Pages 16-17 of the Little Book:
Healthy soil and clean water should be non-negotiable. Yet these natural resources are exploited for profit and their protection eroded.
In 2018 Michael Gove launched a 25 year Environmental Plan. How’s that going? Followed by the Environment Act 2021 and the 2023 Environmental Improvement Plan. Lot’s of policy, no signs of improvement.
Now Labour is pitching a new approach to land use which they say will ‘empower decision makers’. And who are those decision makers? Ben Goldsmith, chair of the Conservative Environment Network and a non-executive director of DEFRA at the time of the 2020 Agriculture Act, remarks:!“When a fresh government of any kind is being formed, new ministers find themselves quickly encircled by powerful vested interests made up of people who consider nature and efforts to protect it merely obstacles to be steamrollered.”
Farming is important and rivers play a vital part in our ecology, especially in Uttlesford with its rare chalk streams. Let’s hope that Labour DO have a plan and it is not simply another surrender to big money.