"ON Friday October 28th, Rebecca Pow tweeted that she was “delighted and honoured to be back with the top team in Defra.”

We must all hope that she can now address the government failures and chaos on many environmental fronts.

Also on Friday,the government admitted that it would not be able to fulfil its statutory duty to publish environmental bill targets.

The excuse given was, “the volume of material and significant response” to the Defra consultation on nature recovery in July, but this failure to publish clean water and biodiversity targets is in breach of its own Environment Act.

If this weren’t bad enough,the governmentis also trying to rush through its Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill.

Jacob Rees-Moog has claimed that scrapping EU law is necessary “to fully realise the opportunities of Brexit and to support the unique culture of innovation in the UK.”

This is nonsense and has led to widespread concerns about the environment,food standards and workers’ rights.

Many rightly fear that the rush to remove EU law risks undermining protections regarding water quality, sewage pollution, clean air, habitat protections and the use of pesticides.

I share the view of Craig Bennett, CEO of the Wildlife Trusts, “If it doesn’t have the bandwidth, capacity and focus to set a handful of targets for nature’s recovery, how on earth does it think it has the ability to review 570 pieces of environmental legislation in the next 12 months, as will be required by the appalling retained EU law bill?”

No wonder our new Prime Minister is not going to Cop27 and Downing Street “believes itis notthe right occasion for King Charles to attend.”

We are an embarrassment on the world stage and it is time that the government stopped claiming how green the country is and started to sort outthe mess."

DAVID LAUSEN
Staplegrove