CIEEM’s Priorities for Senedd Committees

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Last week CIEEM had our first formal opportunity to share our views with Senedd committees following May’s Welsh elections.

Both the Climate Change, Environment, Sustainability and Rural Affairs (CCESRA) and Local Government, Housing and Planning (LGHP) Committees sought responses regarding their priorities for this Senedd term, asking respondents to rank their top three priorities. CIEEM’s responses were developed by our Wales Policy Group and internal Policy team.  Our priorities – and a brief explanation of each – are listed below.

CCESRA Committee

Read our response in full here.

Our top three priorities are:

  1. A Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) that delivers against the Sustainable Land Management Objectives (Agriculture Act (2023)), ensuring farm businesses are resilient against climate change and biodiversity decline and that the agricultural sector’s contributions to addressing the climate and nature crisis are optimised.
  2. Improving climate change literacy and planning across government departments to ensure the necessary actions are taken to develop climate resilience across society at the appropriate scale.
  3. Reviewing policies affecting water quality and quantity (i.e. availability, scarcity and excess), with a particular focus on planning for how these are affected by climate change and ensuring Wales’ water systems and policies are climate resilient.

The first priority in particular was selected in consideration of the membership of the CCESRA Committee: several senior members have previously been skeptical of the SFS, particularly regarding its environmental actions, and environmental regulations on farms more generally. Consequently, we decided it was necessary to reiterate the centrality of the agriculture sector to nature restoration and climate adaption in Wales (accounting for over 90% of Wales’ land area). Furthermore, given the Welsh Government’s recent agricultural ‘red tape’ review, we believed it was essential we made the case for protecting environmental ambitions in the SFS.

Our aim with our second priority is improve ‘eco-literacy’ amongst Committee members, Senedd members and policymakers in Wales more generally, by highlighting how the climate crisis impacts every area of society. We hope that by highlighting the inextricable links between climate and critical facets of everyday life, we can encourage government action at the necessary breadth of scale to ensure Wales is sufficiently resilience to climate change. In particular, we have asked the Committee to review policies across government departments, not just the portfolio of the Cabinet Minister for Rural Affairs and Sustainability, to drive this action.

Water is set to be a significant issue in this Senedd term: it was a prominent policy area in Plaid Cymru’s pre-election manifesto, and the new Government are aiming to build on the water governance reform conversation started at the end of the previous Senedd. This is a particularly pertinent priority following a record-breaking summer of heatwaves, droughts and wildfires across the country that cast into grim focus shortfalls in water availability infrastructure and policy, whilst water pollution continues to blight freshwater wildlife, especially in catchments associated with intensive agriculture.

 

LGHP Committee

Read our response in full here.

Our top three priorities are:

  1. Ensuring that planning policy is ‘future-proof’ by preparing for a changing climate and with strategies to improve the sector’s resilience to climate change.
  2. Improving the implementation and communication of net benefits for biodiversity (NBB) across Wales.
  3. Ensuring local planning authorities and other planning bodies have sufficient resources, ecological expertise, and access to data.

Echoing our second ask of the CCESRA Committee, our first ask of the LGHP Committee reflects the pervasiveness of climate change impacts across society. The planning sector has a significant role to play in improving the climate resilience of people and communities, through choices affecting both the design and placement of location: buildings will need to withstand an assortment of weather extremes, whilst planning authorities must increasingly be mindful of the expansion of disaster-vulnerable areas (e.g. floodplains).

Net benefits for biodiversity is Wales’ non-metric equivalent of BNG, aiming to create ecological resilience through new developments. Given the divergence of approaches across the UK, misunderstandings have, understandably, arisen in the implementation of biodiversity mitigation approaches in the planning sector, leading to wasted resources and unrealised potential. Planning authorities continue to receive applications based on England’s metric approach and that fail to meet ecological resilience tests. CIEEM members – in particular Wales Policy Group member Craig Llewellyn – are leading the development of new NBB guidance, in conjunction with Welsh Government. This consultation response is an opportunity to highlight this work to many new MSs, whilst securing government action to support the communication and implementation of this guidance.

Finally, we highlight the foundation of our above priorities and many of CIEEM members’ work across Wales: the sufficient resourcing and support of ecological expertise within the planning sector. Following a recent Welsh Government report highlighting sector-wide deficiencies in this regard, we ask that the Committee work with the Government to forge a sustainable plan to address these gaps and evaluate how prepared the sector is to deliver planning policies going forward.