Environmental Audit Committee
Oral evidence: Assessment of EU/UK environmental policy inquiry, HC 537
Wednesday 2 December 2015
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 December 2015.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Professor Sebastian Oberthuer
Members present: Huw Irranca-Davies (Chair), Peter Aldous, Jo Churchill, Gerant Davies, Margaret Greenwood, Carolyn Harris, John Mc Nally.
Questions 1-51
Witnesses: Professor Maria Lee, Professor of EU Environmental Law, University College London (UCL), Professor Sebastian Oberthuer, Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development, Institute for European Studies (IES), and Nigel Haigh, Honorary Fellow, Institute of European Environmental Policy (IEEP), gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. This is the first public hearing of the Committee’s inquiry into the assessment of EU/UK environmental policy and we have three authoritative witnesses in front of us this afternoon. You are very welcome, and thank you for spending the time with us. Before we commence, and rather than me giving an elaborate introduction, I understand you may want to say a few words of introduction—brief words if you could—and do some scene-setting yourself. Do you have a preference in which order you would like to begin? Mr Haigh?
Nigel Haigh: Yes, Chairman, I would like to say some introductory words about the peculiar reputation that the UK has on environmental policy in the EU, as I think it would help your inquiry. I will keep it brief.
I will start by saying something about Parliament’s reputation; the UK Government’s reputation is something different. Fairly soon after the EU started its environment policy, the House of Lords established its scrutiny committee and the regular reports that they produced on individual directives were unique in the EU and established a reputation for being thorough and probing. EU Commission officials did not always like them—they were feisty, the chairmen were feisty—but it established the point that people in Britain were thinking about the issues. No other Parliament did it the same way. Other Parliaments certainly gave instructions to their national Governments on how to negotiate, as did this House, but that reputation depended largely on the House of Lords rather than this House. The fact that you are bringing this inquiry I find very encouraging and I congratulate you on taking it on. It is a difficult task.
Chair: Thank you very much. You have identified a potential weakness in current parliamentary efforts but also buttered us up extremely well, which is always good at the beginning of a session, so thank you for that. It is an interesting opening contribution as well, thank you. Professor Lee?
Professor Lee: Thank you. I am a professor of law at University College London where I work on EU environmental law. My particular interest is the way in which law shapes decision making, so the way in which law tells us what to take into account, who to involve, what might count as a good reason for a decision at the end of the process. For current purposes, that means that I am interested in the ways in which EU law enhances legal and political scrutiny of the implementation of environmental measures in the member states. Thank you.
Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Lee. Professor Oberthuer?
Professor Oberthuer: Thanks very much, and thanks very much for the invitation. My name is Sebastian Oberthuer; I am working at the Flemish Free University of Brussels at the Institute for European Studies. Perhaps what I can particularly bring to your inquiry is the work that I have been doing about the role of the EU in international environmental policy, obviously also the prominent role that the UK has played in shaping that international role of the EU. I am, furthermore, specialised in EU and international climate policy and law, which is obviously also a very prominent theme these days, on the third day of the Paris conference that we have today.
Q2 Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you all very much for those very succinct opening statements. We are probably going to move from one of you to another as we go along, but we may mix this up a little bit, if you are happy with that. To put some of this into historical context of why we are where we are, I will begin by asking Mr Haigh why the EU became involved in governance of environmental matters, and perhaps move on to the issue of whether, having got itself involved, it has fulfilled what it has set out to do and what its goals were on environmental policy?
Nigel Haigh: There was a big upsurge in interest in environmental issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s worldwide, and this was symbolised by the great United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, which made the point absolutely clear that environmental issues transcend national frontiers and have to be handled internationally. So, on the one hand, many member states were developing their own environmental policies and establishing Environment Ministers. The United Kingdom did that in 1970; it was the first in the EU to have a Department of the Environment, closely followed by France. In the United States, the US EPA was formed in 1970. The EU was confronted with the fact that here was a new issue—international—and there was nothing about it in the treaty. Did they have to ignore it, or did they have to take it on board? There were big debates, as you can imagine, and at the conference that preceded the accession of the UK, Ireland and Denmark in 1972, the assembled Heads of State and Government—which included the British Head of Government, Ted Heath—declared that the EU should have an environment policy, and asked the Commission to draft a programme of action. That is the origins.
Q3 Chair: Could I just ask you a strange question on that? If there was not such an institution as the European Union, with its three parts of governance and so on—if that was not there at the time when these debates were going on, would we have had to invent something to deal with the supranational issues? I know it is an odd one, because it is a hypothetical.
Nigel Haigh: It is a hypothetical question to which there is no answer but, since you have asked me, I will attempt one. There would have been two schools of thought. One would have said you can have international conventions on all these issues; there is no need for a new supranational institution like the EU. Others would have said, obviously you have to invent the EU. But that really is hypothetical.
Q4 Chair: Okay, thank you. The other question I ask is related to the goals. What did it set out to do, and has it achieved the goals?
Nigel Haigh: Not completely. If you had asked me in the late 1970s what the situation would be today, I would have been very surprised if the body of EU legislation that we have, the range of subjects it covers, the influence it has had in life would have been achieved. So I think the answer to your question is yes.
Q5 Chair: Perhaps I could extend that a little bit as well, to ask how the goals might have changed; what are the new goals, what have you seen that has changed on environmental policy, on sustainability policy, within the EU, at the EU level?
Nigel Haigh: It has changed enormously. The Brundtland Commission’s report of 1987 that gave it currency—it was around before—was quickly endorsed by most national Governments, and I am fairly sure that it was Mrs Thatcher in her Royal Society speech in 1988 who was the first British Government spokesman who said, “We endorse the concept of sustainable economic development.” That is what she said. If she had not said that and had said, “No, no, no! This has come up with some fluffy ideas that will not work,” history might have been different, but she said what she said. That has altered the scope of environment policy. It has given it a long-term objective for future generations.
Q6 Chair: If I could ask you one final broad question, as we set the scene, which is to do with the extent to which you believe that individual member states have been able to shape that EU policy in accordance with their own national objectives as well?
Nigel Haigh: Some have. Some have been very happy to be free riders and follow the lead of others. You can identify certain member states as clear leaders, originators of ideas, and the UK is certainly among that group. Germany is obviously one, the Netherlands is one, Denmark for some issues, France would claim it was. Italy would not—they are quite happy to say, “Well, we are not very good at governing ourselves. We will take on board what you decide for us.” The Mediterranean member states, when they joined, were happy to model their environment policies on what they had been given on a plate, and the same is true, largely, of Eastern European countries. So, yes, some member states have been able to shape EU environment policy, including the UK.
Q7 Chair: Thank you for that. Certainly, I do recall, and I think it is still the situation, that within the environmental sphere there is a loose grouping, who sometimes come together a bit more formally, of the so-called “like-minded nations” who are perceived to be more progressive on environmental matters, and that seems to reflect what you were saying there about some of the Scandinavian countries, UK, and others.
Nigel Haigh: I believe there is a group called the Green Growth group. I have to say, I know a lot about the first 30 years; I know much less about the last 10 years. Please put questions like that to my colleagues at IEEP. But I failed to mention Sweden, because it was not one of the original member states, but it is a major player on some subjects.
Chair: I am sure we will expand and come back to this a little bit, but I just wonder whether our two professors here have any initial observations on what they might have heard there?
Professor Lee: I might just add a couple of points. First of all, has the EU achieved what it set out to achieve? I think environmental protection is a process; it is never over, so the answer sort of has to be no. Yet at the same time I agree with Nigel that an awful lot has been done and one could look at it as a success in its own terms, but this will never be over. On the question: if the European Union had not been there would we have had to invent it? Well, if we were trading with each other, then probably yes, because that is another important aspect of EU environmental law, that it is often—for good and for ill—designed to support free trade between the member states.
Chair: Okay, we will move on. Peter?
Q8 Peter Aldous: Thank you, Chairman. I was just going to take forward the ideas you were exploring. Mr Haigh, how have the strategic objectives of EU environmental policy changed over the last 40 years? We now have, in the 7th Environmental Action Programme to 2020, nine priority objectives. How much different is that to what it was 40 years ago?
Nigel Haigh: Very different. Forty years ago there was nothing, so the Commission, in its first action programme, was publishing a sort of bill of fare of the wonderful things it might do, some of which it did, some of which it did not. But it started small and took obvious subjects like water pollution, air pollution, waste management, which are the traditional fields of environment policy and nature protection, of course.
Halfway through, when the Single European Act was adopted in 1987, it introduced the statement that environmental considerations shall be integrated into other policies. This altered the nature of EU environmental policy from being inward looking on narrow fields that did not touch the other bits of the Commission; it touched the member states, who had to implement the bathing water directive and the drinking water directive and so on, but the other bits of the Commission did not really notice that this little grouping was working. Once the statement of integrating environment to other policies, suddenly other directorates-general had to wake up because they were on notice that they were going to be interfered with, so the people dealing with agriculture, with transport, with energy, woke up and took notice. So it has evolved from being a narrow, specialist subject to being a broad subject that touches everything.
Q9 Peter Aldous: Would you say this evolution from being narrow to being broader has been a success?
Nigel Haigh: Yes and no. I would say yes to the extent that it is now recognised. People talking about the common agricultural policy know that its environmental impacts are a major consideration. This was not true 20 years ago, right? It is perfectly obvious in the field of energy policy that climate change has entirely altered energy policy, so that is now good. Even the transport people, who thought that the more roads you built and the more goods that moved around the better, now know that there are constraints environmentally. So yes, that is a success. Whether it has adequately altered those policies to be environmental is another matter. The answer is no.
Q10 Jo Churchill: I am interested, Mr Haigh, in the extent to which individual members are able to set standards that depart from EU norms and, in saying that, those—and your free riders, perhaps—that choose to adopt what suits them, higher or lower.
Nigel Haigh: I said something about this in my written evidence, but you must divide it into two. There are standards for traded products and there are standards for not traded products. Obviously, if you are selling motor cars, if there are different emissions standards in different countries, it makes it very difficult to make your motor car. So the EU sets standards for products and no member state may refuse entry to a product if it meets the EU standards. There is no scope for departure for products, except in exceptional circumstances and for products that are not exported. Take, for example, bisphenol A, a chemical that is widely used in all sorts of products: the French have introduced a ban, or are proposing a ban, on its use in till receipts. When you go to Tesco’s and buy something, you get a little bit of paper. In France, they say, “Guaranteed without bisphenol A” on the back. The French have notified the Commission of this proposed ban and the Commission now has to decide whether to introduce a Europe-wide ban or take the French to court for impeding the internal market. Because somebody making till receipts for sale will not be able to sell them in France if they contain bisphenol A. That is a battle, the outcome of which we will watch with great interest.[1]
That is products. When you come to things that are not traded, like a factory that does not move but emits smoke—emissions—out of its chimney or spouts into the river, standards are set in EU directives for those. It is open to member states, if they wish, to set more stringent standards. So it is the other way around from traded products. The argument there is that emissions standards do distort trade; if some countries do not have any standards at all, they can undercut countries that have standards, so we need to set some standards and it is a good thing for the environment that we set them anyway, but if member states want to go further, they are free to do so. The question whether emissions standards distort competition is an interesting one, because the European Union cannot and does not harmonise other factors of competition like labour rates, or geography; if you are discharging into a small river or a big river, environmental effects are different. It cannot do anything about that. But for emissions standards for fixed plant, member states have some freedom to depart.
Q11 Jo Churchill: In a supplementary, which you partially covered by that, in your view do the framework directives that set broad objectives but leave the choice of implementation and enforcement to the member states provide sufficient flexibility within that? Do they bend enough? A slight supplementary from your opening remarks, how is best practice spread?
Nigel Haigh: Can I just answer that technical question first, because it is easy. There is an organisation known as IMPEL, the Implementation Network, I think, which is bodies like SEPA in Scotland and the Environment Agency in England and Wales, and comparable bodies in all the other member states. It started as a voluntary association of such bodies. It is now being funded by the Commission and by some member states. It is a legal entity now. They arrange exchanges between themselves, so a Dutch inspector will go to Portugal to see how they do it, and vice versa; they write reports and they meet. Best practice is disseminated in that way.
Secondly—and I am talking now about industrial installations and it will be different for nature, obviously—there is an organisation in Seville in Spain that is called the IPPC Bureau, which, taking industry by industry, examines the technology that is available for reducing emissions, for being as good to the environment as possible, and publishes these, and they are guidance for member states to follow when authorising their own plant. So best practice is disseminated. These are published worldwide, so they become a benchmark throughout the world. That is the easy question.
The more difficult question was flexibility. Directives are binding as to the result to be achieved, but leave to member states the choice of form and method. So directives will often set standards, but how they are achieved is entirely a choice for the member states. Let us take the large combustion plant directive, which limited emissions of sulphur dioxide to combat acid rain. What it did was set a limit on the amount that each member state could emit to the air of sulphur dioxide. How the member states achieved that—whether by switching from coal to gas, by having renewables, by going nuclear or by massive investments in energy saving—was entirely a matter for the member states. When that directive was being negotiated, the Commission originally set the same standard for everybody, what percentage reduction you had to achieve. It became perfectly obvious in the negotiations that would never be agreed and as a result of a lot of horse trading, different member states agreed different emission caps—in microcosm, what is happening in Paris as we speak for climate emissions. During the negotiations, what would have been a fairly inflexible directive became much more flexible. The whole process of negotiation is effectively member states trying to ensure that this proposal, this ideal initial proposal, is modified to fit their needs. That is what it is all about.
Q12 Jo Churchill: By the introduction of flexibility, does it lose effectiveness?
Nigel Haigh: Probably sometimes yes, but it is better to be less effective and have some result than not be effective at all.
Chair: Thank you very much. We are going to keep the spotlight on you just for one moment longer if we may, before we turn our attention to our other two witnesses. John?
Q13 John Mc Nally: Mr Haigh, Thank you for your delivery and I am grateful to your comprehensive knowledge of the subject, and your recall is quite amazing as well, considering it is going over 40 years. I was particularly interested in your comparison of till receipts—I think probably all of us this weekend when we are in Paris will be collecting till receipts there and making comparisons when we get back here. Whether we are going to present tips or not is a different story. I think we will all do that. Following on from that, in the historical development of EU policy making and implementation, has it actually mattered whether particular member states are unitary and/or more federal? You mentioned SEPA earlier on, which obviously I have a great interest in.
Nigel Haigh: I am sure it matters. It obviously matters to the member states that they are what they are. But there is nothing particularly unique about the UK situation where Scotland has its own legislature. Germany is a totally federal country where Bavaria, which was once a nation and is now part of Germany, has its own legislature. When negotiating a directive, every member state seeks to ensure that it is workable within its constitutional and administrative arrangements. This is not to say that there have not been conflicts. I know, in the Scottish case, when the urban wastewater treatment directive—that covers sewage works—was being negotiated, it was at a time when the water authorities were being privatised in England and Wales, but they were not being privatised in Scotland. This directive imposed quite considerable costs in higher standards for sewage works. The officials negotiating it from DEFRA were not particularly worried about England and Wales because they knew the costs would fall on the companies who would pass it on to the consumers, and it would not fall on the public purse; it was not public expenditure. This was not true in Scotland, but I remember people in Scotland being very angry with the negotiators for apparently overlooking this point. So conflicts do arise.
John Mc Nally: Yes, they do, yes.
Nigel Haigh: I remember being invited up to Scotland by the Scottish Office, and I told them more about the EU because of this, and they woke up to the fact that they may have a different interest from the rest of the UK. I think they are very aware of that now.
Q14 John Mc Nally: The supplementary to that probably is that the UK has become more favourable in its structure and you have probably addressed that already with the legislators in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so how has this affected the relationship between the EU and the UK’s devolved Administrations? Has it caused lots of problems?
Nigel Haigh: That is an example of a problem that occurred before the EU, I think. I am not aware of it, but I may not know. I may have to pass on that bit.
Chair: Thank you very much. Breathe easily for a moment. We have subjected you to enough forensic questioning here. We are just going to shift for a moment. If you want to come back in at any point, please do, as we move the spotlight on a little bit. Margaret, you have an opening question to Professor Lee?
Q15 Margaret Greenwood: I do, thank you. In what ways do EU institutional arrangements contribute to effective environmental protection here in the UK?
Professor Lee: The thing that particularly interests me for current purposes is the approach of the Court of Justice to implementation and enforcement. So, in my written evidence I said EU law is not foreign law, it is domestic law. The Court of Justice is insistent that ordinary litigants, ordinary individuals and NGOs can use EU environmental law, even if it has not been implemented in the UK, even if it has not been put in an Act of Parliament or a statutory instrument. Ordinary litigants can use EU environmental law before the courts, and the courts are obliged to provide remedies. In some cases, those remedies are even more extensive than we would see for purely domestic law, to the extent that we can unpick domestic and EU law.
Margaret Greenwood: That is really interesting.
Q16 Chair: I just wondered—Margaret, sorry—could you give us some specific examples, recent examples?
Professor Lee: The ClientEarth litigation—I know you know ClientEarth as an organisation. The ClientEarth air quality litigation was a perfect example. The air quality standards were found in an EU directive, and the obligation to plan and report was also found in an EU directive. Now, the High Court and the Court of Appeal said, “We are not going to give you any orders Everyone agrees that the air quality standards have been breached, but we are not going to provide a mandatory order.” The Supreme Court, following European Court of Justice approaches, both gave a declaration in respect of the breach of air quality standards and required DEFRA to put in place a plan that complies with the directive. Now, to comply with the directive, exceedance—breach of the limits—has to be brought to an end in as short a period as possible. The Supreme Court suggests that it will be for the judiciary to supervise the compliance of the plan with the air quality directive, if a litigant brings it before the court, obviously.
Q17 Margaret Greenwood: When developing a proposal for a new item of legislation, to what extent does the Commission draw on and take account of the different conditions and circumstances of particular member states?
Professor Lee: The treaty requires EU legislation to do just that, so the different conditions around the European Union are clearly a relevant factor in legislation making. I say this with some hesitation because you can always find counterexamples, but I would suggest that legislation has become increasingly flexible in the sense of allowing member states to take account of their own geographical conditions. I will emphasise, you can always find counterexamples, but take the example that Nigel mentioned of the industrial emissions directive, where the Seville Bureau—to avoid the acronym—creates very detailed and sometimes quite challenging standards for the Environment Agency here to apply to factories. One of the reasons for not applying the emission limits in those standards is because geographical conditions would make it disproportionately expensive, for example. That is one example, but I would suggest that that is increasingly recognised in a very diverse union.
Q18 Jo Churchill: I am pretty dense with all this sort of stuff, so you will have to help me out here. I see a problem in that if a directive is not implemented in a certain way but there are escape mechanisms within the EU legislative mechanism, you can get a dissonance between a country that is trying to do the right thing but not achieving it for one reason, and then a completely opposite country not trying to do anything very well or very hard but not being penalised at all. Is that fair?
Professor Lee: Both propositions would be fair. It is both the case that there are challenges with flexibility and the case that there would be challenges with inflexibility. It is a constant debate and sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other side wins. It is a constant debate and neither approach is perfect, but one of the interesting things about flexibility in the European Union is that the flexible standards are always associated with very strict procedures, so you cannot do this in secret, without anyone knowing. These decisions are pretty much always public; they are reported publicly, they are reported to the Commission, they are reported to other member states, so you get that peer review that Nigel was also talking about. So yes, I agree, it can be a challenge, but equally there are efforts to put safeguards in place that, in turn, may empower civil society to do quite a lot of the environmental monitoring, and that depends on how strong civil society is in a particular member state. It is always imperfect, but there is something there.
Jo Churchill: Because it is that dissemination of that information down into business that ultimately makes the economic decisions that then empowers the movement forward as far as the environmental progress goes. That it is the worry within that, for me.
Q19 Chair: One of the ultimate backstops that sends the fear of God through Ministers in any member state is infraction. There are directives and there is enforcement, monitoring and compliance, but ultimately they do not want a demand for a cheque for however many millions of pounds.
Professor Lee: Sorry, they don’t want to demand?
Chair: They do not want a demand for payment landing on the doorstep of DEFRA because they failed on air quality or water quality. I think everybody would argue, even with flexibility of implementation, none of us would want the beaches that we used to have and the quality of the rivers. Would financial penalties, infractions, be the biggest hammer at the disposal of the EU institutions, or are there others that are more effective?
Professor Lee: The cases that you are talking about— the air quality standards, the water quality standards—are hard edged; they are the hard standards and they are indeed the ones that tend to get people’s attention. Financial penalties are very powerful but they are quite unusual. It takes a long time and a long, slow, and quite political process to get there. Yes, it is a big hammer, but I think the day-to-day political pressure that can be put on Governments and businesses through openness, through debate, may in some cases also be very powerful.
Q20 Geraint Davies: I should declare an interest, because I used to work for the Environment Agency in charge of flood risk management and adapting well to climate change in respect of flood risk. Obviously the Environment Agency is the environmental regulator, but the Government is now moving to create a new regulator for oil and gas, in my view to sidestep air quality standards in respect of fracking. What I wanted to ask is, if they do this, can we assume that the air and water framework directives, and so on, will basically protect us from any reduction in standards for emissions for air and water out of the process of fracking?
Professor Lee: I believe they will apply. The extent to which they protect us remains somewhat open-ended, does it not? But I cannot imagine that they would no longer apply just because we have a new regulator. They would still apply to the UK.
Q21 Geraint Davies: I understand, from talking to the Environment Agency about these things, that there is some move to change what is acceptable. Water waste, for instance: you will know that they put 100 chemicals into water going into fracking and there is the issue of what you do with the water after.
Professor Lee: I am not able to help you with the detailed points.
Chair: But we will have others in front of us who might help you on those topics.
Professor Lee: It would not be possible to simply avoid the directive by changing the nature of the regulator. But the detail, I’m sorry, I cannot help you with.
Nigel Haigh: Could I come in? The responsibility for implementing a directive lies primarily with the member state, and in the case of emissions in England and Wales, it is the Environment Agency that is the regulator. If that power is taken away from them and given to another regulator that chooses to take a softer approach, which I think is the question you are asking?
Geraint Davies: That is what I am saying.
Nigel Haigh: They can do that, but if it results in the breach of EU standards, it is open to anybody to complain to the Commission in Brussels. So if you have a new regulator that has a policy of being laxer, there may well be a period of time when laxer standards will happen, but there will be the thought that the community will try to stop that.
Q22 Geraint Davies: In other words, in the event that we left the EU through the referendum, which obviously we may, we would not have that extra protection and we could get a lower standard of regulation for fracking. That was the point I am trying to make. Thank you.
Nigel Haigh: But it depends on the terms on which the UK leaves the EU. If we remain part of the European Economic Area then, just like Norway, we are still bound by EU standards and have our own court proceedings.
Q23 Geraint Davies: I know competitive standards are lost, but all the environmental ones would still apply? Is that right?
Nigel Haigh: Some, but not all.
Geraint Davies: I thought so.
Professor Lee: If we were to join the EEA, which is many steps down the road, then air quality standards would apply. Some water quality standards would apply, but not all of them. It is not pure product standards under the EEA; it is much broader than that.
Q24 Chair: I am conscious that Professor Obertheur is sitting there, listening intently and looks as though he wants to chip in on what he has heard.
Professor Oberthuer: Yes, thank you. I was just thinking, if you take that a little bit further obviously then the UK would not be able to influence the further development of the standards any more, given that the UK in many areas has been a member of the Green Growth group and has helped the standards to be relatively high. It is a little bit difficult to extrapolate, though, into the future for several years, and then to think what might happen. That is a little bit of speculation.
On the question of the financial penalties, the research that is out there stresses very much that it is usually a combination of more facilitative and more enforcement measures that is applied, and it is exactly that kind of mixture that usually moves all the member states—not just the UK—where they have, in the early days of directives, problems in the implementation over time towards compliance. The financial penalties are only really the last stick that would be applied, but there is a lot of communication going on before that with the Commission in Brussels and so on, and sometimes peer processes with the other member states to learn.
Q25 Chair: Can I just ask what may seem like a slightly odd supplemental to that, to any of our witnesses? To what extent is the propensity of the EU institutions to get involved where they think a member state is failing dependent on the capacity of lobby organisations within a country? The clear illustration might be that if there are well developed, very articulate, very powerful organisations that would spot and identify where they thought something was not being done well and they would lobby not just here with the UK Ministers but out in Europe as well through confederations, does that differ between member states, and does it have an effect on compliance and rigour and the thrust behind environmental policies?
Professor Lee: There may well be research out there. I am not aware of any specific research on that. But it is very well known that the Commission lacks resources to do its own investigations, so much of the Commission’s enforcement activity comes on the back of complaints, and the better those complaints are—the more convincing, the more evidence, the more information—presumably that does help the Commission to take action. It seems likely that there will be unevenness around the member states, but how that runs through the process, I am not sure.
Nigel Haigh: It is obviously true that member states with well-developed NGOs who know how the system works use the system to make complaints to the Commission, in comparison with member states with weaker civil society. The Commission is of course aware of this and knows that numbers of complaints is not a fair indicator of compliance, so it tries to aim off. But as Professor Lee says, its resources are limited, and its more recent statements on its implementation policy are to set priorities so that they devote their attention to more serious breaches rather than to the ones that are more vociferously argued.
Q26 Carolyn Harris: I am interested to understand how the EU processes and enforcements fit in with our own. Professor Lee, how successfully do you believe the European environmental policies have been integrated into the UK’s?
Professor Lee: I am not sure that I can speak to how successful. What I would say is that it is very difficult to separate EU and domestic environmental law. EU environmental law is profoundly embedded in our whole environmental protection system, and picking apart national and EU would be very, very difficult. In that respect, it is supremely successfully integrated. That is not to say that it will not sometimes be an irritant when it is new, but so is any new approach or new legislation.
You started your question with enforcement. In terms of enforcement, as I said at the very beginning, the power of that integration and embedding is that ordinary litigants, individuals, NGOs, businesses, can use this law. It is not exotic or separate or different. They can just use this law in court and, in turn, in political debate.
Q27 Peter Aldous: Again, I am afraid you are sitting in the hot seat, Professor Lee. How do substantive and procedural obligations ensure that EU environmental law is properly enforced by member states?
Professor Lee: I suppose I should preface my answer by saying it is very imperfect, that implementation and enforcement is very imperfect, around the European Union. If you take procedural obligations, the idea is that individuals have rights: we have rights of access to information, we have rights to participate in decision making, and under EU environmental law we have rights of access to justice, and that access to justice should not be prohibitively expensive. So we have individual rights which are enforceable, and which we can demand. That empowering of individuals and environmental interest groups creates a space for political scrutiny and for legal scrutiny. As I said, it is not perfect; this is always going to be partial and problematic, but it means that someone can always be watching, and I think that that is as powerful as a single police officer sitting in the Commission watching what we are doing.
Q28 Peter Aldous: Just getting closer to home, how do you think that has actually impacted in the UK?
Professor Lee: I am a lawyer, so I am focusing on what goes all the way through the process, really, to a legal claim, while most of this will happen under the radar. But people have insisted on their rights to participate in decision making time and time again, and it might even be fair to say that that litigation is dropping off, presumably because that case has been made and been won and we are more careful to allow people to engage in processes. Again, I will mention the ClientEarth litigation. The empowering of an organisation like that by providing it with information, by providing it with standing before the courts and by providing it with this set of substantive and procedural obligations, turned out to be rather powerful. Of course, the air quality is still poor. So it is imperfect, but there is a process in place.
Q29 Peter Aldous: What level of compliance do you feel has been achieved in the UK?
Professor Lee: I could not even begin to answer that. I am sure you are getting regulators in who will be able to give you some sense of that. As a country, as a member state, we try to comply. When I go to conferences and listen to the Environment Agency, they are always trying, there are always good people striving to do what they need to do.
Q30 Peter Aldous: So, trying hard, but could do better, perhaps?
Professor Lee: I am not sure I could even go that far, but it sounds fair, yes.
Chair: In relation to that last question, does anybody want to add how we are doing? No?
Professor Oberthuer: Perhaps I can just say, one indicator that you may have across the EU is how many infringement proceedings are going on against each member state, and you find that information on the webpage of DG Environment. I just happen to have checked in the last few days; I think there were two or three against the UK, and that was a little bit below the average, if I remember correctly, across the member states. So, the UK was not doing that badly in that respect.
Chair: Not too many detentions for the UK. Carolyn?
Q31 Carolyn Harris: Professor Lee, what EU and national level mechanisms are there to scrutinise EU policy and legislation?
Professor Lee: Scrutinising the EU legislation, not the implementation? At EU level, the Commission tries to be an open organisation. If you look on their website they have big open meetings, big consultations about most of their major policy innovations in the environmental field, and legislation goes through a legislative process that is largely open and public. It has to go through the European Parliament, democratically elected, and it has to go through the Council, which is made up of EU Government representatives, member state Government representatives.
Scrutiny after legislation has been made—let us stick with how legislation is being made. The national level process, I suppose, is the subsidiarity process, which I am sure you are familiar with, where proposals are sent to national Parliaments who are allowed to provide a reasoned opinion to the Commission, but only on the grounds of subsidiarity—only on the ground that they think that this is a measure that should be taken at the national level rather than the EU level; so in principle, not so much on quality, but on subsidiarity precisely. There are other opportunities for the Commission and member state Parliaments to talk to each other. So there are certain processes for openness during the legislative process.
After the legislative process I think it is fair to say it varies. Some legislation is revisited under the current legislation itself. Very often in legislation, there is a provision, “The Commission shall report on this legislation in”—five, 10, 15 years’ time—“and shall put forward legislative proposals if necessary.” That is often in legislation: a provision for the Commission to review. There is also what has been called the REFIT process going on at the moment where, as I am sure you know, much of the environmental policy is being reviewed for effectiveness, cost effectiveness, along all those sorts of grounds.
Q32 Carolyn Harris: Do I take from that there is room for improvement?
Professor Lee: There is certainly room for improvement, but I think when we talk about reviewing environmental law and policy—environmental law and policy that is in place—we need to think about why, and on what grounds. I noticed from the written evidence that has been submitted to this Committee that there is some concern about the thinking behind some of the REFIT process, for example. Review and scrutiny and thinking about effectiveness are all really important, but I would not straightforwardly say that means everything needs to go through the REFIT process, for example. It is a complicated question.
Q33 Carolyn Harris: Is it co-ordinated?
Professor Lee: Is it co-ordinated? In what sense?
Carolyn Harris: Is it doing the job? Is it fit for purpose?
Professor Lee: It would depend on how it is implemented. If you imagine a piece of legislation that says, “The member states shall report on the implementation of this legislation every five years.” Well, if the member states do a good job, you will get a good sense of what is going wrong in the efforts to implement that legislation. Then, if the Commission reports itself the following year, and the Commission also does a good job and looks carefully at those reports and at implementation, then yes, the processes are there for it to be fit for purpose, for it to be very good. Whether it always is, that is more questionable.
Carolyn Harris: Thank you for your honesty.
Chair: Thank you very much, thank you very much. John, I think you were going to take us on to some questions primarily focused at our third witness today.
Q34 John Mc Nally: Thank you, Huw. Professor, just to give us a better understanding of the role in the EU, in an international context, how far has the EU replaced the individual member states as actors in the global environmental negotiations?
Professor Oberthuer: That is a very good question to start with. “Replaced” is perhaps not how I would frame it. As you know, also from the written evidence, most of the multilateral environmental agreements that we have today are so-called “mixed” agreements. That means the EU as a supranational organisation and the member states are members to these agreements and are therefore participating in the negotiations. Then it is a different question of how you negotiate. In most cases in environmental policy, in that field, properly defined, it is the EU speaking and frequently speaking through the European Commission. That does not mean the member states are completely out of the game, because there is co-ordination usually in a committee of member state representatives that determines the negotiating mandate, the negotiating position, and therefore what the objectives are that are to be pursued. In that sense, over the last three or four decades, I would definitely say that the EU as the EU and as its member states speaking with one voice in international environmental politics, has become much more prominent and much more of an actor.
Q35 Chair: Do you have an illustration? I could certainly look at things like international whaling conferences, for example, where the EU speaks with a very powerful voice and is at the top table speaking, but individual member states as well are out there, if they choose to be, pushing to strengthen that voice and so on and so forth. Do you have an example?
Professor Oberthuer: There are all kinds of examples. We have the climate negotiations going on right now where the EU speaks with one voice but then there are arrangements how you arrive at the position and who is speaking. There it is usually led by the presidency of the Council of Ministers that rotates every six months, as you know, with a prominent role also for the European Commission. There is a system that has developed that is called “lead negotiator system” where essentially under the lead of the Council presidency, negotiators are determined who will negotiate on a specific topic and who will lead the EU in the negotiations and represent it in the negotiations. That has been thought of as an innovation that has also strengthened the EU.
In the climate negotiations, for example, you have the EU as a member of that treaty, also, which allows the EU to be represented as the EU. You have a few other treaties where the EU cannot join—older treaties like the whaling convention, where it is formally not a member of that treaty because the treaty did not provide for that. Especially older treaties did not foresee that there would be what is then called a regional economic integration organisation that would be part of that treaty. You have that in the UN as well, where the EU is not a member as such. Then, frequently, it is a member state, be it the Council presidency, be it some other member state, that represents the EU, the member states overall. So, the arrangements can differ. Although mostly it has tried to speak with one voice, but there is—in the literature, for example, you will find what you seem to describe—one message that is delivered through many voices. That is in the system.
Q36 Chair: So the very direct, blunt answer to John’s question about the EU replacing member states, is that you would say that is not the case because there is input in the development of positions and policies, and there is input into the instigation, the conception of what the position will be, but also the development of those? There is a two-way, three-way, 27-way narrative going on in the background all the time?
Professor Oberthuer: Yes, so before you go to the negotiations in Brussels and other cities, the EU member states meet to determine the position. But you also have, like now in Paris, every morning what is called “co-ordination sur place”—the member states sit together and determine the next steps in the strategy also, what to do next. So it is a quite tight system with involvement of the member states on a daily basis.
Chair: Some people would think this technical detail is boring, but I love it. So, Jo and then Geraint. Jo?
Q37 Jo Churchill: Professor, I think I read in one of the submissions that all this lovely system has the downside, particularly going into Paris this weekend, of being so cumbersome that it stultifies the mood, if that is possible. Yes or no?
Professor Oberthuer: That has been a concern, especially in the past. That is true. If I remember, especially the 1990s, I would say, where there was sometimes talk about the “EU bunker”. That was because the EU would be so occupied with talking to each other and trying to define a position that they would not have enough time to talk to the outside world and lead the negotiations. That has improved quite drastically in the 2000s with this system that I mentioned, with the lead negotiator system, where there is more structured internal discussion that takes less time and so leaves more time for external contacts. It does not mean that there would not be at times internal conflicts, which make it difficult then to take a determined stance on certain issues, as you can imagine. It was in the Copenhagen climate conference that the EU could not agree whether to move from minus 20% to minus 30%, and so on. These days these are highly political questions, obviously, so it is perhaps also reassuring for the member states to know that one needs to first agree on these before they can be put forward in the negotiations. Certainly there remains a certain amount of tension between the energy that you need to invest in the internal co-ordination that may subtract from the energy that you can invest in the international process. As I said, you will also find that the literature has improved quite considerably over the past 10 years or so, I would say.
Q38 Jo Churchill: There is scope for improvement still further via the pre-meeting or whatever mechanism you use? The end of a virtuous system is that it does that broader thing—which I think was in Mr Haigh’s submissions—that it does spread good practice beyond the EU into a more global context.
Professor Oberthuer: It is difficult to find an area in life where there is not room for improvement, I find. It is relatively philosophical but perhaps also to just make the point from a different perspective: there is sometimes a trade-off between efficiency and participation of everybody in those processes. There is a balance and one could have an argument where the optimum balance is.
Q39 Geraint Davies: On this, and taking Paris as an example, is it not the case that if we do get our bunker mentality, or whatever it is, right, so we have a collective position, we have much more power and influence over the environmental world as part of Europe than if we left Europe—Europe on the one hand negotiating and Britain on its own with a different view floating around outside? Would you agree with that?
Professor Oberthuer: That would definitely be my analysis as well, as I think I have also put in the written evidence I have submitted. We also have all the analysis of how you would determine the power or the weight that you have in these negotiations. You look at the share of emissions; you look at the size of the markets that you represent and in all those terms obviously the UK on its own would have much, much less weight than the EU together has.
Q40 Geraint Davies: Going back slightly to a similar question I asked, I suggest that in the event that Britain left the EU there would be a risk of falling standards of air and water in terms of fracking and you said, I think, that as part of the EU the direction of travel is increasing environmental standards, not decreasing them, and often Britain takes a lead in that. That is correct, isn’t it?
Professor Oberthuer: At that in these areas Britain has been a force towards more ambitious standards, whether it is always moving up there I guess as a result of that also moving up. If the UK was outside of that, then also in these international negotiations perhaps sometimes the positions would not be exactly the same. That is pretty obvious also. The UK is, in my view, a major player within the EU, shaping the EU’s positions as it does the internal policies.
Q41 Geraint Davies: If we wanted to consider Britain leaving the EU in environmental terms, what I am trying to get at is whether you would agree there would be a risk, on the one hand, that our standards could slip if we were outside, or we could be part of an ever better solution inside? Secondly, if we are inside, we have much more leverage over the bigger picture, namely global climate change, working together in the EU rather than just having a lone voice outside. Would that be your view?
Professor Oberthuer: Can I just say yes?
Q42 Jo Churchill: What is the value added of EU action compared to the member states acting on their own, which is rather similar, I feel, to Geraint’s question?
Professor Oberthuer: I guess it follows. Obviously the EU, by putting its weight together, becomes a much more weighty and powerful actor. I think that has been really the basis of the EU becoming what has been described as a leader in international environmental politics over the past decades. It is just this aggregation of the weight of the member states and if each of them were to negotiate individually it is obvious that they would not have had the same impact.
Jo Churchill: The sum of the parts, yes.
Professor Oberthuer: I think you need to link that aspect to the development of the internal policy, because that has been really the basis also for the EU to act together. That has provided for the coherence; that has provided for the interest in internationalising standards. I see that very much as interconnected, these two things. It is not just saying to the outside, “We’ll act together” but also internally to have the conditions to be able to act together, to not have to spend days and days co-ordinating the positions but have a basis to work together.
Q43 Jo Churchill: So moving that on, on a supplementary question, because the EU is a little like a family and tensions emerge at times between EU member states—they do round a dinner table at my house so I am sure they do around the EU table as well—when they have emerged between particular states, how have these tensions been addressed? What mechanisms do you use to ameliorate those tensions?
Professor Oberthuer: First of all, I am never sure whether I like the family pictures.
Jo Churchill: Why might that be, Professor?
Professor Oberthuer: Perhaps just because family is something private. We are used to describing this as a team, I guess—
Jo Churchill: Okay, your team and there are always differences—
Professor Oberthuer: So there can be tensions but in many cases these are political issues that you then would address by negotiating and talking with each other as to what a compromise might be. There are trade-offs involved sometimes from one issue to the other because it is not only one issue that they are discussing. For sure, if there are 28 around the table, 29 if you include the Commission, there will not be everybody saying, “We agree on this text.” No, there are negotiations going on and that is pretty normal in politics. Sometimes you move it up a level.
Q44 Jo Churchill: Yes it is, so it is merely the mechanism of discussion and dialogue. By virtue then, that rather takes me back to that question: is that not mechanism by default then very cumbersome and perhaps less efficient than it could be? I am only throwing it out there.
Professor Oberthuer: The EU has established a very elaborate system that allows it to try to address these issues, not only at the negotiations but before. It links back to what I said before, that I see very much a link also to the internal policy development. That provides a basis for the EU to have a common position because it already unites the member states much more than it would unite any other coalition that may emerge at the international level of states that would try to work together. There are a lot of internal standards, so commonalities where one perhaps does not need to discuss any more because that is already enshrined in EU law, so everybody is on board. It provides for flow already in the international discussions. I think that is pretty important.
Nigel Haigh: I just wanted to sound a note of caution on the slight assumption that the EU is axiomatically going to be good for the environment because if it chose not to, it wouldn’t be. It is quite difficult to change quickly and it was very interesting to watch the new Juncker Commission—I suppose it is still new—when it came in, sending out a message that its focus was on growth and jobs and that the environment was an impediment to this. They would roll back, they would withdraw, the circular economy package that was about turning waste into resources, and they would review the habitats directive and so on because these were getting in the way. There are plenty of people who think that the environment is an impediment. There is lots of evidence that it actually works the other way but that is an argument worth having. The Commission initially took that view. It was quite interesting to watch the reaction because the reaction to the circular economy package came from some member states and some businesses who could see that this would disadvantage them. They put pressure on and, lo and behold, a whole new circular economy package is being presented. So the Commission has power not to make proposals and to withdraw proposals that have not yet been agreed. It has no power to remove what has already been agreed, unless the member states allow it to—the Council and the Parliament. It is not fixed, anything can change. The EU can change. I think we just want to bear that in mind.
Q45 Chair: It is a very useful, very instructive answer. I just want to check on a little item of housekeeping at the moment. We are likely to overrun by 10 minutes, are you okay until about 10 past? If Committee members can remain with us as much as they can that would be great. I understand some may have to rush off.
Can I just pick up on that point that has just been made, am I right then to assume from what you are saying that overall—perhaps I could ask Mr Haigh and Professor Oberthuer—that the EU, on balance, is a benign influence on the environment and on environmental policy? It is positive, based on its principles that were set out in treaties. Overall, at the moment, it chooses to be pro the environment: it could choose to do something else. Would your assessment be that, on balance, it is pro the environment, pro-sustainability?
Nigel Haigh: I would give an enormous answer to that because there are different voices that push and pull in different directions. That battle, exactly that argument, goes on inside the Parliament, inside the Council of Ministers, inside the Commission for every single issue that comes forward. Is this a good thing to go forward in this direction or is it not? On balance I would say, “Yes,” but I would say it doesn’t follow that it would always be so.
Professor Oberthuer: I very much follow that assessment. I am very thankful for the comments by Nigel that it is all relative. Also, what I said before and would be discussed at the moment, that it is also true for the UK. It is more, on balance, probably a relatively progressive actor within the EU. That is all currently, we do not know what will be in five or 10 years, it is all time-dependent. Probably what one can say is that there are many areas of environmental policy and international environmental policy, the EU has been, over the past one to two decades, more a leader and more progressive or ambitious than many of the other world players. That obviously does not give us any certainty that that would be the case in the future and it does not mean that that is necessarily the case for each and every issue. It is a very general balanced view.
Professor Lee: I agree with those references to the complexity of it and I think that one tends to have the tendency to compare what the EU is doing with what one sees in one’s national jurisdictions. So it is about the relative environmental commitments of these two institutions and that clearly colours anything that we might say. We might have a different view if we are in Wales or if we are in England or whatever. The political contingency of that environment commitment is one of the reasons why I think the institutional factors are important. They are not immutable, they could change but those institutional factors are about the European Union, not about its shifting political commitment to environmental protection.
Chair: Thank you, very helpful.
Q46 Peter Aldous: Professor Oberthuer, how well do you feel the UK has been able to shape the emergence of content of EU international environmental policy?
Professor Oberthuer: Again, considering the debate that we just had, it is a very general question. It might depend or be different from one issue to another—
Peter Aldous: Perhaps you might give examples where it has been influential and where it perhaps has been least influential.
Professor Oberthuer: Yes. On balance I would say, as I believe Nigel’s assessment was on domestic EU policy, also in shaping the international environmental policy of the EU the UK has been one of the major forces. That has various reasons; it is perhaps just because the UK language-wise—as was also mentioned in one submission—has an advantage. In comparison with the EU member states it has a very good diplomatic service—lots of embassies out there in the world, lots of contacts. It also has lots of expertise and experience that it can bring to the table. The things that I have watched and analysed has been one of the driving forces in shaping the EU’s position in these international fora. Obviously it is also the matter of the size of a member state, but it goes beyond that, I think.
Q47 Peter Aldous: Do you think there are any areas in which the UK could be doing better, where it could be increasing its influence?
Professor Oberthuer: You can always increase your influence. I guess there might be matters but I find it hard to think at the moment which ones those are where a particular member state like UK may have less of a stake. When it comes to perhaps negotiating the Barcelona Convention on the Protection of the Mediterranean Sea Against Pollution perhaps it might not be among the priorities of the UK to shape that. I would have to think hard first or pass for the moment on that one.
Q48 Peter Aldous: The question leads on from this and it may be that Professor Lee and Mr Haigh would come in on this: for all this involvement, do you feel that the UK’s environment has benefitted from it?
Nigel Haigh: I think there are very clear cases where it has. The most dramatic one is the removal of lead from petrol. When the decision was taken to remove lead from the petrol the measured lead in the air dropped quite significantly. That was a British initiative supported by Germany and the Netherlands, and the French eventually came round to it. You have to take it case by case. I could probably give you more examples if I had notice. I could probably give you some examples where it wasn’t at all obvious.
Professor Lee: There are lots of examples where following EU legislation we start doing better. Bathing water would be a famous one to add to the lead in petrol; some air quality; some of the water standards; they say certain migratory birds. The difficulty is that you are comparing it with the counterfactual so we would have developed domestic law in the absence of EU law in many of these cases. It may have been less demanding; it may have been less well enforced. It is inevitably a bit of speculation.
Professor Oberthuer: I guess you would have the area of product policies that Nigel was also referring to before, like CO2 standards of cars and so on, where obviously the UK also benefits from these standards being ratcheted up in discussions at EU levels.
Q49 Peter Aldous: During the course of this very good session, we have covered those countries that have had the most influence on EU environmental policy in terms of being both enduring and the strongest influence. We were talking, in no particular order, the UK, Germany, the Netherland and France have been mentioned, and I think Sweden also. What is driving those countries forward? Do you think it is genuine passion for the environment, wanting to help achieve better their own domestic foreign policy or perhaps to encourage EU integration? What do you sense the driving force is behind the various countries?
Professor Oberthuer: There are two questions here. I see that you are asking first, which countries are shaping the policy, which does not necessarily mean always driving them forwards but giving them the shape that they want to have, and, second, the countries you mentioned that have been influential and that is driving them forwards.
Being progressive is another matter where it depends a little bit from one issue to the other. On the shaping part, I see that many of these countries realise that legislative processes are going on at EU level, that EU policies are very important and they therefore obviously then pay attention to them. From what I see, especially in my field, climate policy as I mentioned, is that the UK is doing a particularly good job at influencing the agenda setting in Brussels and so on, being early on in the process. There is a lot of discussion going on, before the Commission tables any proposal, of stakeholder consultations and informal contacts. The UK has been particularly good at that in influencing that. I think I mentioned one example in my written submission of the recent climate and energy package in 2014, just the agreement at the heads of state level. Perhaps the others want to comment on this.
Nigel Haigh: I would add to that that obviously public opinion, cultural considerations, the strength of civil society and the development of the NGO movement plays a role. Public opinion is enormously important and that manifests itself quite differently in different countries. I remember a southern European admitting reluctantly that his fellow countrymen were quite happy to kill and eat wild birds, unlike outraged northerners who poisoned them with pesticides instead. I think it is true to say that the British do not like the idea of Greeks and French and Italians shooting wild birds but they are very happy to see them poisoned with pesticides, or don’t mind or don’t object in the same way.
Chair: Indeed, which is very similar to criticisms, counter-criticisms, I recall of a fisheries policy. How dare you tell us to outlaw the fishing of this species when you are doing X, Y and Z and so on?
We are coming to the close of this very useful first session but, Geraint, you had one additional question.
Q50 Geraint Davies: On a slightly different subject. You will be aware that the EU is negotiating with the United States and Canada a new trading regime, TTIP and CETA. There are concerns that will undermine environmental policy in the future because large companies will be able to sue Governments for changes in law that will undermine their future profitability. For instance, if we allowed fracking and then put restrictions on, we could be fined. Do you think there is a conflict between the environmental objectives and these big trading agreements and do you think environmental considerations should be built into those trading agreements?
Nigel Haigh: Well, I would prefer not to get into the TTIP. It is a very big subject and I do not know enough about it. It is worrying. I am sure that your other witnesses will be able to talk more about that.
Professor Lee: It depends entirely on the detail of the agreement, which we do not know yet. Like Nigel, I would be cautious about setting out an opinion in the absence of that information.
Professor Oberthuer: I guess it would flow from the treaty actually, that integration of environmental considerations, but that should occur at a very general level. What that now would mean for the specifics of that agreement I would also—
Geraint Davies: At the moment there are no binding commitments to the environment at all. I just thought I would ask.
Q51 Chair: I think, as our witnesses said, we can come back to that in the future with other witnesses. Could I simply ask before we close if there is anything that you think you want to add that we haven’t covered and you would want to put in front of us? By all means, by the way, if on reflection there is something else you think we should be aware of or something elaborated upon, please do write to us. We would like to hear from you but at this stage is there anything else you would like to add?
Nigel Haigh: Chairman, I did say at the beginning that I might say something about the reputation of the UK but it would take longer than we have time for so I won’t say it now. I will reflect whether I can put something sensible down in writing.
Could I just say one other thing that I hope is helpful to the Committee? I have just written a book. It is a history of the evolution of EU environmental policy that I would like to present to your Committee. I did ask a friend of mine who is a retired Clerk of the House of Lords Committee whether this would be proper and he said, “I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be it” so could I do that and I will give it to the Clerk.
Chair: That is very welcome. Thank you very much. Very kind indeed and we will declare it, of course, but thank you very much.
Professor Lee: That was very thorough. Thank you, no, nothing to add.
Professor Oberthuer: No, thanks. Thank you very much for the invitation.
Chair: Thank you all very much. You have got us underway very well indeed. It has been a very thorough session and, as I say, if you have any other thoughts including what you have just mentioned, Mr Haigh, please write to us; it will help us enormously.
Thank you.
Oral evidence: Assessment of EU/UK environmental policy inquiry, HC 537 18