Pippa Heylings

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond, and I thank the hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry (Stephen Gethins) for securing this important debate. In South Cambridgeshire, the majority of constituents, 60.2%, voted to remain in the European Union. They did so from a clear understanding that our prosperity, freedoms and security depend on and benefit from co-operation with our closest neighbours, but the effects of the Brexit referendum deal have been stark and deeply damaging. Our young people have lost the freedoms that we as their parents once took for granted—the right to travel, work, study, live and love across the EU. Economically, Brexit has blown a £90 billion-a-year hole in the public finances, with around £250 million every single day in lost tax revenue, and an economy now between 6% and 8% smaller than if we had not left, which particularly hits our small and medium-sized businesses. There are wider issues of security, too. As Dr Paul Browne, chair of Cambridge for Europe, said, “the world of 2026 is not the world of 2016… Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine shows us that democracy, defence and economic security are one”. After a decade of working internationally with communities and economies devastated by climate change, I became much more politically active when I realised that Brexit would threaten our environment. Nature knows no borders. Wildlife mates and nests in one country while feeding in another, and the habitats and water framework directives were hugely effective in respecting that. However, we are now diverging from those protections of the nature and wildlife that we all hold so dear. The Institute for European Environmental Policy has found that since Brexit the EU has introduced 28 new or strengthened pieces of environmental legislation that the UK has not adopted. Meanwhile, we have weakened protections in areas such as habitats, pesticides, forever chemicals and fisheries. We must be bolder, rejoin, closer to the EU and—