Recommendations
5. Government must
commit to improve the situation in all environmental areas, if
not in this Parliament then over the term of the next. (Paragraph
21)
6. The Government,
as we have recommended previously, should put the Natural Capital
Committee on a permanent footing to allow it to continue to co-ordinate
a programme to improve environmental monitoring data. The Government
should use the development of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
as an opportunity to identify any data gaps and inconsistencies
between databases, to produce a single dataset on the state of
the environment. This would … provide a key component of
an urgently required overarching Environment Strategy. (Paragraph
26)
7. The Government
should strengthen systems currently focussed on embedding sustainable
development and extend them to explicitly address environmental
and natural capital risks. Specifically, it should renew its programme
for auditing and improving departments' compliance with impact
assessment and policy evaluation guidelines, and include in the
review of departments' business plans an explicit scrutiny of
potential environmental harms. (Paragraph 55)
8. To help bring the
required leadership to environmental protection across Government
and beyond, the Government should establish an overarching Environment
Strategy to:
· set out strategic principles to guide
the action needed to improve the quality of protection over the
next 5, 10 and 25 years;
· include the actions and good practices
required in local government (for example in formulating new Local
Plans), as well as the actions needed in central Government to
help bring those changes about;
· facilitate a more informed discussion
between central and local government about environment resource
funding requirements for local authorities;
· encompass a clear assessment of the state
of the environment including in each of the 10 environmental areas
covered in our report;
· identify the research and analysis work
that needs to be done and coordinated to fill gaps in the data
that that such assessment requires;
· map appropriate policy levers to each
environmental area and set out a clear statement on the place
of regulation, public engagement and fiscal incentives as complementary
measures. Such a Strategy should involve, for example, a reconsideration
of the scope for greater hypothecation of environmental taxes
to support expenditure on environmental protection programmes;
· identify how Government, local authorities
and the wider community could co-operate to develop consensus
on the actions needed; and
· set out how environmental and equality
considerations will be addressed and reconciled in infrastructure
and other policy areas across all Government departments. (Paragraph
57)
9. As we have previously
recommended, the Government should extend the remit of the Natural
Capital Committee beyond 2015 to allow it to reach its full potential
and the Government should implement the NCC's proposal for a 25
year plan. But this will not on its own be sufficient to drive
environmentally protective Government action. The government should
set up an independent body—an 'office for environmental
responsibility'—whether by adjusting the NCC's remit or
creating a new organisation, to:
· review the Environment Strategy we advocate;
· advise Government on appropriate targets,
including in each of the 10 environmental areas we have examined;
· advise Government on policies, both those
in Government programmes and new ones that could be brought forward
to support the environment;
· advise Government about the adequacy of
the resources (in both central and local government) made available
for delivering the Strategy, and
· monitor performance against such targets
and regularly publish the results (or publish its audit of such
an assessment produced by the Government itself).
The proposals for legislation from the RSPB and the
Wildlife Trusts would address much of this necessary agenda, which
we therefore commend to the Government in this Parliament or,
given the proximity to the Election, the next. (Paragraph 58)
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