on environmental targets.
This has resulted in a formal letter of complaint to Defra and the new Office for Environmental Protection ‘OEP’ from 42 environmental and conservation groups –
https://www.wcl.org.uk/joint-complaint-legal-breach-environment-act-targets-deadline.asp
It has also prompted the Chair of the OEP, Dame Glenys Stacey to write to the new Secretary of State itemising other failures by government to meet legally binding deadlines covering environmental law, and to issue a statement –
“The Secretary of State has made clear that the statutory deadline set by Parliament for environmental targets will not be met. We appreciate the particular political difficulties of recent months, but nevertheless the failure to meet the deadline is deeply regrettable. An ambitious and comprehensive set of targets is needed urgently to tackle serious and concerning trends of environmental decline and to drive improvements that will benefit us all. With government committed to halt species decline by 2030, and given other environmental pressures, there is no time to lose. “
There were already a number of significant concerns about the Government’s proposed Environmental Targets made in responses to this consultation.
On Biodiversity and Wildlife, Wildlife and Countryside Link welcomed the proposed target to halt the decline in the abundance of species, but criticised “a long-term target for wildlife that could see nature in worse condition in 2042 than it is today”.
On Water Quality and Availability, I pointed out that in the 22 years since targets were set under the Water Framework Directive of achieving “good chemical status” and “good ecological status” in rivers by 2015 (then 2027), 0% of England’s rivers meet good chemical status and 84% fail to meet good ecological status. The Government’s proposed response was selective and partial targets for pollution stretching out to 2037, with no overall target to improve water quality or even to prevent its further deterioration.
On Air Quality the Mayor of London and others questioned why the consultation only proposed targets for PM2.5 particulates, for 2040, and not other pollutants; why it made no attempt to deliver WHO standards on air quality, and why it left another generation of children to suffer the effects of exposure to excess air pollution.
On what is now the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, given its Second Reading on 25 October 2022, I pointed out that it was not going to help the environment to set long term targets under the Environment Act 2021 and then to sweep away detailed standards contained in the (570) environmental laws targeted for revocation by 31 December 2023 under the new Bill.
It is striking that 180,000 members of the public felt sufficiently strongly about environmental targets to write in about them. And in the end, that is the key, because once legislation has the “support and consent of the people”, and the public supports the need for clean air, clean water, unpolluted beaches, and the protection of nature, the political costs of undermining or failing to apply environmental legislation rise very steeply.
As a country, we may all be struggling with the cost of living crisis, rising interest rates, a deep recession and the means to pay our energy bills, but that does not mean that the public supports the dismantling of environmental protections, the lowering of environmental ambitions, or an ideologically driven “go slow” on addressing climate change.