When Labour won power last year, promising strengthened environmental protections and a reset with the EU, many environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps the damage of the Conservative government would be undone.
This was not to be the case. As we reported this week, Keir Starmer’s government has instead cut environmental protections further and faster than the Tories ever did.
Despite that promised “reset” with the EU, Keir Starmer’s government has failed to even start closing loopholes in environmental law that have widened since Brexit, and is in some cases choosing to delete EU environmental rules from the statute book. Our analysis found the UK is falling behind the EU in terms of protecting rare creatures such as red squirrels, cleaning up our polluted air and water, removing dangerous chemicals from products and making consumer items more recyclable and energy efficient.
One of the main reasons for this is that the bureaucrats at the EU are some of the best regulators in the world, with huge amounts of funding and expertise allowing them to, for example, decide which chemicals are dangerous and should be banned (think those lurid coloured dyes that are banned in Europe but still allowed in the US). They are also good at coming up with novel ways to remove pollution from the environment.
One example is water treatment. We are outraged in the UK about the quality of our water, from sewage being dumped in lakes, rivers and seas. Indeed, we are at the bottom of the leaderboard when it comes to the cleanliness of our bathing waters.
At the moment, we have three levels of water treatment in our sewage systems: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary is the removal of large solids, secondary is the removal of dissolved matter, and tertiary removes pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus. The EU is going one layer deeper and introducing quaternary treatment, a hi-tech way of removing microplastics, dangerous “forever chemicals” and other chemicals from waterways. And they are making polluting companies pay for these new treatment centres.
If we were still in the EU we would have to follow these rules, too. But there are no current plans for the UK to update our sewage systems to match the EU’s. We are falling behind, and simply not developing at the pace of other countries when it comes to removing harmful waste from the environment. (Even the red tape-free Singapore has quaternary treatment.)
Another major problem is where the UK has decided to actively diverge from the EU’s strong environmental protections. The Tories, for example, loosened EU air pollution rules, changing the thresholds for dangerous pollution in the air. They also started the process of removing the legal duties under the Water Framework Directive to monitor the cleanliness of rivers, and ultimately clean them up.
Labour is desperate to fix the creaking economy, and with the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, politically unable to cut spending or meaningfully raise taxes, economic growth is the only hope. Ministers therefore are happy to, for example, sacrifice the environmental regulations that limit developers from building in pursuit of that singular goal of boosting growth. This means tearing up the EU’s Habitats Directive, which is there to protect rare creatures like nightingales, red squirrels and dormice. This is the biggest divergence so far since Brexit and means that these creatures in the UK now have far less protection than they do in the EU.
You will remember from the bitter EU referendum campaign that those who were against leaving Europe were accused of “fearmongering” when they said that it would lead to weakened environmental protections. Former environment secretary Michael Gove promised a “green Brexit”, and Boris Johnson, prime minister when we left the EU, lauded our “world-beating” environmental protections and promised to uphold them.
Now the dust has settled, it’s clear that the “fearmongers” were right.
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