Guest election blog – A legal manifesto for wildlife by Carol Day

Carol Day is a part-time solicitor with public interest law firm Leigh Day. For one day a week, she works for the RSPB on access to environmental justice.

I’ve been asked to set out what I would include if I was fortunate enough to be drafting a manifesto for environmental lawyers – the key question being how can the law best address the crises of habitat loss, species extinction, raw sewage in rivers, polluted air and the devastating impacts of climate change?

Being an Aarhus nerd, I’d start with an Environmental Rights Bill (ERB) to enshrine in law a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment for everyone – and to strengthen the ability of citizens to hold public bodies to account when it comes to the environment, pollution and climate change. This would give proper effect to the UNECE Aarhus Convention (which has still not been comprehensively implemented despite the UK ratifying the Convention in 2005) and deliver on the commitment to a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment by the UN General Assembly in 2022 and the Council of Europe in 2023.

People feel let down by UK public bodies. An ERB would help meet the demand for public action to ensure a healthier quality of life – including urgent imperatives for clean air and water and access to nature. In addition to actively promoting climate busting energy and transport schemes and undermining nature and pollution protections, the current Government has implemented a programme of regressive new laws on public protest. Prior to these restrictions, it had been almost unheard of, since the 1930s, for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK. An ERB could reverse these draconian measures and empower people to protect the environment by protecting and strengthening their access to environmental information, participation in decision-making processes and access to the courts. It could reverse the impacts of over a decade of attacks on judicial review by guaranteeing that those brave enough to take cases to court, like Sarah Finch (whose ground-breaking Supreme Court case last week on climate emissions has significant implications for fossil fuel projects across the UK), are guaranteed protection from crippling legal costs.

My shopping list would continue with the introduction of an English Bill to mirror the Wildlife Management & Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024 with the power to rescind and withhold licences if birds of prey continue to “go missing” under suspicious circumstances on particular grouse moors.

I would also legislate for a ban on trail hunting and the introduction of a “Right to Roam” giving everyone the freedom to wander in open countryside, whether the land is privately or publicly owned (as they do in Norway, Sweden, Estonia and Scotland).  There are many other things I would include if I had more space, but I would also reverse proposals to undermine compensatory requirements in the marine environment under the Habitats Regulations and include a commitment to restore statutory agency funding to levels that enable them to fulfil their statutory functions, pinned to inflation, and without fear of recrimination – thus enabling them to enforce against polluters, provide bespoke (not just standing) advice in planning matters and monitor important wildlife sites appropriately.

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. They were commissioned by Wild Justice several months ago by approaching a wide variety of conservationists and environmentalists long before the date of the general election was known. Some people who originally agreed to write pieces found the date and short timescale impossible and had to back out. We did not know what they would write and their only brief was to pick one or two political parties’ election manifestos and tell us what they liked and didn’t like about their environmental policies. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.