Member

The current role of the JNCC is to advise both the UK and the devolved Administrations on their responsibilities to nature. It is there to co-ordinate nature protection across the UK and ensure that we as a whole are complying with our international obligations. It is the body responsible for five-yearly reviews of which species should be listed as protected under various schedules to the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Given that the provisions on species protection in both that Act and the habitats regs were designed largely to implement the UK’s international obligations, I find it extraordinary that the Government are now taking a power to drive a coach and horses through those protections without first consulting their statutory adviser on such matters. Amendment 255 seeks to correct that oversight by re-establishing an appropriate role for the JNCC in line with its statutory function, and commissioning it to produce a list of protected species that would not be suitable for inclusion in an EDP because such inclusion would be unlikely to enhance their conservation status.