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What we found in our investigation was shocking – if not entirely unpredictable. The Guardian reporting shows the UK is falling behind the EU on almost every area of environmental regulation – as the bloc strengthens its legislation, the UK weakens it. In some cases, ministers are removing EU-derived environmental protections from the statute book entirely. Our environmental law used to be tied to the EU’s. In fact, the UK used to be one of the more progressive voices in the EU parliament, pushing for many of the laws ministers are now itching to dump. The EU sets minimum standards for the entire bloc, making trade easier as chemical and agricultural standards remain largely aligned, encouraging heavier polluting countries to be in line with the others. The system is far from perfect, and some regulations are not always enforced, but at least the regulation is there to begin with. Now, of course, we are not in line with the EU. So when their board of experts deems a chemical too dangerous to be used and put out into the environment, we don’t doesn’t automatically follow suit. Eight rules restricting the use of hazardous chemicals have been adopted by the EU since Brexit, and a further 16 are in the pipeline. The UK, however, has not banned any substances in that time and is considering only two restrictions: on lead ammunition and harmful substances in tattoo ink. While their environmental regulations have tightened, ours have remained the same. As we reported, in practice it means water in the UK will be dirtier than in the EU, there will be more pesticides in Britain’s soil and companies will be allowed to manufacture or sell products containing chemicals that the EU has restricted for being dangerous. In other cases, the UK plans to dump EU-derived law from our statute books, on air pollution, water quality and rare habitats. This chasm isn’t only dangerous for our natural environment but it is also highly likely to affect trade because the EU won’t accept shipments with banned chemicals, for example. And Northern Ireland is stuck in the middle because with the Windsor framework, the agreement with the EU to avoid a hard border in Ireland (which you can read more about here), it has to keep some EU regulations. Not that regulations are being enforced there anyway, because due to arguments over the Brexit agreement there has been no functioning government for two years. My excellent colleague Rory Carroll has reported further on that. So how can this situation be fixed? Either we accept that our regulations are going to massively differ from the EU and swallow the environmental and trade consequences, or we beef up our regulators to track EU regulations and seeing if we want to mirror every single one. There’s another solution that environmental and legal experts prefer, which is known as “dynamic alignment”. This would mean we would mirror EU regulations automatically and not have to duplicate its processes ourselves. But it also gives the UK the power to diverge from some of these regulations if it chooses to. So we could still be in control of our own laws, we just wouldn’t needlessly be misaligned in cases where our understaffed regulators haven’t had time to mirror EU regulation. The Conservatives will never do this as it looks too much like taking instruction or direction from the EU. But Labour’s shadow environment secretary Steve Reed, who could be in government in less than a year, has said the likely next government is “very sympathetic” to the idea. So watch this space. Either way, this is likely to become a much more pressing issue in coming years as the environmental chasm between the UK and EU widens further. Read more: |
Some View on the World 