Conduct of negotiations

Part of European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill – in the House of Commons at 4:30 pm on 8 February 2017.

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Photo of Caroline Lucas Caroline Lucas Co-Leader of the Green Party 4:30, 8 February 2017

I apologise, Sir Roger. I know that my hon. Friend Mary Creagh—who chairs the Environmental Audit Committee—tried to make some of these points for hours yesterday, but I will confine myself to saying that I agree with what she has said. I think that the impact on our chemical industry has been massively underestimated. Given that it is our second largest manufacturing export and given that at least 50% of those exports go to the EU, the impact on the sector will be massive.

If the Government are serious in their ambition to be the first Government to leave the environment in a better condition than the condition in which they found it, Ministers must now explain to us in detail how the legislative system for monitoring and enforcement will be replaced. I find it astonishing that they expect us to vote for the Bill without being given any idea of what the present complex, robust and unique system of legal enforcement might look like when we leave.

In evidence given to the Environment Audit Committee, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds made the important point that the European Court of Justice operates on a slightly broader basis than the Supreme Court in the UK, which must follow narrower due process. It is therefore possible that great swathes of environmental protections, once transferred to UK statute, will in effect become redundant owing to the absence of monitoring and enforcement by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. That loss of an effective judicial system will come at a time when UK regulators, tasked with monitoring compliance with environmental legislation, have had their own budgets slashed. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has a third of the staff that it had 10 years ago. Furthermore, because the great repeal Bill will not carry over the jurisprudence from the European Court of Justice, we seem to be set to lose the important case law which, for the past 40 years, has proved so effective in protecting the UK environment.