The Brexit gong rang three years ago, but for green campaigners that sound was also the death knell for U.K. environmental protections.
On the third anniversary of the U.K.’s departure from the European Union, a bill intended to revoke, replace or revise pieces of EU legislation is making its way through the House of Lords. It’s also targeting EU environmental protections that have been part of U.K. law for years.
Civil servants have until the end of the year to go through those 1,000-odd pieces of environmental legislation and decide which ones to keep or kill. Under the bill’s “sunset clause,” laws that haven’t been changed or repealed by the end of the year will automatically disappear.
NGOs warn that the resulting regulatory “bonfire” could lead to chaos.
“It creates real uncertainty for people as to what regulations still apply in the U.K.,” said ClientEarth lawyer Katherine Nield — a warning echoed by industry lobbies.
A report published by a coalition of green groups last month estimated the impact of weakening or deleting inherited EU environmental legislation could incur costs of £80 billion over the next 30 years.
“It seems completely bonkers to me,” said Nield. “It’s not good for business. It’s not good for people. It’s not good for the environment. It kind of seems like they’re doing it to make a point.”
Campaigners also warn the country has already fallen behind the EU in recent years on everything from pesticides and chemical legislation to air and water quality, leaving the U.K. playing catch-up.
There’s nothing to worry about, said a government spokesperson. “The U.K. is a world leader in environmental protection. Reviewing our retained EU law will not come at the expense of the U.K.’s already high standards and environmental protections will not be downgraded.”
Here are some of the key areas caught up in the U.K.’s regulatory revamp.
Chemical reactions
When it left the EU, the U.K. also parted ways with its chemicals legislation — known as REACH.
Its own system came into force in January 2021. It keeps the fundamentals of the EU’s approach but without the staffing capacity or extensive index to back it up. After Brexit, the U.K. lost access to the EU framework and its vast database of more than 23,000 chemicals imported or used in the bloc, as well as substances of special concern.
A 2022 report by the U.K. National Audit Office warned it’s likely to be “a further four years before [the Health and Safety Executive] reaches the full capacity it has planned for its post-EU Exit regulatory regime,” risking delayed decisions on restricting potentially dangerous chemicals.
The uncertainty is frustrating NGOs and industry alike.
Chemical manufacturers have criticized a persistent lack of clarity over where U.K. legislation is heading, while green groups say postponed deadlines for the industry to register substances mean the country won’t have the necessary data to regulate potentially harmful substances for nearly a decade.
“[This] is obviously a decade in which we won’t have data on substances … and I think there’s just basically an erosion of REACH slowly and some of the key principles behind it,” said Zoe Avison, a policy analyst with the Green Alliance think tank.
The EU is also tightening its own environmental protections in key areas like pesticides. Last month, for example, the EU’s highest court banned the emergency use of bee-killing insecticides; that same week, the U.K. government gave the go-ahead to the same substances.
“That divergence at the moment is looking like it can only be negative” for the level of environmental protection in the U.K., said Matt Shardlow, the CEO of NGO Buglife.
The U.K. has also failed to deliver on promises to draft new measures on the sustainable use of pesticides, originally due in 2018. “Every year, we’re told this is imminent. It’s always six months away, and it’s currently still six months away,” Shardlow added.
Politics and pollutants
Campaigners also point to air and water quality as areas where the U.K. is setting far lower standards than across the Channel.
The U.K. last year proposed a revamp of EU laws on air quality, setting an annual target of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter — a common air pollutant — by 2040. Months earlier, the EU had announced it would be targeting that same figure, 10 years sooner.
“There’s evidence to suggest that they could get there by 2030,” said Nield, the ClientEarth lawyer. “But they’ve decided to kick the can down the road for another decade … the numbers are rubbish.”
Experts are seeing similar divergences on water pollution.
While Brussels has set itself a 2040 deadline to fix water pollution and plans to make companies responsible for releasing micropollutants bear the costs of any clean-up, the U.K. has shied away from that rationale and fixed a more cautious 2050 timeline in its plan to tackle sewage pollution — which was panned by campaigners.
“My impression is that the EU, with regard to water, has been moving ahead with their thinking at quite some speed, especially in the last three years,” said Mark Owen, the Angling Trust’s head of fisheries. “If you look at their proposed amendments to most [of] the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, the thinking is ahead of what’s happening in the U.K.”
Conservatives vs. conservation
When it comes to conservation and nature protection, some campaigners have pointed out that it’s not all bad news.
In 2021, the U.K. announced a ban on bottom trawling — an environmentally destructive practice that involves dragging heavy fishnets across the seafloor — in four of England’s offshore Marine Protected Areas and is now mulling expanding it to another 13 areas. That’s something “we wouldn’t have been able to do inside the EU,” said Kate Jennings of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
But the U.K.’s legislative revamp puts key aspects of nature legislation at risk.
A government spokesperson pointed to new legally binding targets under the Environment Act — which aim to halt species decline by 2030 and then increase species abundance by 10 percent by 2042 — and its new Office for Environmental Protection watchdog, both of which will “protect and improve the environment.”
But the Retained EU law bill “basically threatens the best of the legal tools that we’ve got to achieve those targets,” said Jennings.
Many of the U.K.’s nature conservation rules stem from the bloc’s Habitats Directive, for example. If it gets ripped up or watered down, the U.K. may not have the legislative power to preserve protected wetland and wildlife sites, she added.
Nield, the air quality lawyer with ClientEarth, worries that critical pieces of legislation protecting air quality could be discarded — or even forgotten — under the pile of regulations civil servants have to sort through.
“[They’re] really critical legal protections that are there to protect, essentially, the lungs of our kids,” she added. “That’s really quite depressing. Really, people living in the most polluted areas are most at risk.”
