Last week I, alongside a number of colleagues from the environmental sector, gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Rural Affairs and Islands Committee on the Natural Environment Bill.

On targets, I said:

“It is not targets themselves that will drive change, but the actions that follow and that are already under way. Targets can play a vital role in the restoration of nature and an important part in creating long-term policy certainty and a shared level of ambition across Government and wider society, including not only environmental non-governmental organisations but private landowners and other actors. They can also drive Government action across portfolios and public bodies. Importantly, they can create a cycle of monitoring, reporting and accountability, which will be important as time moves on and we get closer to the meeting of those targets. We want to ensure that Parliament is able to hold Government accountable on progress against the targets.”

On Part 2 of the Bill, I said:

“Fundamentally, the bill will hand an extremely broad enabling power to ministers. The legislation could be on the statute books for decades, and future ministers could use the power to modify crucial parts of environmental protection for, in essence, any purpose that they wanted to. Although any modifications would need to follow the six purposes that are outlined in section 3 of the bill, those purposes are extremely broadly drafted. Purpose (f) is “to improve or simplify the operation of the law.”

“Whether something improves or simplifies the operation of the law is a very subjective judgment. However, if a future Government thought that radically weakening the effect of the habitats regulations would improve the operation of the law, it would be able to do so under the bill as it is currently drafted.

“The policy memorandum says that the proposed power is needed because, as a result of Brexit, we have lost powers that we previously had under the European Communities Act 1972. However, there is a really important distinction to make. When we were a member of the EU, ministers had the power, through regulation, to amend the protections, but they could do so only in line with European law. The power existed because, if the European directives changed, the domestic Government needed to have a way of implementing those changes in domestic law, but there was a backstop, whereby the power could never be used to go beyond what was in European law to undermine the protections.

“As the bill is currently drafted, there is no such backstop, so there is nothing to prevent future Governments from drastically weakening the level of environmental protection that EIA legislation and habitats regulations, which are important parts of our current law, provide.”

The full transcript of the session is available on the Scottish Parliament’s Official Report.