Since its introduction by Jacob Rees-Mogg in the turbulent days of Liz Truss’s Prime Ministership, the catchily named Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill has had environmental organisations including The Wildlife Trusts alarmed at the possibility that important protections for our natural environment could be watered down or scrapped altogether.

If passed into law, the Bill would see all EU-derived legislation retained in UK law after Brexit either reformed or removed from the stature books at the end of 2023, at a potential cost of more than £80bn over 30 years.

It would also give Ministers the power to alter affected legislation without going through full Parliamentary process and prevent devolved nations from making their own decisions about which bits of EU-derived legislation they would like to keep or make stronger.

The worry for the environment is that a government focused on deregulation and ‘cutting red tape’ could use the powers given to them by the Bill to weaken or remove some of the more than 1,000 pieces of environmental legislation that would be in scope.

This includes laws that currently protect our most important places for wildlife, set minimum standards for air quality and require action to improve the parlous state of our rivers and streams.

In Suffolk, this could mean weaker protection from the impacts of new infrastructure development for parts of the Suffolk Coast that are home to some of the UK’s rarest and most threatened wildlife.

It could also mean progress to restore some of our most degraded rivers and streams slowing or stalling altogether. This, in a part of the country where pressures on water resources from the demands of energy infrastructure schemes like Sizewell C, rapid housing growth and agriculture, are set to get worse with climate change.

Over on the coast, where large areas are protected by EU-derived designations as Special Protection Areas (for birds) and Special Areas of Conservation (for other species and habitats), major infrastructure schemes that could affect wildlife in these places are subject to rigorous requirements to assess, avoid, and minimise their impacts on nature. The Retained EU Law Bill would put these protections at risk.

Natterjack toads that lay eggs in ponds in the Suffolk coast’s precious heathland, avocets that inhabit its wetlands and estuaries, otters that have bounced back from extinction to thrive in its rivers and streams all benefit from legal protection derived from laws we have inherited from the EU.

The fact that some in Westminster now want to send these laws to the shredder is ironic given that in many cases the UK played a leading role in creating them in the first place.

What nature really needs now that we have left the EU is a sensible and evidence-led approach to reviewing environmental legislation to strengthen and improve it where necessary and retain it where it is already doing a good job. 

The Retained EU Law (REUL) Bill is currently making its way through the various stages of Parliamentary readings, proposed amendments, and votes. This means that MPs could still decide not to pass it into law and instead start a more democratic and evidence-led review of legislation.

Unfortunately, in a vote following the Bill’s third reading in the House of Commons on 18th February, all of Suffolk’s MPs voted with their party and for the Bill.

This really shouldn’t be a whipped vote with MPs told to toe the party line – the future of our natural environment is too important for that.

Already more than 240 people in Suffolk have sent postcards to their MPs asking them to stand up for nature in the face of the threats posed by this Bill and other new Government policies and regulatory reforms.

It is now even more urgent that we collectively alert our appointed representatives in Westminster to the risks to nature and ask them to oppose the Bill in future votes.

You can make your voice heard by sending them a postcard directly to their office, tweeting them, or writing to them directly.

Find our more our on Defend Nature page.