Local MPs Urged to Oppose Government's 'Attack on Nature'

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Campaign groups ask them to resist removal on environmental protections

The eels crowd around a pipe after recent pollution incident in the River Brent. Picture: Michael Kenny

A local environmental campaign group has written to MPs representing constituencies in the borough of Ealing about the government’s policy on environmental protections.

Describing the planned deregulation being proposed by Liz Truss and her administration as an ‘attack on nature’, The Brent River & Canal Society (BRCS) is calling on the MPs to resist any loosening of laws which it says are critical to protect the environment.

One of the borough longest-established environmental groups, the society successfully campaigned for the creation of the Brent River Park in the 1970s.

The government is proposing to revoke many existing environmental laws by 31 December 2023. This includes rules which currently protect natural sites and their wildlife from potentially harmful development.

The BCRS says that the ripping up of these regulations would see the removal of protections for species vital for biodiversity gain, connected green and blue spaces for nature growth and sustainability and the weakening of water quality regulations protecting waterways from polluting sewage.

As BRCS Chair Nic Ferriday said, “This is a truly shocking proposal. The Government committed to legally binding targets to start nature’s recovery by 2030 and Ealing Council adopted its Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy in 2021 and its Biodiversity Action Plan in 2022. We have only 8 years left and ripping up existing protections will make these targets, on which our lives and those of our wildlife depend, impossible to achieve.”

BRCS trustee Katie Boyles added, “It is essential that the legal protections for nature are maintained and not ripped out or weakened within new ‘Investment Zones’, or elsewhere. We are in a Climate and Ecological Emergency. The government should be strengthening environmental planning rules, not removing them. We are asking our MPs to help us fight these proposals and to support us in our campaign to protect biodiversity and green spaces both UK wide and locally on their doorstep.”

Ben Morris of BRCS and the Clean Up the River Brent campaign commented, “The message from our waterways could not be clearer. We need higher standards and a greater enforcement of those standards. The government must play its part in protecting our environment, or we will see a spiral of extinction, culminating in our own.

“The government’s proposals are strongly opposed by Britain’s leading environmental organisations, such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Wildlife Trusts and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

Much of the legislation was introduced as EU Law which is now subject to a detailed review with a view to axing much of it. Originally it was planned to complete the process by the end of next year but business secretary Jacob-Rees Mogg has said there is an extension mechanism for the removal of specified pieces of retained EU law until 2026.

The new environment secretary Ranil Jayawarden told the Tory party conference that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) would stop being a “regulatory department” and become a department for economic growth.

His statement was reinforced by Kwasi Kwarteng who told delegates that the government would review, replace or repeal retained EU law which he claimed was “holding our country back” and there would be an accelerated deregulation in specific investment zones.

The BRCS also asked Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma to rethink his support for building a stadium and sports pitches on Warren Farm which, the society says, would cause mass biodiversity loss and irreversible damage to wildlife on this rewilded green space.

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October 13, 2022