Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, while the top twitcher in the House of Lords is undoubtedly my noble friend Lord Randall of Uxbridge—although there may be other candidates, I am prepared to admit —I live near the Minsmere Nature Reserve, so what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, referred to about marsh harriers is truly extraordinary. I tend to see them in close proximity to Sizewell, which shows that there is an element of how we can all try to live together in that regard. Amendment 244 gets to the kernel of the issue that we are addressing with the overall significant improvement test; I strongly support the noble Baroness’s amendment. Other noble Lords have made important points, including those made by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. The Government’s amendment is very cleverly written. There was a legal case with the last Administration, where ClientEarth, Friends of the Earth and the Good Law Project managed to find that the then Government had an unlawful climate change action plan, and they had to be pushed back on that. That is the element of hope value—not in terms of land, but in hoping that the EDP is, in effect, good enough. Assuming that everything will work was not good enough in that case. If this provision goes into primary legislation in the way it is now, without further consideration of some of the other amendments that have been tabled by noble Lords, that will give the Government, frankly, a very good “get out of jail” card, because it is primary legislation and the courts will not be able to override it on the basis of the criteria being set out today. On Report, we should come back and consider with all noble Lords who have looked at this carefully how we try to make watertight what we want to do with the significant improvement test. I will come back to the whole debate about what a Secretary of State is in the Bill, because I have tabled an appropriate amendment, which will be considered in a later group—I think in group 19 or 20—that will be started by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. There is something around this whole area that we are getting into—I am not going to stray into the mitigation hierarchy—that is about the environmental principles public duty that applies to Ministers. It does not apply to arm’s-length bodies; it applies to any policy considering legislation. It applies to any strategies and to any framework. But, critically, it does not apply in itself to any planning application consideration. So that is why we need to make sure that we get this bit of the Bill right. As far as I am aware, although on GOV.UK it says that the environmental principles policy statement was under the last Administration, it should still be in force. I would like confirmation from the Minister that that is still the case. I point out to her that if it is not in force, the Government would be acting in an unlawful way. So in consideration of this, there may be further questions coming, whether through this or other legal routes, specifically about how, in constructing Part 3 of the Bill, the environmental principles policy has been applied to achieve the particular outcome that is desired and, potentially, about other aspects of how it is complying with the Environment Act in its own right. It is worth us having some careful consideration before the next stage on what we all want the outcome to be. I am confident that the Government want, despite a lot of the speeches and rhetoric, to make sure that we have nature thriving.