A resident asked me to support the Nature’s Bill motion by the Green Party at County Hall on 22nd September. Here’s what I told him.
Thank you for writing to me ahead of the meeting, and for setting out your reasoning so clearly. I wanted to give you a proper answer rather than a one-line response, because you raised something I take seriously.
I didn’t support the Green group’s motion as it was originally worded when it came to Full Council on 22 September, and I want to be direct about why. This wasn’t a rejection of protecting nature. It was a refusal to sign this Council up to a Bill nobody in that chamber had properly assessed.
The motion asked us to back “the foundational principles” of the UK Nature’s Rights Bill. I read the Bill itself before the meeting, not just the campaign summary, and what I found should concern any councillor being asked to endorse it:
- Section 4 sets a legal hierarchy: nature’s rights come first, human rights second, and economic, corporate and property rights third. That places every farm and business in Norfolk below nature in law.
- Section 6 says economic hardship is no defence against the duties the Bill creates. This Council is carrying a highways maintenance backlog of over £70m, a stretched budget, and debt approaching £1 billion. There is no exemption written in for a public body in that position.
- Section 47 funds only the Secretary of State’s own costs. Not a penny is allocated to local authorities, despite the Bill placing new duties on councils, including Rights Impact Assessments before major decisions and a review of existing permits.
- Section 33 carries a criminal penalty of up to twenty years’ imprisonment for reckless harm, extending to individual officers for neglect, with no definitive benchmark for what counts as “reckless” set out in the Bill. That leaves it wide open to interpretation. And I’ll be blunt about the hypocrisy here: earlier in the same meeting, the Green group’s own Cllr Webb argued passionately that council officers must be protected and never left to “fall on their sword” over decisions taken above their heads. I agreed with her on that. But when it came to her own party’s Bill, a Bill that exposes those same officers to up to twenty years in prison on an undefined legal standard, that principle apparently stopped applying. You cannot demand protection for officers in one debate and hand them a prison sentence in the next. I wasn’t willing to let that contradiction pass unchallenged.
- The Bill creates a Nature Guardianship Council appointed by ministers, regional Bioregional Councils with no elected mandate, and a Tribunal that can order infrastructure removed or modified. None of that answers to anyone Norfolk residents actually vote for.
There’s also a basic point of due diligence. The Bill itself requires a Rights Impact Assessment before significant decisions are taken. The motion asking us to endorse it arrived with no assessment of what it would cost Norfolk, what liabilities it would create, or how it would interact with our own powers and duties. Supporting a Bill of this scale without that work done would have been irresponsible of any councillor, whatever their view of the underlying aim. I wasn’t prepared to do it, and I don’t think anyone asking us to sign up should have expected us to.
What I did support, and what the Council in the end adopted, was the amendment that kept our actual commitments intact: delivering the Norfolk Local Nature Recovery Strategy, protecting and improving our coast and heritage assets, and opposing developments like inappropriate solar farms that damage the character of our countryside. That is real, funded, accountable action. A letter backing an unassessed Bill with no money attached to it is not.
I share your frustration with the state of our rivers and the scale of sewage discharges. That is a genuine problem, and it deserves proper enforcement against the companies responsible, not a council signing a blank cheque to a legal framework with no costing and no accountability built in. If you’d find it useful, I’m happy to talk through what the Local Nature Recovery Strategy will actually deliver, and where I think the real gaps still are.
Thank you again for taking the time to write in. It’s exactly the kind of scrutiny I’d want from residents, and I’d rather give you my full reasoning than a vote with no explanation behind it.
Best wishes,
Gary Douglas-Beet
Norfolk County Councillor, Hingham Division
