Julie Marson MP on Environment Bill: 'We expect Duke of Wellington will drop amendment in favour of new approach'

If a week is supposed to be a long time in politics, the past two weeks have felt like a lifetime!

There has been the misguided attempt to conflate reform of the Parliamentary standards process with the issue involving Owen Paterson, resulting in his resignation as an MP, huge public interest in the Environment Bill related to sewage discharges, the COP26 conference, which is still working to get agreements that halt global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, and a landmark Budget and Spending Review. At the same time, as part of my job in the Ministry of Justice, I have helped shepherd the Judicial Review and Courts Bill through its Second Reading and into committee stage.

I could devote this entire column to the Budget, and indeed on the Treasury Select Committee we are scrutinising the many policies and announcements, but particularly noteworthy to me for our constituency was its recognition of the leading role science and innovation should play in the future of our economy.

Bishop’s Stortford’s place in the Innovation Corridor and as part of a world-leading sci-tech region will help to push areas like ours specifically to the forefront of our changing economic environment. As co-chair of the Innovation Corridor All-Party Parliamentary Group in Parliament, I have been working to advance its case to ministers ever since becoming an MP.

The Government has now committed itself to making sure the UK can become the science superpower that it needs to be in order to prosper as a world-leading 21st-century economy. It is just a start, but core science funding will be increased by a further £1.1 billion and I will be working to try to ensure that this funding will directly and positively impact us here in Hertford and Stortford.

The Environment Bill came back to the House again on Monday. The Duke of Wellington’s Lords amendment on water pollution has proved controversial. This stage is called ‘ping pong’ and is effectively a form of legislative negotiation.

As a result of this process, the Government has introduced a new amendment which will, for the first time ever, put on a legal footing the expectation that water companies must take steps to significantly reduce storm overflows. It puts more protections in place against water pollution than ever before and dovetails with existing provisions in the Environment Bill for each water company to produce statutory drainage and sewerage management plans. The Government will also have the power to direct water companies in relation to actions in those plans if they are not good enough.

This is good news for our rivers in Hertford & Stortford and we expect the Duke of Wellington will drop his amendment in favour of this new approach. I am absolutely passionate about our precious chalk streams and have spoken to both the minister and the Secretary of State about this issue in the past week and am pleased with the revised amendment.

I met with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury as part of my ongoing work seeking to improve our approach to delivery of public services in areas like rehabilitation, children’s services and homelessness. I recently published a report (with the Centre for Policy Studies) which made recommendations to Government about how to improve the effectiveness and performance of interventions. The report is long on detail, but the main idea I was trying to get across to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was the importance of shifting focus onto results when planning for and commissioning publicly-funded interventions.

Ahead of COP26, I was delighted to meet with the Bishop’s Stortford Climate Group. I raised the importance of local action task forces like theirs in the House of Commons chamber during the COP26 debate as I genuinely believe that the answer to many of the issues raised by climate change lie in local and individual actions, as well as Government action. The minister echoed this at the despatch box and I am pleased she provided that recognition.

I was also pleased to visit the mineral extraction site at Thorley Wash Quarry with Cllr Graham McAndrew. I was very interested to see how it is run and what they are doing to minimise any local impact on our environment. It was a useful meeting and I was particularly encouraged by the plans to develop the nature reservoir and lots of natural tree planting. The most important thing to me is protecting the beauty of our natural landscape now and in the future.

November is of course a time to pause in remembrance and reflection. I was delighted to attend the launch of the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal in Jackson Square in Bishop’s Stortford with local councillors. This charity, in its centenary year, has been the bedrock of many of Britain’s most special remembrance traditions and continues to do incredible work to support veterans and their families, both up and down the country and here in Hertford and Stortford.

The response and generosity of people on the day was absolutely wonderful. I am always honoured and humbled to be able to lay wreaths at our local war memorials to express our respects to those to whom we owe such an enormous debt of gratitude.

As always, if constituents are experiencing any issues of casework that I can help them with, please do get in touch with me via email at julie.marson.mp@parliament.uk.