CIEEM and other professional bodies say EU Withdrawal Bill is inadequate to deliver Gove’s “Green Brexit”
As MPs begin to debate the landmark European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, leading environmental scientists, engineers, ecologists and water and waste experts have called for meaningful parliamentary scrutiny of environmental policies and laws.
Whilst the Conservative Government committed in its manifesto to “be the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than it inherited” and Environment Secretary Michael Gove has talked of his ambition for a “Green Brexit”, CIEEM and a range of other professional bodies (under the banner of the Environmental Policy Forum) have warned that the EU Withdrawal Bill gravely threatens the ability to achieve either.
In letters to Michael Gove and David Davis, we have warned that the Bill fails to adequately provide for parliamentary scrutiny of the raft of changes required to make environmental laws function, ensure the fundamental principles which underpin decades of environmental improvement are protected, or provide a meaningful framework for independent scrutiny of future Government performance on the environment. We also warn that devolved administrations should not be constrained from pursuing ambitious environmental policies and targets of their own as a result of the powers the Bill creates.
We are calling for the legal establishment of a new body, answerable to Parliament and fully independent of Government which would help provide the kind of scrutiny currently provided by the European Commission. In the past this has allowed citizens and organisations to take governments to court over failing to meet legal obligations such as on air quality. We have also called for parliamentary committees to rubber stamp or call in for scrutiny the large number of laws which Ministers can approve, under so called ‘Henry VIII powers’, as EU laws are made workable in the UK.
Media coverage in The Independent
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