19
Examination of witnesses
Dame Helen Ghosh and Natalie Prosser.
Q1 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to the Lords Committee on the Environment and Climate Change. For this morning’s session, we will be hearing from the Office for Environmental Protection. I am delighted to have with us Dame Helen Ghosh, the newly appointed chair of the OEP, and its CEO, Natalie Prosser. We look forward to hearing your evidence.
Before we start, I remind everyone that the session will be webcast live on Parliament TV and that a transcript will be taken and made public. Witnesses will have an opportunity to review the transcript and, if necessary, make very minor amendments. Members are reminded that they should declare any relevant interests the first time they speak. This, of course, applies equally to all witnesses, which may not be so relevant in today’s case. I take the opportunity here to say that I am a director of Peers for the Planet. Dame Helen, perhaps you could now introduce yourself.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Thank you very much. I became chair of the Office for Environmental Protection on 1 June this year. My previous career was 30 years in the Civil Service in a variety of departments, latterly as Permanent Secretary at Defra and then at the Home Office. I moved from there into the NGO sector and became the director general of the National Trust for almost six years. From there, I moved to my immediately previous role as Master of Balliol College at Oxford University. In all these roles, in various ways, I had contact with the environmental and natural resource issues that concern the Office for Environmental Protection. Therefore, it is a delight to be in this role in this organisation, which I think has already had, and can continue to have, a real and measurable impact on the outcomes for the natural environment and resources. It has been a pleasure. I have to say that my first two months have reinforced my view that it is a great privilege to be carrying out the role.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Natalie, perhaps you could introduce yourself.
Natalie Prosser: Good morning. I am the chief executive at the OEP, and I have been chief executive here for about five years.
Q2 The Chair:. Thank you. We will kick off with the first question. Dame Helen, given that you are so new to the role, what are your plans and priorities as the new chair of the OEP? I will ask a follow-up later.
Dame Helen Ghosh: My initial impressions of the OEP are all very positive. As your Lordships will know from your previous hearings with representatives, it was set up very effectively. It is an efficient, impactful organisation. I find a number of highly committed staff, an excellent senior team and—saving her presence here today—an outstanding chief executive.
I pay tribute to Glenys Stacey, my predecessor, for the work she did to make the OEP such a going concern, one might say. We now have a challenge, following the experience of the last four years or so. In particular, we face a resource challenge for the future three years—the current year and two future years. We have been given flat cash as our settlement for our activities in both England and Northern Ireland. That is a real challenge since it is, in effect, a real-terms cut. We are having to go through a process—as we do every year and have done every year in the past—and be very clear about what our priorities should be. We are focusing on the things that really make a difference, that are most salient to the Government achieving their environmental improvement plan targets—but more broadly so that, in England and Northern Ireland, the environment is both protected and improved.
That process of prioritisation is extremely important to us. The staff have begun the process, but the board will be looking at the new draft strategy for the organisation. Every three years we have to renew our strategy. That will be an opportunity for us to think about priorities, organisational shape and so on. In fact, this appearance is timely since the views of members of the committee will be very useful in feeding into that strategy review process.
The Chair: Thank you very much. On your appointment, you said that you will be focusing on areas and actions that will make the most difference. Can you outline some of those areas that you think deserve priority attention?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed. I entirely support the statement made by the outgoing chair and acting chair when they were reporting on the most recent EIP, EIP23. They said that the most important thing in achieving the Government’s ambitions is to get nature-friendly farming right. As this committee is aware, that has many aspects, in relation to support systems, protected areas, regulation and so on. So I think that is an area that we will be focusing on, and it is a focus for our work in this current year.
We are also engaging ourselves in the issues around reform. Reform of the water industry, which is in process at the moment following the Cunliffe review, is of great interest to us. Among other things, we need to make sure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated in the future when it comes to the areas of regulation that our public authorities are responsible for. We will also be monitoring very carefully what one might describe as the unfolding issues around planning.
If we look at our priorities for this coming year, marine is also a very significant area for us. We have a major investigation ongoing, on the issue of good environmental status and the continuing failure of that to be achieved. Nature-friendly farming, keeping our eye on and playing a positive and perhaps innovative part in some of the developments on water reform, and marine—those would be our priorities for the next couple of years.
In Northern Ireland, the absolutely central and important issue is managing the nutrients produced by livestock farming, as well as sewage outflows. Our team there are working very hard on that in various aspects— investigations, for example, but also in relation to nutrient action plans and regulations. So, in Northern Ireland, nutrients is front and centre of our work.
Q3 The Chair: Excellent. Thank you. Before I come on to members who have indicated that they would like to ask a supplementary question, I have something else to ask. This may be more for you, Natalie, but I will leave it for you both to decide who is best placed to answer. The committee has finished an inquiry on pet parasite medications. We found that some of the chemicals, the ones that are used traditionally—imidacloprid and fipronil—because they are so harmful to the environment are being phased out in favour of isoxazolines and related compounds whose impact on the environment is not so well documented and researched.
My question is not really about the impact on the environment. The committee found that we could not get a handle on how many of these chemicals were in the environment, because that sales data was not available to us due to commercial sensitivity, we were told. Yet we know that in similar circumstances—for example, for antibiotics—that sales data is available. Given that the OEP has a remit to apply environmental law, I wonder whether that is something that you could help us rationalise.
Dame Helen Ghosh: To get hold of the data?
The Chair: Yes. We will be debating this report in the Chamber, so it would be really useful to understand where we stand on getting the data that we need to quantify the problem.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think that is for Natalie rather than for me.
The Chair: I thought it was a bit left-field, but it is important that we ask the OEP these questions.
Natalie Prosser: I am not sure that I can assist with that specific question, but I think I mentioned last time that I was before you that we have an ongoing concern about how we regulate chemicals more generally in this country, and that we have identified that as a potential very serious threat. The committee’s work illustrates that in relation to a very specific chemical. We have a small amount of work looking at the chemicals regime in the round, and that is so that we can identify areas to sharpen our focus on. We do not have a great deal of resource to attend to that, but I recognise that chemicals present a very material threat to our environment, whether they are pesticides or pet treatments, and we are concerned that our overall regulatory system may not be adequate for dealing with that. I am afraid I cannot answer your specific question, but I recognise the salience of the issue and that it does warrant further attention.
The Chair: I wonder whether you could write. The reason I ask is because I know it is your remit to monitor and report on the implementation of environmental law. I wonder whether there is anything in the environmental law that says that data should be made available where the chemicals involved have been shown to be so harmful to the environment. I will leave that there.
Q4 Baroness Whitaker: You mentioned resources and enforcement. You are not the only body enforcing regulations concerned with the environment, so I wondered, first of all, how you liaise with other enforcers as to who does what. Also, do you have any thoughts yet about how you ought to prioritise enforcement? It can be very expensive.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes. Clearly one of the outstanding features of the Office for Environmental Protection is that it has very clear purposes and a very clear role and legislation, and the board of the office has very particular powers in relation to its functions. It is not true to say that we are the regulator of regulators, but of course the public authorities that we are regulating—Natural England, Ofwat, the Environment Agency in particular and of course Defra itself—are, to some extent, partners in achieving outcomes, and also often the object of our investigations. Again, this is something that I am exploring. Clearly, we have close connections with the regulators that are themselves responsible for administering various aspects of environmental regulation; Natalie has many years of experience doing this. We have to remain close to them in terms of understanding them and, when things get tricky in an investigation, being able to negotiate a satisfactory outcome for our purposes and for theirs.
In that sense, yes, we liaise with them on a continuous basis, but sometimes life gets tough and we have to use some of our more powerful tools, either to get information out of them through an information notice or by requiring them to carry out what we regard as the appropriate steps to resolve a poor environmental outcome. As it happens, I know a number of the heads of the key regulatory bodies, including Natural England and the Environment Agency. Because of my past career, I understand quite a lot about the organisations, but we have to be both close and distant.
Of course, the other partner we have—in a fundamental sense given the future of the country’s natural environment—is the Climate Change Committee. Very clear lines were drawn up in the Act as to what the committee does and what we do. There is a memorandum of understanding about its role and our role. However, particularly on adaptation, we have to understand its view on the pressures from the sadly inevitable increase in temperatures and the impact it will have on nature and the natural environment.
For example, Baroness Brown came to our most recent board meeting with the chief executive, Emma Pinchbeck, and talked to us about its latest report, which we will now be able to absorb, as it were, into our thinking. We operate in at least four dimensions: the three dimensions and then time. When one thinks about the length of both the interim targets and the longer targets that we are collectively trying to achieve, the impact of climate change—which has been vividly illustrated this summer—is something we have to have in our minds all the time.
The Chair: Thank you. Lord Redwood has a short question, I hope, on plans and priorities before we move on to Baroness McIntosh.
Q5 Lord Redwood: Dame Helen, you described three very general areas as aims, which I would have thought would have had policy work led by accountable Ministers from a range of departments and policed by independent regulators. It would be helpful to the committee if you could give us one example of a recent unique intervention by your body that has done some good and has been taken up, with a headline of its costs and benefits.
Dame Helen Ghosh: There are a number of such outcomes; for example, our investigation into combined sewage outflows. That is a matter of both environmental concern and great public concern. In that instance, our investigation showed that there was, in essence, confusion between Defra, the Environment Agency and Ofwat as to what the regulations meant and what the standards of implementation should be. Our clarification of what the current law—including some important court cases—actually meant has changed the operational practice of all the relevant bodies to good effect.
Monitoring is very important to us. I imagine that we may get on to the subject of waste later in the hearing. For example, the most recent report on waste inspections found, as you know, all sorts of failures in both the statement of achievement and the process and outcomes. We are very conscious that what will now have to happen, when the response from the Government is formally agreed, is that the things that were promised to be done are really done.
On combined sewage outflows, the data on monitoring is available—going back to the data issue. We will use the existing datasets to do our monitoring and then feed that back into our assessment reports.
Q6 Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: I will try to ask short, sharp questions, but you are both very welcome; it is lovely to see you here before us. You are on the record in 2025 as saying that progress towards improving the environment has slowed and that the Government are still largely off track in achieving their legal environmental commitments. In January, we heard that the revised environmental plan was a little too early to form an assessment. Are you in a position to form a more general assessment as to where the Government are on achieving these? I will give a specific example: the failure to give legally binding species targets is quite a gap.
Dame Helen Ghosh: As you say, in relation to EIP23, which of course is not the most recent EIP, our report found they were off track on 21 out of 43 targets, I think. We advised on how we thought the structure and approach of EIP25, published by the Labour Government, could be improved, and it is improved in a number of areas, particularly around implementation. This is a persistent failure in many elements of both Government and other public authorities. There should be clear delivery plans and measurable outcomes. EIP25 is better on that, although it is not ideal.
We will be producing our report on the Government’s progress report in January. That will obviously deal with, as it were, two halves; the 25-26 year, part of which is covered by EIP25 and partly still by EIP23; and then we will give our opinion on progress in that year. I do not think we have any reason to think that there will be a significant change. We have got this wonderful infographic, which sadly has a great deal of red and a little bit of amber and tiny numbers of green against the dartboard of achievement. I do not think we are expecting anything to have changed significantly, but EIP25 gives us a basis, if the measures in it are implemented, for at least better delivery plans and better KPIs.
On the question of species and specific figures, I turn to my chief executive. Do you know?
Natalie Prosser: I am not sure.
Dame Helen Ghosh: We can write on that.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: You mentioned reform of the water sector. When we were part of the European Union, there was a very effective enforcement regime where water companies were brought to book. That is one of the reasons why we have now got cleaner water than we had in the 1980s. Do you believe that the current regime is as effective? I ask in particular: what work might you be doing on the water framework directive and where? I am slightly concerned that the clean water Bill seems to have been delayed to next year. The water framework directive has been a key part of the water regime in this country. They have obviously moved on in the EU to a different phase. Do you have any ongoing work in that regard?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We do. We are currently carrying out one of our investigations into the water framework directive implementation and outcomes. It is well known, not least from the Court of Appeal, that the Government is failing to achieve its water framework directive targets, so in that sense it is already known that the law is being broken, which is, of course, one of the things that our investigation will highlight. That investigation will conclude this year, I assume, and therefore we will be making our findings on that public.
We know that the Government, as part of its water Bill, is thinking of adjusting the measures in the water framework directive, in so far as in the current legislative arrangements that is possible. That is of course of interest/concern to us. We have already started to have some discussions of an informal kind with Defra officials, the Environment Agency and others who will be involved in that. That is an issue which is very salient and current for us.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: I have just one last question, if I may. The Government are reluctant to implement, for example, Schedule 3 to the Floods and Water Management Act to make SUDS mandatory. They say that the planning regime covers this. There has been an appeal which has driven a coach and horses through this; I think it was Gladman, and they literally just said, “No, you do not need to worry about this. Just build where you like”. Do you share my concern about there not being these mandatory statutory targets? Without SUDS you are going to have sewage spills, potentially into existing houses and certainly into watercourses, because water companies are not statutory consultees, are not going to be statutory consultees, and are not given the tools to prevent the sewage spilling in this way. Do you share that concern?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I can entirely see the problem that you outline very clearly there. I assume that this is one of the issues that should be picked up by the Bill in due course.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: One would hope, but of course planning is under the housing department and I get the impression that Defra are keen to have mandatory targets. The housing department, not wanting to upset the planners, are less keen.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I will hand over to my colleague, who may well know the more detailed answer to your question. I think one of the most interesting things—
The Chair: Actually, can we just park that there, because on the next question we will be looking at BNG in far greater detail, so it can be addressed there?
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Can I just have a quick answer, though?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Do we have a quick answer?
The Chair: Just on this one issue, then.
Natalie Prosser: Not specifically on SUDS, but there are some serious dysfunctionalities in the current system. One of the reasons we have focused on water framework directive compliance and implementation is that we think part of the root cause of why we have not managed to grip pollution in rivers is because of the lack of engaging with why pollution is getting into the rivers in the first place, which the framework is meant to prevent. That is rather a concise answer to a long issue, but there we go.
The Chair: Lord Jay has indicated that he would like to ask a supplementary, and Earl Russell as well.
Q7 Lord Jay of Ewelme: Welcome. It is very good to see both of you here today. My question really follows on from what Baroness Whitaker was saying. The office’s functions, as I understand it, include scrutinising, advising and enforcing regulations and legal compliance. Now, as you have already said, an awful lot at the moment is going wrong in the environment. My question is: do you think you will need to put more emphasis than you have done in the past on enforcement? Do you think you have the powers for enforcement? Do you think that more emphasis on enforcement will be a part of the strategy that you are drafting at the moment?
Dame Helen Ghosh: That is a very interesting question. My impression after two months is that we have achieved outcomes in a number of areas—waste, sewage outflows and so on—by making transparent the failures; by achieving a common understanding of what the regulations require you to do, which of course is absolutely fundamental to our processes; and then by proposing practical and achievable measures for the public authorities involved to change their practice. That has been successful. The sub-nuclear option for us is a decision notice, which we have done in some cases, and there may be cases to come on that. What we have never done so far is initiated an environmental review—a judicial review in effect. Why have we not done that? Some NGOs are concerned that we never have. It is partly because it is a costly, blunt instrument. As we know from judicial review, it is possible that it simply passes decision-making back to the public authority rather than saying, “This is the outcome. This is the thing you need to do. That is the thing you need to do”. That is what we have achieved short of using our environmental review powers, but I would not rule it out for the future.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: If you were to institute a judicial review, it could at least give a pretty strong signal that you were seriously interested in putting things right, rather than just commenting on them.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes. We are challenging the fact that they are not doing things right, and we are making sure that they change their practice for the future. That is this point about monitoring the outcomes.
There are two possible scenarios for why we would use an environmental review power. One is when there is clear disagreement on what the law actually means: when is an environmental target an environmental target, and what behaviour should it produce? If it is clear that we are not going to reach the kind of fruitful outcome that we want to achieve—if it is clear that we are so far apart from the public authority concerned and the outcome is so disastrous for the environment—we might do it then. Seriousness would be one, and “Can we just have clarity from the courts as to what the law means?”
Lord Jay of Ewelme: Do you think that you might do that?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We might do that in future, on either of those grounds.
Q8 Earl Russell: I will be very brief. In answer to the first question, you talked about the work you are doing on your draft strategy for the next three years. Then in response to this second question you have talked about the fact that, sadly, there is lots of red and orange and not much green. I do not want to go over the same territory as the last question, but I guess I wanted to ask you something fundamental. We are coming up against 2030 targets really quickly. I welcome all the work your organisation is doing to hold the Government to account, but I guess my overarching question is: if, as a result of your work, government policy does not change in such a way that we are hitting those targets, what more can we do to improve processes and mechanisms to make sure that actually we do not continue to fall further and further off track? What is the strategy for you as an organisation, should that continue to be the case? Sorry, that is a bit of a general question.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No; I completely see the point you make. Are we achieving change quickly enough and are there any ways we could achieve change—
Earl Russell: How can we make systems work?
Dame Helen Ghosh: If you look at our systems, there is something that the board will be looking at. Obviously the starting point is: what does the law and the regulation say; and are the people who are operating it doing the right thing, and is it achieving good outcomes? It has to look at process as well as outcomes. The depth with which we find evidence, of course, is something that could enable us to at least stand still in the output of investigations and reports that we do. I am very convinced from my past life that the best can sometimes be the enemy of the good. I think I said this to the Select Committee in the other House: our reports are very thick and the details are there, but making sure that the work we do is enough—not necessarily perfect, but good enough—is something, and we will be considering that with our teams.
We are so focused on outcomes. Anyone who has tried to run any project knows that having a plan, having milestones, knowing what you are trying to achieve, being transparent—those are all the things that we build into. On every occasion when we have done an investigation, that is what we are trying to get the Government to do, if we think of government targets and 2030. For example, EIP25 is much better than it might have been because those were the kinds of things we asked for. Can we have data? Can we have delivery plans? Can we have clear measurement of progress? We are having a generic effect across the whole range of environmental issues, as well as the detailed effect on individual issues that we think are most salient. That would be my answer to your question—but we do hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near all the time.
The Chair: Before I move on to Lord Trees’s question, I have just a quick supplementary; it follows on well from Earl Russell’s question. In January 2026, Professor Robbie McDonald, the chief scientist for the OEP, when asked whether he thought it was still possible to meet the 2030 target to halt the decline of species abundance, said yes, but “to not take that action at this point is a choice to not meet the target”. Dame Helen, you said that we need better delivery plans and we need better KPIs, but I am sensing that there is little sense of the urgency required to meet these targets. Those dates are just around the corner. We are not on track to meet those targets by those dates. Does the Government understand the urgency of putting in place action plans to deliver these targets?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The chief executive may well have comments to add, given her longer time horizons and understanding of where we have got to and why we have got to where we have got to. There is a real issue for us, and it arises in at least one of our current investigations, about: what does a target mean? Is it just something we are aspirationally trying to achieve, or is it something where we should be showing particular kinds of action? That debate will be particularly salient in relation to at least one of our current investigations. When is a target a target? Getting some sense from Government that they appreciate the importance of the targets—they are not just there for show, they are not just aspirational, they really mean something and they are taking action that will achieve it—
The Chair: Are these not targets in statute?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, some of the targets are in statute, and some of the targets are ones that the Government has taken on of itself. For example, 30 by 30 is one that the Government committed to under the biodiversity concordat. But there are specific statutory targets, of which the only one that we think is on any kind of positive track is the air quality target.
The Chair: Where does responsibility lie for not meeting those statutory targets?
Dame Helen Ghosh: With the Government.
Natalie Prosser: The framework is very clear that responsibility sits with Ministers for achieving these targets. These are targets put into law, recommitted to by the current Government. They are on the face of it, and Ministers are responsible for delivering them. Our role here is to provide clear and objective evidence to the degree they are delivering on that.
The Chair: Is the Government hearing the message loud and clearly from the OEP that they are not on track to deliver those targets? How can you challenge them to say what action they are taking to rectify this position?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We challenge them through the process set down in the Act. We have done our hard-hitting reports on their progress since the statutory regime was set up. They have to respond, via Parliament. Our report is published in Parliament. In terms of transparency and accountability it is a very clear framework, and we will continue to do that because that is our job.
The Chair: I will move to Lord Trees and bring in Baroness Coffey when I can.
Q9 Lord Trees: Can I just ask a quick supplementary on your role? One of the things I have been struck by in our various reports on nitrogen, chemical pollution and waste in general is how bad we are at seeing the value in waste. I wonder, apart from pointing out what is wrong currently with what is going on, whether you have any role in catalysing, encouraging and nudging innovation in the way we handle waste, which would reduce environmental contamination hugely.
Dame Helen Ghosh: We have certainly spoken out very strongly to say that the Government should really fulfil what must be its commitment to have a circular economy strategy, which indeed pulls together all the parts of the waste cycle—not just how it is handled, but every stage in the cycle so that resources are better used. Clearly we have gone in on some particular elements—waste inspections is one—
The Chair: Shall we park the waste? We are encroaching on—
Dame Helen Ghosh: The most significant thing the Government could do would be to draw up and publish a strategy that pulls together, so that there is a coherent system within which it happens.
The Chair: Lord Trees, your question?
Q10 Lord Trees: Yes. I have got a question about biodiversity net gain, and I am wondering what your assessment is of the Government’s approach to that. Particularly, could we focus on a couple of things? There was a suggestion in the government consultation that brownfield sites would be exempt from the biodiversity net gain requirements, and I think the OEP objected to that. I would like to know what the outcome of that is. On the matter of water, we have done a report in this committee on drought and particularly the role of data centres and their vast potential consumption of water resources. They are not regarded as essential statutory consultees in planning for water resource. What are your thoughts about that?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We are very worried about the chipping away at a biodiversity net gain. We have smaller sites being excluded. We have larger sites. We have the proposal on brownfield sites. Most recently, in the NPPF there is a provision to say that local authorities cannot seek higher standards. We are very worried about biodiversity net gain and will continue to monitor the outcome. As you know, we commented, on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, that we thought that it was regressive in pure legal terms, despite its having taken on board some of our comments. But it is possible that it will not be regressive in practice. BNG is something we are particularly concerned about. In so far as we have made comments to them about biodiversity net gain, was anything taken on board?
Natalie Prosser: Not at the moment. The key issue really is that BNG has not had a chance to bed in.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, and then we bring along environmental delivery plans—
Lord Trees: Has a final decision been made whether or not to exempt brownfield sites?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, I do not think so.
Lord Trees: And the water question? Should planning and consultation of data centres be obligatory, to put their inputs into planning for water resources?
Natalie Prosser: There has to be a whole broader strategy about water resources, which goes beyond the specific question of data centres. We are looking at a very serious water resilience issue that is only going to be exacerbated, and we need to get very serious about it. The new regime for water reform has to grapple with scarcity as much as it does with pollution, and that includes demands from business and how water is used and the type of water that is used. I do think it is a serious question, and I would like to see the water reforms grapple with it. It would be unavoidable for national resilience.
Lord Trees: We are building all the data centres in the south and east of the country—
Dame Helen Ghosh: Which is the most water-depleted and most water-stressed area, yes. The Secretary of State, Angela Eagle, has clearly got resilience at the forefront of her mind, but how it will resolve itself in the water reform I do not know.
Natalie Prosser: Of course, data centres do not need to use water to cool. There may well be incentives in the current system to use water cooling but it is not the only option. That is why that water resources strategy is so important. If water was more expensive to use than other technologies, that might solve the core problem.
The Chair: And if water were not cheaper the more you use. Those tariffs really need to be addressed. Baroness Coffey?
Q11 Baroness Coffey: Good morning, Dame Helen; good morning, Natalie. This builds on what Lord Trees has just been raising. For openness, I was the one who basically wrote EIP23. Arriving in a department when I was told that it would not be possible to deliver it on time, I made sure that it was. It might not have been quite as fulsome as perhaps was liked; nevertheless, the key focus was achieving that apex target. I just wanted to get what level of confidence you have that the new EDPs are making it more likely or less likely to achieve that apex target, the one that is set out in primary legislation.
Dame Helen Ghosh: We have more confidence, because it has these substructures—[Interruption.]
The Chair: Sorry; I do not know how my phone went off.
Natalie Prosser: Is it EDP or EIP?
Baroness Coffey: EDPs—the new stuff brought in.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Oh, I am so sorry; I was thinking of EIP. Environmental delivery plans—we wait and see. In particular, if Natural England has enough resources to implement and monitor and do all the things that are necessary to achieve outcomes, then in principle they could be a good thing. It is itself concerned about—what is the phrase?—the measure of significant improvement.
Natalie Prosser: Overall improvement.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Does it achieve an overall improvement? They are, I think, concerned about how that is measured and whether it will be achieved, which actually goes back to the point about regression. Whether or not they will be attractive to developers is another matter. The chief executive referred to it; BNG is new, and then you introduce something else, and then there is something else. The welter of new provisions around the environment and planning is such that for anyone to understand it is a challenge, let alone for it seriously to have the positive impact we want it to have.
Natalie Prosser: The first EDP is due to be consulted on imminently, as I understand it, and that is rolling out as a pilot specifically to address nutrients—
Dame Helen Ghosh: In East Anglia.
Natalie Prosser: That is quite a narrow role. With the overall rollout of EDPs, particularly with the 10-year time horizon on their delivery, it will be nigh on impossible at this point in time to see whether they will have a positive or negative net effect, particularly on the 2030 target. It has the potential, but it also has potential risks. It is far too early to know, but I am very interested to see that first EDP.
The Chair: When my phone came on, I was just actually trying to remind myself what the Government’s apex target is. It is to halt the decline in species. Have we halted that decline in the abundance of species?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No.
The Chair: So we are still on the downward trend. We are still getting worse and worse, let alone improving and protecting the 30% by 2030.
Natalie Prosser: In practical terms, we are seeing some evidence of a flattening—
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, a flat-lining effect.
Natalie Prosser: But there is an awful lot of detail—which species are improving and declining—underneath that headline data, and you have to really get underneath it. Will what is happening at the moment allow that to flat-line and reverse? The 2042 target on recovering species is really salient. If the policies are not in place to realistically say with some confidence that we have halted, the prospect of that final target is put in jeopardy. It is possible, potentially, for the Government to hit the 2030 target, but that might not tell us in a meaningful way whether we are actually on course for the real win, which is reversing that decline. There is a lot of noise in the data at the moment, which makes it somewhat unreliable to say with certainty.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Our current investigation on SPAs for wild birds will throw up some very interesting data of the kind Natalie describes. I remember from when I was at Defra numbers of wild birds—certainly farmland birds—plummeting in the 1970s. Basically we were just about achieving flat-lining. In some areas of species, we are still only just doing that.
Q12 Lord Rooker: Can I declare an interest first? When I joined Defra in 2006 as Minister of State, Helen was the newly appointed perm sec. When I left Defra in 2008, she became a referee for me. That is on the record.
I am going to ask about waste inspections, but I just want to point something up about your organisation. In some ways it was touched on, but not in detail, by Lord Jay. Your organisation was really only set up following Brexit because we lost the ability to have fines levied by the European Union on people who were not delivering. I know, and you will have known as a perm sec, that when the fines were delivered it did make a hell of a difference in the attitude of the department. Your office was set up to replace that. Clearly you cannot fine the Government, but the importance of why you were set up was to replace that really powerful tool. In a way, the thrust of our questions this morning has been about how you are using that powerful tool.
My area of question is the waste inspection report, which found the Environment Agency’s regime for waste sites to be inadequate; that is a very polite way of putting it. We want to know what the response has been of the Environment Agency to your report—their failing on almost every aspect of waste. Following our waste report, they have not really done the business, as it were—other waste sites have been discovered—in being proactive. The evidence we have had is that they are not really meeting their key performance indicators. What is your approach? What has been your attitude to the Environment Agency’s response to your report?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I will hand over to Natalie on this since she obviously has been closely involved in it. I think the Environment Agency had recognised some of their failures, but certainly not all of their failures. Our report, particularly in relation to transparency, KPIs and process outcomes, has been very positive. We are working and will continue to work closely with them on outcomes. That is how we would summarise it.
Natalie Prosser: We had been engaging with the Environment Agency for some considerable time prior to publication of this report, and if you have read the report you will see that it makes for some very difficult reading in terms of the overall metrics in the quality of the inspections of regulated waste sites. I should be clear: it is regulated, not illegal, waste that we are focusing on.
To give the Environment Agency credit, although that has been a difficult process of surfacing these issues, they have engaged really meaningfully with what we have brought to light. The response to our report has not been published, but I do understand it to be imminent. My understanding is that all of our recommendations have broadly been accepted. It is not just the OEP that has brought these issues to light. There was a National Audit Office report along similar lines very recently, and the Dan Corry review surfaced similar issues. I have a pretty reasonable degree of confidence that the issues we have highlighted will be gripped. Shining a light on this, an area that is often not subject to this kind of scrutiny, will be a motivating factor in those changes sticking, and we will be following up with the Environment Agency to see the positive change. I have a pretty high degree of confidence that the issues raised have been taken seriously and will be addressed. There is work to do.
Lord Rooker: I will just ask you then finally: without going into any detail whatsoever, has your organisation ever been contacted by anybody unofficially from the Environment Agency—ie, a whistleblower?
Natalie Prosser: We have had whistleblowers come to us; I am not going to give any specifics—
Lord Rooker: I do not ask for that.
Natalie Prosser: We have had whistleblowers from within the public authorities we oversee, yes. I think we have had four in our last reporting period.
Q13 The Chair: I just want to ask a further question on waste. First, the issue that the committee identified was so much bigger in scale than we had ever imagined: 38 million tonnes of waste illegally managed every year, enough to fill Wembley Stadium 35 times over. That is not the sort of waste that is fly-tipped on the side—you know, the odd mattress or the sofa. This is organised waste on a very large scale. Because the scope of our inquiry was limited to illegal waste dumps and time was limited we did not look at permitted waste sites, so we are very grateful to the OEP for filling that gap for us, but it has really highlighted where the bulk of that waste is coming from—and it is coming from permitted sites regulated by the Environment Agency. What really struck me in your report is that the Environment Agency has been ticking the boxes off the KPIs when they obviously have not been met—not just by a small margin but by a large margin.
There is large-scale landfill tax evasion taking place right under the Environment Agency’s nose. This is where the bulk of the 38 million tonnes of waste is coming from. What does that say about our environmental regulator, that they can allow this level of toxicity to end up in SSSI sites like Hoad’s Wood and another one in Kent—in forests, in protected lands, in open land that people live in? This is really quite shocking.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is indeed, and when we produce our report on EIP25, we will be saying that the current set of targets to reduce illegal waste are inadequate and lack ambition and that they should be trying harder. We do not rule out the possibility of looking at illegal waste tipping at some stage in the future, depending on the success of the various initiatives that the Government have made recently on illegal waste. But I entirely agree with you; it is a shocking issue.
Natalie Prosser: It speaks to the real need to have that waste resources strategy, because these issues are fundamentally interconnected—how we use resources generally, how that feeds into the waste system and how it all hangs together. Of course, this committee has found very serious shortcomings in relation to illegal waste, and we have found fundamental weaknesses in the regulation of the licensed waste sector, although I said I have a lot of confidence that those issues are in fact being gripped. All that lends evidence to the fact that how we use waste, how we manage waste, and the approach to it is serious—
Dame Helen Ghosh: As a whole system
Natalie Prosser: —as a whole system, and does need to be gripped.
The Chair: Just a final question on waste before we let you go; I think we still have a few minutes. The Government has ambitions to deliver a circular economy model. To what extent do the leakages in the waste system here undermine that circular economy model? Natalie, maybe this is one for you.
Natalie Prosser: It is fairly fundamental—
Dame Helen Ghosh: I would say significant. I cannot see how it could be anything other than significant, for the many reasons you give.
Q14 Earl Russell: I shall be very brief. I too—I think the whole committee—welcomed your report, because obviously we looked at the illegal side and you looked at the legal side. The false positives coming from the EA inspections were extremely worrying, so I am grateful for your highlighting that.
I wanted to ask you a slightly broader question. My impression is that the culture in the department and in the EA has shifted substantially. Obviously that is partly a result of media pressure, and partly a result of our report and your report. But could I ask you just a little bit more broadly about the issue of compliance and the work of government departments? Are there lessons that could be learned, perhaps from the waste example, that could be applied to other areas of enforcement in government and the ways that actually your organisation and Parliament can hold other areas to account? Is it a case study that could be applied to other areas where actually we are getting false positives, for example, where—
Dame Helen Ghosh: Where no inspection was carried out? Yes. I would have thought that that is true in the generic sense of having processes, having data, having a focus on outcomes, and testing your data against reality.
Natalie Prosser: There have been multiple reviews looking at the whole system of environmental regulation. I do not need to repeat what they have found. There are multiple issues with the coherence of the system in targeting activity against greatest harm, and about the ability to take a risk-based rather than a resource-driven approach to regulation. There are lots of lessons. We did publish another report prior to this where we looked at inspection regimes across multiple environmental regimes, and we found really high degrees of variation in approach. That may well be driven by where funding is available as opposed to not. I think the answer is yes, but it is a whole-system issue, and we need to take forward these learnings both from us and from the other reviews and implement change.
The Chair: I come to Lord Redwood and then Baroness Coffey. Before I do so, we are nearly up against the clock here, and I just want to check with you, Dame Helen and Natalie, whether it is okay to take you over by a couple of minutes.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, certainly.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Lord Redwood?
Q15 Lord Redwood: What is your assessment of the quality of the regulatory work of the water regulator on Thames Water? Is that an area where you did intervene or might you be intervening?
Natalie Prosser: We have not looked at the specific economic regulation of Thames Water; that would be somewhat outwith our remit. We did look at Ofwat’s overall performance in terms of its enforcement responsibilities and its historical underenforcement, under our CSOs investigation, and that has driven a change in approach on Ofwat, but we have not looked specifically at its oversight of Thames.
Q16 Baroness Coffey: I was just thinking about the last question. You could imagine taking the Environment Agency to court, if necessary, for breaching the Regulators’ Code if they have misled on what is compliant or not. However, my real question is: do you see a role for the OEP following up and basically enforcing the rulings that have been made by judges, particularly the ones in which you intervene? I am very interested in the Pickering Fishery Association. It is a huge amount of work which the Environment Agency did not want to do. What progress is being made in that? It is more the broader principle.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is something that the board has recently discussed. It is all very well to say, “Done and dusted. We’ve done the report” or, “We have intervened successfully in the case”, as in the case of Pickering, “and now let’s move on to the next thing”. But in fact we need to make sure that the things said and the undertakings given are fulfilled and that the outcomes—we hope and trust—progressively improve. That is something we are now going to shine a light on—we always have done, I think; so a greater light—and, when we are talking about our strategy, really build into our processes a process for doing that, and using our relevant powers as necessary.
Q17 Lord Trees: Dame Helen, in your introduction you talked about nature-friendly farming being an important objective. Defra is about to open, I think, a second tranche of the sustainable farming incentive. Have you had any opportunity to feed into Defra in its developing that scheme?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Natalie can comment on, as it were, the history. We are worried about the current government Defra policy on SFI in the sense that they are putting all their eggs in that basket. They seem to be taking an approach of, “If we can get the maximum coverage of SFIs”—and perhaps some of those people will then move into the higher-tier landscape recovery or countryside stewardship schemes—“then everything will get better”. Actually, SFIs will not alone achieve the improvements that are necessary. Things like the underresourcing of the higher-tier schemes concern us. For instance, £500 million over 20 years is not very much money. Sorry, the second part of your question—
Lord Trees: It was about SFIs. Had you been able to input, as a regulator, to how they might tweak the SFI scheme to address some of your concerns?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Our concern is that they need to be putting more effort into the higher-tier schemes that will really make a difference to outcomes. In that sense, we have made our view very clear in our report on EIP23. We are also initiating an informal report rather than an investigation this year into what the broader elements are that will achieve the outcomes of nature-friendly farming. Defra tends just to talk about its ELM schemes—its support schemes—but of course, as we know, it is a whole ecosystem. We want to put ourselves in the best position to give the best possible advice and comment on what Defra is doing, so we are consulting and gathering data. We are having a round table in, I think, a few weeks’ time with everyone from the British Retail Consortium through to the real farming conference—those who are passionately engaged in the nature-friendly farming debate—so that we can get some picture of what needs to be done across the whole ecosystem to get nature-friendly farming to work. That will enable us to comment, to advise and to investigate as necessary.
Natalie Prosser: Defra has taken our recommendation on nature-friendly farming seriously, and we have seen an improvement in practice. We did not feed into SFI specifically, but there has been greater transparency and more coherence on the rollout of SFI this year. We have also seen the land use framework, recognising issues—
Dame Helen Ghosh: Ah, wonderful.
Natalie Prosser: The farming profitability review has got useful things in it, and the farming road map is particularly useful. Obviously now, as ever, it is all in the doing, but we have seen progress, to give Defra credit. Although not on SFI specifically, we do think they have taken our recommendation in that regard very seriously. The next thing is about how we look even more broadly about initiatives on farm, about the benefit of things like farm clusters and nature markets, and getting more investability into nature. There is an awful lot to play for, but we have seen some encouraging signs from Government.
The Chair: Excellent. Thank you, Dame Helen and Natalie, for being so generous with your time and for appearing before the committee and answering our questions with such openness and willingness as well. I know it is quite a challenging task for you to deliver scrutiny of environmental targets that seem to be slipping all the while, but thank you very much for your efforts in this regard. With that, I draw an end to the public session of this committee.
