Having attended the Liberal Democrat and Labour Party Conferences, I’m handing over to my boss, Mike Clarke, who will speak at our fringe event in Birmingham for the Conservative Party Conference alongside some good friends from the Wildlife Trusts and WWF.
Although I won't be in Birmingham this week, I shall be interested to hear how Andrea Leadsom, the new Secretary of State at Defra, will follow up her speech to the State of Nature event a fortnight ago. Her re-commitment to ensuring that this will be the Government under which wildlife recovery will start to happen, and to a robust 25 year plan for Nature in England were really welcome – but I have a feeling we may to wait until later in the autumn (November?) before we get substance and perhaps a draft plan.
I’m particularly keen to hear what the Government will view as success. The UN sustainable development goals and biodiversity targets should provide a focus for what needs to be achieved by 2020, but what about by 2030 and 2040?
We have thoughts about how our seas and landscapes need to be transformed and we will want to see an ambitious visions backed up by policy, money and commitment from across government. Yet, the terms of Brexit could have a great bearing on all of this as so many of our environmental laws as well as our policies for agriculture and fisheries are current set by the European Union.
This weekend, Prime Minister May confirmed that she will trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty by March 2017, which will begin two years of formal negotiations with the UK leaving the European Union in 2019. We now also know that this will be accompanied by a repeal bill (which will mean repealing the European Communities Act 1972).
This is what the Prime Minister said in her speech "As we repeal the European Communities Act, we will convert the ‘acquis’ – that is, the body of existing EU law – into British law. When the Great Repeal Bill is given Royal Assent, Parliament will be free – subject to international agreements and treaties with other countries and the EU on matters such as trade – to amend, repeal and improve any law it chooses. But by converting the acquis into British law, we will give businesses and workers maximum certainty as we leave the European Union. The same rules and laws will apply to them after Brexit as they did before. Any changes in the law will have to be subject to full scrutiny and proper Parliamentary debate."
This means that those domestic regulations which transpose EU Directives remain in place until actively repealed, while EU Regulations would be transposed across: domestic laws like the Habitats Regulations (which transposed the EU Habitats and Species Directive) will still stand (although without the threat of fines from the EU for non compliance and without the European Court of Justice as final arbiter) whereas laws like the invasive non-native species regulations would have to be incorporated into the Great Repeal Act.
What’s more, we do know that the UK will have to introduce new domestic regulations to govern agriculture and fisheries which currently are set by EU regulations. This is going to keep the parliamentary draftsmen busy as these regs will need to be in place by the time of our exit and my guess is that governments across the UK will need to have rough idea about what their ambitions are future agriculture and fisheries policies.
This is why I hope that the four UK administrations look hard at the guiding principles for the future of farming that we launched at the weekend. They could help fast-track thinking about how best to encourage the type of land management we and nature need.
If ministers are clear about what they want to achieve through their 25 year plan, they can then over time develop the right incentives and legal framework to achieve their ambitions. That said, environmental NGOs are united in saying that we need a clear commitment to maintain and bolster the current level of protection afforded by European legislation (which must include proposals for new judicial and enforcement mechanisms to replace that lost through our departure from the EU).
Finally, although we may be leaving the European Union, we won’t be leaving Europe, with whom we will continue to share so many of our birds and habitats and with whom we will need to collaborate to tackle threats, such as climate change, which transcend international borders. I hope that during the Conservative Party conference this week, we hear a wider aspiration for the UK to play a full part in creating an “environmental Europe”.
Clearly it is still early days, and we aren’t looking for all the detail on these issues this week. But it’s now time to move on from the welcome top-line commitments on the environment to some of the difficult nitty-gritty that will help to bridge the gap between rhetoric and local environmental reality.
Photo of a bluethroat courtesy of Jeroen Stel (rspb-images.com)