UK delays signing of environment bill for third time

By Nneka Nwogwugwu

The Uk government has announced the suspension of the long-awaited environment bill, provoking fury from campaigners who said it would harm action on air pollution and water quality, as well as other key issues.
UK Minister told the Guardian Uk that the delay was a s a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, adding that the flagship bill is unlikely to pass before the autumn.
The minister at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Rebecca Pow, said: “We remain fully committed to the environment bill as a key part of delivering the government’s manifesto commitment to create the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth. Carrying over the bill to the next session [of parliament] does not diminish our ambition for our environment in any way.”
She promised that work on the bill would continue, including establishing the Office for Environmental Protection, a watchdog for the UK’s environmental standards that campaigners fear will not be sufficiently independent or powerful under the current bill.
Campaigners said this was the third time the bill, work on which began in July 2018, had been severely delayed.
Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace UK, said: “Time and time again the government tells us that ‘urgent action’ is needed to restore nature, that it will ‘build back greener’ and that we can’t afford to ‘dither and delay’. What then is it playing at by delaying the most important piece of environmental legislation for decades?”
Green groups warned that the delay could damage the UK’s credibility at key international environmental summits this year, including a biodiversity summit and the UN climate summit Cop26, to be hosted in Glasgow this November.
The bill will contain measures to improve the UK’s environment, which campaigners want strengthened further. Harry Bowell, director of land and nature at the National Trust, said that ministers’ proposal to protect 30% of the UK’s land for nature by 2030 should be enshrined in law in the environment bill.