Lord Krebs (CB)

My Lords, late on Friday afternoon, or even early on Friday afternoon, is known in academic circles as the graveyard slot. I hope that this is not the slot where my Bill enters the graveyard. In introducing the Bill, I declare my interests as set out in the register; in particular, that I am on the scientific advisory board of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, a consortium of NGOs and Cambridge University, and that I am an independent scientific adviser to Drax, the power company. I thank the Minister for meeting me to discuss the Bill —in fact, twice—and Richard Benwell and Matt Browne of Wildlife and Countryside Link for their help in preparing the Bill and providing a briefing. We have outstanding legislation in this country relating to climate and the environment, so why the need for further legislation? I intend to explain that over the next few minutes. The Climate Change Act 2008, and its associated secondary legislation, sets a legally binding target to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and to meet the interim targets in the carbon budgets. Furthermore, the same Act places a requirement on the Government to ensure that the country adapts to the inevitable impacts of climate change on our infrastructure, buildings, land and people. The Environment Act 2021 also places specific legal obligations on the Government, including targets on biodiversity, water quality and use, woodland cover, waste and air quality. Examples include halting the decline of biodiversity by 2030 and reducing nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in water from agriculture by 80% by 2038, compared with the 2020 baseline. The unfortunate news is that, in spite of this excellent legislation, the Government are nowhere near on track to meet their legal obligations on climate and nature. The Climate Change Committee said in its report to Parliament in July this year: “The UK has committed to reduce emissions in 2030 by 68% compared to 1990 levels, as its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. It is the first UK target set in line with Net Zero. Now only six years away, the country is not on track to hit this target”. In the same report on adaptation, the Climate Change Committee said: “The UK’s Third National Adaptation Programme … lacks the pace and ambition to address growing climate risks, which we are already experiencing”. In its January 2024 report, the Office for Environmental Protection said: “Government remains largely off track to meets its environmental ambitions and must speed up and scale up its efforts in order to achieve them”. The OEP concluded that the Government were on track to meet just four of the 40 targets it examined. This is where my Bill comes in. The simple fact is that myriad day-to-day decisions that could help to deliver the targets are not in the hands of central government. It is as though the Government have a set of levers on their desk that they can pull, but the levers are not connected to anything under the desk. Instead, these actions are spread across many public authorities, which are listed in the Bill. These include land managers, such as the Forestry Commission, Forestry England and the national parks authorities; regulators such as Ofwat; local authorities responsible for planning decisions; and infrastructure authorities such as Network Rail and National Highways. The Bill encompasses not just the public sector but, indirectly, the private sector, such as water companies that are regulated by the authorities listed. Meeting the legally binding targets will require a Stakhanovite effort not just from central government but from all those public authorities. In fact, I argue that, without action from the public authorities, there is little or no chance that the Government will meet their targets. This Bill would give the public authorities a duty to have as a priority helping to meet the targets. Contributing to the targets is referred to in the Bill as the environmental recovery objective and the listed public bodies have a duty to take all reasonable steps to meet that objective. Some of the bodies predate the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act, so it is not surprising that they do not have a responsibility to help to meet the targets in these Acts. For instance, the work of Forestry England, the country’s largest landowner, is closely tied to legislation written over 100 years ago. In general, where public authorities do have duties in relation to the environment and climate change, the duties are weaker than those implied by the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act. For example, National Highways, established under the Infrastructure Act 2015, has as one of its eight objectives to “minimise the environmental impacts of operating, maintaining and improving the network and seek to protect and enhance the quality of the surrounding environment”. It is also obliged to “conform to the principles of sustainable development”. These are well-intentioned obligations, but they do not imply a specific duty to help to meet the biodiversity or greenhouse gas emission targets, yet transport infrastructure can have a major impact on both. We know that surface transport accounts for roughly a quarter of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions and these emissions have barely reduced at all over the past 30 years. Local authorities have a key role in this Bill, and councillors from across the political spectrum and from a range of councils across England have expressed their support for it, both personally to me in writing and in public statements. The briefing from Climate Action is very revealing and salient. It concludes that, without action by local authorities, the Government will not achieve its net-zero target and that voluntary action is not sufficient. In 2024, according to the Local Government Authority, two-thirds of councils were not confident that they would reach their net-zero target. The barriers to achieving the targets include lack of money, lack of expertise and lack of political will. In Scotland, all councils have to produce an annual report on climate action. In England, under two-thirds of councils do so. That is the case for giving public authorities a duty to help meet the targets in the two Acts to which I have referred. There will no doubt be objections to the Bill, so I will address three of them. The first objection is that it is unnecessary because the listed public authorities are already doing the work. The second is that it is too burdensome and costly for the nominated authorities to implement. The third is that it is too blunt an instrument. It is apparent that the first two of these objections cannot both be true at the same time. If it is unnecessary because public bodies are already doing it, by definition it cannot be too burdensome. Some public authorities may already be contributing to the targets to the best of their ability. For them, there will be no extra burden or cost. However, as my examples have illustrated, not all public authorities contribute to meeting the targets. Many of them—perhaps most—have weaker obligations than those implied by the Bill. In fact, if all public authorities were contributing fully to meet the targets, one might ask why we are so far off track in meeting them. What about costs? There might be some modest additional costs in the short term, but they have to be considered alongside the costs that will be avoided. These include costs associated with flood damage, damage to infrastructure from extreme weather, and loss of ecosystem services such as clean air and clean water, and—we now know from the excellent book by my noble friend Lady Willis of Summertown—good health. Those costs could be avoided by modest investment in taking action to help protect the climate and nature. The third possible objection that I raise is that the Bill is too blunt an instrument, imposing requirements on public authorities that they cannot meet because of other priorities. However, although the Bill is prescriptive, it is not too prescriptive. It states: “The environmental recovery objective is a principal objective”, not the principal objective. So public authorities have it within their discretion to balance it against other objectives. Finally, two further considerations are measurement and reporting. How will progress be measured and who will assess how well public authorities are doing? The targets are in the two Acts to which I have referred; therefore, the measurement of progress and the baseline for each target will be based on the criteria that the Government have set out in these Acts. The most obvious body to assess public authorities’ progress in meeting the targets would be the Office for Environmental Protection. In summary, the Bill fills a gap in the Government’s plans for climate and nature. We know that they are not on track to meet their targets. If they do not accept the Bill, or at least the principles within it, I would ask the following question: if this is not part of the answer to the question of how to get back on track, what do the Government propose as an alternative? I beg to move.