Important report – Mark Avery

“Our better nature: why strong environmental protections matter” is designed as a briefing and provides a helpful summary of the much more extensive available literature on regulation and deregulation produced by many others. This literature relates to environmental, public health, social and economic matters published over at least the last three decades.

If the briefing helps to inform a wider audience about the social, economic, and environmental benefits of regulation and contributes to shaping public opinion on why we should oppose much of the deregulatory agenda, it will have proved its value. It may well reach more people than those other detailed and analytical investigations conducted over many years. Its Panglossian view of the future is one many of us would like to see. However, the briefing may be wildly optimistic in places about public support for regulation and how such support can easily be turned into effective action if at all. In parts, the briefing therefore really needs a more rigorous analysis of what went wrong and why on past regulations. That would then soundly underpin the preparation of effective alternative strategies rather than simply wish lists.

The briefing opens with a laudable plea for ‘common sense’ protections but deciding what is ‘common’ and what is ‘sense’ and the extent to which one person’s common sense can be another’s foolishness can itself be a veritable can of worms. Many people working in this field would also argue, unlike Unchecked, that ‘stripping back enforcement capacity’ did not undermine ‘the achievement of government policy goals’ but was in fact a specific and often explicit policy goal of government. They would strongly dispute the Unchecked assertion that deregulatory drives came about from ‘often knee-jerk responses to recession’. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, and Johnson all supported, encouraged, and indeed often introduced ,in various ways and to various degrees, deregulatory measures and policies. These policies were blunt instruments.

Unchecked is absolutely right about industry lobby influences and the adverse effects on the environment and public health that deregulatory policies have produced and continue to produce. However, these were intended consequences of successive UK Prime Ministers not serendipitous ones, whether we like it or not. If we do not recognise the deep-seated cause of the problem, it is difficult to see how we will achieve any effective remedy.

If the costs of deregulation are externalised, as they are, and borne by the environment and the weak and vulnerable in society, why should neo-liberal politicians bother about that? This is especially the case exactly because they are supported by very generous corporate funders and shady think tanks who want deregulation. These interests that particular politicians then represent are not bothered if the oversight system is not as efficient or as simple as it could be because they simply do not want working regulations. Trump’s dismantling of US environmental regulations overtly and covertly is a more primitive version of what has been going on in Europe again for decades.

Ideology and protected self-interest explain what the deregulators are about not social good, technocratic, well managed and efficient services. If the penny has not dropped – after what we have seen with COVID-19, outsourcing and the huge sums of money dispensed by the Chumocracy – it probably never will. Inefficient and incompetent private companies have been rewarded during the pandemic with huge contracts, without effective governance and on the back of years of running down environmental and public health regulatory agencies and bodies. These companies often had no track record of any work in public health, track and trace and PPE & lab manufacture. Why would they or the government that gave them contracts want better or any regulation and certainly not inspection and enforcement of those regulations? That may be the biggest lesson we should learn from the pandemic whilst of course welcoming the recognition by a wider public of the importance of nature to our well-being.

On tackling air pollution, Unchecked consider UK governments had ‘low ambition’ and gave ‘insufficient support for local level action’. This is simply incorrect. For those of us working in the field, it was and is clear that UK Governments had no ambitions at all to address UK air pollution problems and, rather like VW and Trump, had ambitions but also plans and actions that took us in an entirely different direction. The old saying that ‘ information is not power, power is power’ needs to be taken on board if such issues are to be ‘addressed’ effectively. Why would governments and political parties that benefitted from oil, gas and vehicle manufacturing support choose to control air pollution more effectively?

There is also a lot of rhetoric on how the current UK government will protect the environment that we can parcel up with all their broken promises to date. Again the COVID-19 crisis provides us with graphic evidence that deregulation of controls, the introduction of the private sector to whole new health and technology markets and the further dismantling of the NHS opening it up to ‘for profit’ companies is increasing not diminishing. Whether all or any or parts the various Green Recovery plans being developed across the UK come to fruition is a very moot point and the signs on a whole range of topics in terms of policy into practice do not look promising.

The Unchecked case study on REACH and Chemical regulation, in contrast to some of the perhaps rose-tinted case studies offered earlier, certainly tells it as it is in our race to the bottom. The briefing rightly gives the lie to the spurious rhetoric, touted by the UK government elsewhere on air pollution and planning and environmental protection, that we’ll have regulations post- Brexit that will protect the public health and environment.

There are plenty of opportunities coming our way on the environment but still many challenges that may scupper the development of effective regulatory structures.

2 Replies to “Important report”

Andra says:

December 6, 2020 at 10:27 am

“Our better nature: why strong environmental protections matter” is designed as a briefing and provides a helpful summary of the much more extensive available literature on regulation and deregulation produced by many others. This literature relates to environmental, public health, social and economic matters published over at least the last three decades.

If the briefing helps to inform a wider audience about the social, economic, and environmental benefits of regulation and contributes to shaping public opinion on why we should oppose much of the deregulatory agenda, it will have proved its value. It may well reach more people than those other detailed and analytical investigations conducted over many years. Its Panglossian view of the future is one many of us would like to see. However, the briefing may be wildly optimistic in places about public support for regulation and how such support can easily be turned into effective action if at all. In parts, the briefing therefore really needs a more rigorous analysis of what went wrong and why on past regulations. That would then soundly underpin the preparation of effective alternative strategies rather than simply wish lists.

The briefing opens with a laudable plea for ‘common sense’ protections but deciding what is ‘common’ and what is ‘sense’ and the extent to which one person’s common sense can be another’s foolishness can itself be a veritable can of worms. Many people working in this field would also argue, unlike Unchecked, that ‘stripping back enforcement capacity’ did not undermine ‘the achievement of government policy goals’ but was in fact a specific and often explicit policy goal of government. They would strongly dispute the Unchecked assertion that deregulatory drives came about from ‘often knee-jerk responses to recession’. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, and Johnson all supported, encouraged, and indeed often introduced ,in various ways and to various degrees, deregulatory measures and policies. These policies were blunt instruments.

Unchecked is absolutely right about industry lobby influences and the adverse effects on the environment and public health that deregulatory policies have produced and continue to produce. However, these were intended consequences of successive UK Prime Ministers not serendipitous ones, whether we like it or not. If we do not recognise the deep-seated cause of the problem, it is difficult to see how we will achieve any effective remedy.

If the costs of deregulation are externalised, as they are, and borne by the environment and the weak and vulnerable in society, why should neo-liberal politicians bother about that? This is especially the case exactly because they are supported by very generous corporate funders and shady think tanks who want deregulation. These interests that particular politicians then represent are not bothered if the oversight system is not as efficient or as simple as it could be because they simply do not want working regulations. Trump’s dismantling of US environmental regulations overtly and covertly is a more primitive version of what has been going on in Europe again for decades.

Ideology and protected self-interest explain what the deregulators are about not social good, technocratic, well managed and efficient services. If the penny has not dropped – after what we have seen with COVID-19, outsourcing and the huge sums of money dispensed by the Chumocracy – it probably never will. Inefficient and incompetent private companies have been rewarded during the pandemic with huge contracts, without effective governance and on the back of years of running down environmental and public health regulatory agencies and bodies. These companies often had no track record of any work in public health, track and trace and PPE & lab manufacture. Why would they or the government that gave them contracts want better or any regulation and certainly not inspection and enforcement of those regulations? That may be the biggest lesson we should learn from the pandemic whilst of course welcoming the recognition by a wider public of the importance of nature to our well-being.

On tackling air pollution, Unchecked consider UK governments had ‘low ambition’ and gave ‘insufficient support for local level action’. This is simply incorrect. For those of us working in the field, it was and is clear that UK Governments had no ambitions at all to address UK air pollution problems and, rather like VW and Trump, had ambitions but also plans and actions that took us in an entirely different direction. The old saying that ‘ information is not power, power is power’ needs to be taken on board if such issues are to be ‘addressed’ effectively. Why would governments and political parties that benefitted from oil, gas and vehicle manufacturing support choose to control air pollution more effectively?

There is also a lot of rhetoric on how the current UK government will protect the environment that we can parcel up with all their broken promises to date. Again the COVID-19 crisis provides us with graphic evidence that deregulation of controls, the introduction of the private sector to whole new health and technology markets and the further dismantling of the NHS opening it up to ‘for profit’ companies is increasing not diminishing. Whether all or any or parts the various Green Recovery plans being developed across the UK come to fruition is a very moot point and the signs on a whole range of topics in terms of policy into practice do not look promising.

The Unchecked case study on REACH and Chemical regulation, in contrast to some of the perhaps rose-tinted case studies offered earlier, certainly tells it as it is in our race to the bottom. The briefing rightly gives the lie to the spurious rhetoric, touted by the UK government elsewhere on air pollution and planning and environmental protection, that we’ll have regulations post- Brexit that will protect the public health and environment.

There are plenty of opportunities coming our way on the environment but still many challenges that may scupper the development of effective regulatory structures.
1. Mark says:
  
  December 6, 2020 at 10:56 am
  
  Andra – thank you

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