Stella Creasy and Richard Tice are pushing for Labour to allow a Brexit scrutiny committee to be formed in parliament, after the Guardian revealed environmental protections had been eroded since the UK left the EU.
The Labour and Reform UK MPs argue that there is no scrutiny or accountability over how Brexit is being implemented. Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow and chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, said the UK needed a “salvage operation” to clear up the environmental and regulatory havoc caused by Brexit.
The analysis by the Guardian and the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) has found that since Brexit the EU has brought forward 28 new, revised or upgraded pieces of environmental legislation that the UK has not adopted, and the UK has actively chosen to regress by changing four different pieces of legislation including on protected habitats, pesticides and fisheries.
Creasy said the prime minister, Keir Starmer, needed to move more quickly to repair relations with the EU and realign on environmental law.
“I am working with Richard Tice as well as other Brexit sceptics on restoring some sort of European scrutiny committee in parliament so we can decide if and when we want to diverge rather than it all being passive,” she said.
Creasy said: “We don’t have a body in parliament that knows both UK and EU law and can forge a way forward. This data from the Guardian and IEEP makes the case for having a scrutiny committee looking at if we diverge, and if we strengthen or weaken environmental protections. MPs aren’t scrutinising this at all at the moment; they don’t even know about what’s going on.”
One major issue is the planning and infrastructure bill, which overrides the EU’s habitats directive and allows rare habitats such as chalk streams to be destroyed if developers pay a nature restoration levy to government.
Chris Hinchliff, the MP for North East Hertfordshire, had the Labour whip removed for proposing amendments to the bill, including one to protect chalk streams from harmful development.
Creasy said she supported Hinchliff and that the UK should not be regressing from EU law.
She said: “I signed Chris Hinchliff’s amendments as I think he was right to bring these issues to the fore. There are good reasons to be concerned. Nobody wants to be the dirty man or woman of Europe, do they?”
Starmer and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have consistently pitted the environment against growth, blaming bats and newts for a lack of housebuilding.
Creasy said this was wrong: “There is no trade-off between the environment and growth; you can do both.”
She added that Labour had made some positive steps towards realigning with the EU: “Under the Conservatives they were pushing very hard for isolation and they were saying there were benefits to have separate regulatory regimes as if pollution would stop at a border. It doesn’t. The UK and EU reset deal is very clear about the climate crisis and the existential threats we face and that is encouraging.”
There was now less of a fear of joining in with Europe and adopting good policies that the bloc came up with, Creasy said. “The Tories wouldn’t even join the European biosecurity alerts because it had the word ‘European’ in, when there was foot and mouth in France they didn’t even want to know. We are over the hump of saying because it’s European then we couldn’t possibly do it. But now we need to scrutinise this Guardian and IEEP data and find the way forward.”
She said she was relaxed about working with Reform MPs, even though their views are diametrically opposed to hers: “Richard Tice and I can disagree over the benefits of alignment but we can both agree that parliament should examine these issues. Tracking environmental regulation has fallen to external bodies … no one’s checking or holding the government to account.”
Brexit campaigners said leaving the EU would allow the UK to “take back control”, but the UK has not decided on what to do about EU environmental directives and instead has passively fallen behind. For example, the EU has banned dozens of harmful chemicals under its Reach programme, while the UK’s new chemicals regulator has yet to ban a single one.
“Brexit has not led to parliament taking back control,” Creasy said. “We aren’t actively making decisions on divergence. Those conversations aren’t happening.”
Creasy thinks the UK should “dynamically align” with the EU, which means automatically adopting its environmental standards while reserving the right to reject some if they do not work for the UK. This means there would be less pressure on UK regulators to keep up, and it would also be helpful for trade, she believes.
“I’ve always been someone who supports the business case and the business case is you align by default unless there is a really good reason for why we shouldn’t,” Creasy said. “Since leaving the EU we have only actively chosen to diverge on a handful of things, but we have passively diverged on a lot.”
She added: “We need to say: can we align, how do we do that, why does it matter? We need a salvage operation because Brexit has been so damaging to our environment – there is no time to waste. We need to fight for the thing which will save the planet, which is to work with our nearest neighbours as quickly as possible.”
A government spokesperson said: “There are many areas of our environmental protections, like banning bee-killing pesticides, closing sand eel fisheries, restricting bottom trawling in sensitive marine areas, where the UK’s approach is truly world leading. There is more to do, and we need to unlock growth and promote nature’s recovery. Through initiatives like the nature restoration fund, our approach secures lasting improvements for nature and helps fix the failed status quo of time-intensive and costly processes to support the building of 1.5m new homes.”
