Tag: James Bevan

The speech made by Sir James Bevan, the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, at Chapter Zero in London on 28 February 2023.

Introduction

Most of the really useful lessons in life I’ve learned from getting things wrong. I have often only found how to do something successfully by failing to do it the first time. And sometimes the second and third as well. But I have always learned from those mistakes – eventually.

This is one of those stories. It is a story of a work in progress, because while I and the organisation I lead, the Environment Agency, want this story to have a happy ending and are confident that it eventually will, we are still finding out what works and what doesn’t as we seek to get there and we don’t have all the answers yet: in fact, nobody does. But what I’m going to tell you is still, I hope, news you can use. And it’s possibly the most useful news there is, because it’s about how to tackle the biggest challenge of our time: the climate emergency.

What we decided to do

In 2019 we committed the Environment Agency to be net zero for carbon by 2030: that is, we would become an organisation that was no longer a net emitter of carbon and thus would no longer be contributing to climate change.

We did that for three main reasons.

We did it because the EA is a major player in helping the country as a whole get to Net Zero – for example by regulating down most of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change and advising on how to mitigate its extent and adapt to its effects – and we did not think we could credibly tell others what to do if we were not doing it ourselves.

We did it because much of what we do ourselves – building flood defences, tackling drought risk, helping design and create more resilient places – is all about tackling the impacts of climate change, and since we are trying to solve that core problem we did not want to be contributing to it ourselves.

But we mainly did it because it was the right thing to do. Climate change is the biggest of all threats to our world, and everyone needs to play their part in tackling it.

How we are seeking to do it

When we made that commitment we also took some important decisions about how we were going to achieve it. We would aim to do it through the classic twin-track approach: by cutting all our own carbon emissions as far as possible – and we set ourselves a target for that of cutting them by at least 45% by 2030 – and by offsetting the rest of our emissions through tree planting, habitat creation and other measures that take carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it up safely so it doesn’t drive any more climate change.

We also decided to adopt what was at the time the most comprehensive and scientifically sound definition of net zero. That meant we included in our target not just all the carbon the EA produces itself in its own operations, which is a lot – we pump a lot of water around the country to manage drought risk and alleviate flooding, pour a lot of concrete in our flood defence schemes, have a big vehicle fleet, hundreds of offices and over 12,000 employees, whose commuting we also included – but also all the carbon produced by our supply chain as well, which was considerably more.

Other definitions of successful Net Zero were then and are now available, most of which at the time would have given us a much lower carbon target and made our task a lot easier. But we like a challenge in the EA. And we wanted the outcome to be as ambitious and impactful as possible.

There was one further challenge element in all this, which was that there was no additional money to do it. We are funded mostly by government grant and the charge income we receive from those for whom we provide services, and neither of those income streams was going up. So we’d have to fund this from within our existing budgets.

How it felt

We have a saying in my executive team: “Everybody must be heard. We don’t all have to agree. But we do have to make a decision.” And on this decision everyone was indeed heard, we didn’t all agree, but we did eventually make a decision.

There was little debate over the principle of whether we should aspire to be a Net Zero organisation: everyone thought that was right. But there were two main areas where views differed.

The first was over the impact on our operations if we made that commitment. The EA exists to protect people and wildlife, and nobody wanted to compromise our ability to do that by chasing a net zero target that might undermine our ability to carry on pumping water out of homes or building flood defences, or all the other things we do to protect lives and livelihoods and create a better place. We settled that debate by agreeing that our commitment would be to do both things at the same time: we would aim to get to Net Zero by 2030 while continuing to deliver all the outcomes we exist to deliver for all the people and places we serve: reducing flood risk, regulating industry, preventing pollution, enhancing nature and so on. So there would be no stopping doing any of these things: instead we’d need to do at least some of them differently, sometimes radically so.

The second debate was a more philosophical one, which was this: at the time of the decision, we didn’t actually know whether or indeed how we could reach our proposed 2030 target. So was it right to make a commitment to do something without knowing precisely how to do it? That is exactly the sort of clear-eyed practical question you’d expect from an organisation like the EA which always wants to operate on an evidence-based basis, and when it sets out to do something always wants to be sure it will achieve it. For the EA, committing to do something we didn’t know exactly how to do – which meant we were taking a big leap in the dark – was very counter-cultural.

In the end we were inspired by something that many have called humanity’s greatest ever achievement: the US Apollo Programme. In September 1962 President Kennedy publicly committed the United States to putting a man on the Moon by the end of that decade and bringing him safely home again: a SMART target if ever there was one – specific, measurable and time-bound.

When NASA heard about this pledge – which they did at the same time as everyone else listening to the speech – they were incredulous. They had no idea how that would be done, and even if they had known, very few of them thought it could be done in the seven years that the President had promised. And yet we all know how that story ended: with Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface in July 1969. We thought that if the US could put a man on the Moon inside seven years without initially knowing how to do it, the Environment Agency could probably get itself to Net Zero in eleven years on the same basis.

The EA Board readily and unanimously endorsed that decision. They were then, and remain now, our biggest supporters and champions as we seek to deliver it.

How we set about it

Which was the next challenge. Once the decision in principle to make the EA Net Zero in 2030 had been made, there remained the small matter of how we were going to do it.

At Harvard Business School they drill into every aspiring CEO the same message: the main thing is to make sure that the main thing really is the main thing. So we made the climate emergency the Main Thing for the EA. We put it at the heart of everything we did and now do.

At the strategic level we made it the centrepiece of our Five Year Action Plan that drives what the whole organisation does. We put it at the heart of our new Flood Strategy, which among other things dictates how we spend most of our money. And we ensured that every time our executive leadership took a decision on any big issue, one of the questions we always asked before that decision was: how will this help us tackle the climate emergency?

At the operational level we put in place governance arrangements to monitor and oversee delivery of our new Net Zero goal. We established Senior Responsible Officers for the key elements of it. But – critically – we made achieving that goal the business of every single EA employee. We helped our people understand what the goal involved and why we were aiming for it, including by putting everyone through training at our online Climate Academy. And we encouraged all our teams to think for themselves and identify ways in which they could change what they did and how they did it in order to help us get there. Then we stood back and waited to see what would happen.

What happened was astonishing. President Kennedy’s commitment to an audacious but inspiring goal triggered a massive upwelling of enthusiasm and innovation from staff all across NASA. Exactly the same thing happened in the EA in relation to Net Zero. While some of the measures we put in place to get us there were necessarily driven from the top down – such as the decision that we would use low carbon concrete or alternative materials wherever they were available for all our construction – many of the things that happened came from the bottom up: initiatives invented by our local teams to cut, absorb or avoid carbon while delivering the day job.

Progress to date

I said this was a work in progress. We are now four years into our eleven year sprint to 2030, with seven still to go. How are we doing?

Not bad: in 2019/20 (our zero baseline year) our direct operational carbon emissions totaled 31, 284 tonnes, mostly from pumping water to reduce flood or drought risk and pouring concrete to build flood defences. By the end of last year (2021/22) we had got that figure down to 20,485 tonnes, a cut of more than a third. We report on these figures publicly every quarter – another incentive to keep improving.

We are finding new ways to do what we do. Example: using natural flood management techniques that don’t emit and actually absorb carbon such as planting trees, restoring rivers to their natural curves, creating hollows to store rainwater, all to absorb water and slow the flow which could otherwise cause flooding. We are also looking at more advanced technology like electric plant and vehicles, and hydrogen fuel cells.

Meanwhile we are starting to offset our remaining emissions. We have built a pipeline of potential projects to absorb and offset as much as we can, using land we own ourselves as well as potential partnerships with others. These UK- and nature-based projects will include tree planting, creating wetlands and other new habitat like salt marsh. Example: The Lower Otter restoration project in Devon, which will not only reduce flood risk to the local community, but will also create 55 hectares of intertidal saltmarsh, providing habitat for wildlife and sequestering carbon.

Will we get there?

Will we get there by 2030? Honest answer: I don’t know. As we’ve gone further it’s got harder. As we have improved our data we’ve found that we were emitting more carbon than we thought we were when we made the 2019 decision, which means we have more to do to get to Net Zero in 2030 than we originally understood. We are finding it a lot more difficult than we thought it would be to secure credible offsetting measures for the remainder of our carbon output: there are a lot of fake or doubtful “offset” schemes, and we only want to invest in the ones that are real. Our preferred approach to offsetting is for nature-based solutions and it will take time for those to have effect: however innovative we are, we can’t change the fact that trees take a long time to grow.

So right now I simply don’t know whether we can hit our original 2030 target. On our current emissions track and what we know we can currently offset, we won’t. Personally, I think we will. But that depends on several questions to which we don’t yet know the answer: on whether we can make deeper reductions in our own carbon footprint than originally planned, which in turn depends on technology not yet mainstream, affordable or even invented; on whether we can quickly find more offsetting arrangements that make a real difference; and on whether we can secure the funding we need to invest in that new technology and those offsets.

But seven years away from their goal, NASA also thought they weren’t going to make it. And EA staff are just as clever, innovative and dedicated as those who put Neil Armstrong on the Moon. So we are going to carry on driving towards that target, do what we can, use what we have, and see where we get to.

And while I would love to hit our 2030 target, not least since I have a big personal stake in doing so, if we don’t make it exactly on time it doesn’t mean that this isn’t something that’s worth doing. What matters is outcomes: driving down our emissions and locking up the rest as fast as possible. And to achieve that the most important thing is that we keep the goal in sight, that we get there as soon as we can, and that we continue to think differently about what we do and how we do it. Because if we are to tackle the climate emergency successfully – and I think we can and we will –– our thinking needs to change faster than the climate.

What I’ve learned

What have I learned from all this?

I’ve learned that getting to Net Zero is easy to say but difficult to do, and a good deal harder than I thought it would be. There are technical challenges: there are, for example, currently no ultra low emission options for some of the heavy plant we need to do what we do. There are resource challenges: we haven’t been able to fund things like electric charge points for all our offices and depots or convert our whole vehicle fleet to low or no emissions. And there are still cultural challenges: getting everyone in the organisation and all our supply chain partners to Think Carbon and put as much emphasis on reducing or avoiding it as they do on meeting their other operational targets.

But I’ve also learned that the decision to make ourselves a Net Zero organisation was the right thing to do, not least because it is giving us a whole set of benefits that I didn’t anticipate.

Not only did the decision unlock a massive amount of enthusiasm, experimentation and innovation from many of our staff, but it is also changing the EA culture for the better, making us more entrepreneurial, readier to experiment and innovate, and less risk-averse. That will stand us in good stead in the future for everything else we want to do. And the fact that the EA is visibly and explicitly committed to tackling the climate emergency, symbolised most powerfully by our 2030 commitment, has played a significant role in helping us recruit the talented staff we need at a time when the employment market is very tight and we cannot compete with the private sector on pay. That too will stand us in good stead in the future.

I promised you News You Can Use. How would I distill my advice to other leaders who want to get their own organisations to Net Zero? Here are my Top Ten tips.

1. It’s all about leadership. Organisations behave like their leaders. So if you are serious about getting yours to Net Zero, show it and mean it. Your Board and your executive leadership team need to be united behind the goal and visibly committed to reaching it. Staff are very quick to identify when their leaders do and don’t mean what they say.
2. The main thing is to make sure the main thing really is the Main Thing. If you want your organisation to get to Net Zero, you need to put it at the heart of your day to day business as an essential outcome that everyone is responsible for delivering, not treat it as a nice-to-have add-on or the responsibility of a few people in a Net Zero unit.
3. Too much communication is never enough. Talk regularly to your own staff about the goal, why it matters, and where you are making progress: nothing succeeds like success.
4. What gets measured gets done. Have a Net Zero metric as one of your Key Performance Indicators, review progress regularly, and intervene if you are off course.
5. Reinforce the behaviour you want: recognise and reward those who are helping get there and tackle those who aren’t.
6. Governance matters: work out how you are going to oversee delivery of your target, be clear who is responsible for what and hold them to account.
7. Experiment. Be prepared to take a risk that something won’t work: at the very least you’ll learn how not to do it.
8. Learn from others. Look at what other organisations are doing, share your own successful ideas and adopt theirs: none of us is as good as all of us.
9. Don’t be afraid of stretching targets. You will come under regular pressure to adjust or dilute the targets or the deadline or both to make them easier to achieve. Don’t, unless you think it will lead to better outcomes. Unless your organisation is really stretched by the targets, you won’t garner the momentum you need to get there.
10. The journey is as important as the destination. Even if you don’t hit your deadline, it’s still worth the effort: you will energise your organisation, stimulate innovation, attract more talent, and learn things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

Conclusion

Since I’ve been channelling President Kennedy, let me end with another quotation from him. This is for anyone considering whether to commit themselves or their organisation to tackling the climate emergency and setting a Net Zero target: “If not us, who? And if not now, when?”

The speech made by Sir James Bevan, the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, at Imperial College in London on 24 January 2023.

Introduction: the right kind of city

Close your eyes and picture a city. What do you see? I’d guess that whatever most of us see in our mind’s eye, it’s mostly grey – roads, buildings, bridges. When you say the word “city”, it doesn’t normally bring to mind things which are green, like leaves and grass; or blue, like rivers and lakes; or red, yellow, brown, black and white all together, like a goldfinch.

But the best cities, and the cities of the future we should be aspiring to build now, are not just grey: they are multicoloured – in their biodiversity, their ecosystems and their partnership with nature.

That is not just because those multicoloured cities are better places for people and wildlife. It’s because our cities – even more than our countryside – hold the key to addressing the biggest of all issues facing us: the climate emergency.

In praise of cities

It’s easy to find people praising the countryside. And rightly so – our own is one of the greatest inheritances we have, and we need to look after it. In the country we can still find things that are increasingly, sometimes vanishingly, rare in our urban environments: natural beauty, silence, darkness, tranquility. We can all draw sustenance from being out in the country and experiencing at least some of those things. Which is why a lot of the work of the organisation I lead, the Environment Agency, is about protecting and enhancing nature and the countryside.

But today I want to talk about something different. Today I want to sing the praises of the city, and not just the great city of London where we are today.

Cities matter. They matter because they are where most people on the planet now live. In 2010 the world passed a threshold that went largely unnoticed: for the first time in history more people were living in cities than in the countryside. That trend is going to continue: by 2050, most of the people on this planet (some 70% or more) will be living in cities and other urban areas.

Now this next bit may sound counter-intuitive, but that fact is good news, because cities are Good Things. They are more efficient at using resources, so they are a critical ingredient in securing a sustainable economy. They put out less carbon per person than rural areas, so they are critical in tackling climate change. They produce most of the resources we need to create the cleaner, greener world we all want. They offer social, educational, cultural and other opportunities that can be hard or impossible to access in many rural environments. They are centres of economic activity, knowledge and innovation, because they are the places where different people from different places with different skills, new ideas and talent congregate and spark off each other to create something new. Which is why cities are what have driven pretty much all human progress since the dawn of humanity. It’s not for nothing that the word civilisation comes from the Latin for city.

So what we need in future is not – as some might argue – fewer or less populous cities. What we need is bigger and better ones. Cities that retain all the fizz and energy of the cities of the past that have driven so much progress, but which in future use resources much more efficiently, create far less pollution, can stand up to all the impacts that a changing climate will throw at them and thrive, and which have more green and blue spaces to which all city-dwellers have equal access, so that our cities are a joy to live in for everyone as well as drivers of growth and progress. In short, we need to make our cities what the UN Sustainable Development Goals say they should be: “inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”.

The state of nature in our cities

At the heart of every good city is nature. So what is the state of nature our cities in this country? Short answer: a lot better than it was, but not as good as it could be. I know this because in 2021 the Environment Agency published a report on the state of the urban environment in England.

Let’s start with what’s got better. To illustrate this I want to take you back to the decade of my birth, the 1950s, and this city, London. It was then that three significant events happened that shaped this city we know now for the better.

Air quality: the Great Smog,1952

The first event took place in 1952, when thousands of people in London died as a result of the so-called Great Smog – the smoky fog caused by coal burning which eventually led to the Clean Air Act that banned smoke pollution. Most Londoners today have never even heard of smog, which shows you have far we have come. And it’s not just the smoke that’s gone: our air is much cleaner than it was overall. As a result of robust regulation of polluting industries, largely by the Environment Agency, emissions of some of the worst air pollutants have been massively reduced right across the country. Between 1970 and 2017 sulphur oxides (SOx) emissions have decreased by 97%, particulate matter (PM10) by 73%, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by 79%, and nitrogen oxides (NOx) by 73%. We need to go further, because air quality is still a major factor in unnecessary deaths. But we are making progress.

Flood risk: the Great Floods, 1953

The second big event happened almost exactly seventy years ago now, on the night of 31 January 1953. On that day, an anniversary we will shortly be commemorating, over 300 people died in this country when a massive storm surge caused sudden and catastrophic flooding of parts of the East Coast. While Lincolnshire, East Anglia and Canvey Island bore the brunt, London itself came perilously close to disaster. We have come a long way since then. We are much better now at warning people of flood risk and informing communities how to protect themselves. We have much better flood defences. The EA now deploys our people and kit quickly and effectively to help communities under threat. And – a direct result of the 1953 disaster – the Thames Barrier now protects 125 square km of central London, millions of people, and hundreds of billions of pounds of assets and infrastructure. It will continue to do that until at least 2070, but we are already planning for its replacement.

Water quality: the biological death of the Thames, 1957

The Thames was also the centre of the third big event. In 1957 the Natural History Museum declared that the river in London was ‘biologically dead’ because the water was so polluted. Since then, we have made great strides in restoring the water quality of the river, largely down to the investments made by the water companies and the introduction of much tougher rules about what operators can put into the river, enforced by the EA. Which is why the river is alive again, with salmon – always a sure sign of good water quality – back in central London.

Citytopia: imagining the future city

But it isn’t all good news. While here in London and in many other cities around the country the air is cleaner, the population is better protected against flood risk, and the rivers have come back to life, there are significant challenges that remain as our cities grow. Perhaps the biggest of those challenges isn’t actually out there on the streets, in our air or in our waters but in our own heads: if we want to build a better world then the challenge is to reimagine the city itself.

A utopia is defined as “an imaginary place in which everything is perfect”. Of course, nowhere is nor ever will be perfect. But it helps to have a vision of where you want to get to. What would Citytopia look like? It would be many things, but most of all it would be three things: clean, green and climate positive.

Clean

First, the environment in and around our future city would be pristine, with clean air, clean land and clean waters.

For the EA, that means continuing all the work we have been doing over the last two decades to stop the pollution that threatens those natural assets – regulating to ensure our air and water quality continues to improve, restoring contaminated land to its near-natural state, tackling the waste criminals who damage our communities and our environment through illegal dumping, and so on.

Green

Second, our Citytopia would be the best possible place to live: for wildlife as much as for people. That means more green (and blue) alongside the grey and black.

The EA is playing a major role in designing and delivering cities with that green and blue infrastructure. We are a statutory consultee on all major developments, and take an active role in placemaking, including by helping design in that blue and green infrastructure, and advising on how best to protect people from flood risk and enhance the environment. We are influential: more than 97% of planning applications are decided in line with our advice.

As part of that we apply the principle of what is technically called Biodiversity Net Gain, but which in normal English means development that leaves nature in a better state than it was. With our active support that principle was enshrined by the government in the 2021 Environment Act, which makes it a precondition of planning permission.

The government has recently announced another important step forward: its intent to make what is called sustainable drainage mandatory in new developments in England. This is another boring phrase for another really exciting concept. Sustainable drainage increases the ability of our cities and their drainage systems to absorb large amounts of water when it rains, for example by creating parks to act as giant sponges or putting grass on roofs to allow rainwater to drain away gradually.

As our cities grow and our current drains reach full capacity, as we concrete over areas that used to act as natural drains, and as climate change brings us bigger and more violent rainfall, these schemes can make all the difference between basements, underpasses, city centres and Tube lines that are flooded and dangerous, and a city that just shrugs its shoulders, puts up its umbrellas, and keeps going. Not only can sustainable drainage reduce flooding, it can also improve water quality, and provide more green – creating better habitats for wildlife and better places for people. The EA already designs sustainable drainage into the flood schemes we build and the developments we support.

Climate positive

And third, our future city would not just be a clean, green place where many would dream to live. It would also do something even more important than all of those things: it would actively help us beat the biggest of all challenges that we face, the climate emergency.

This Citytopia would no longer be part of the climate problem, because it would not be emitting the greenhouse gases that are causing our climate to change. It would achieve that with the right transport systems, so that people could easily walk or cycle to wherever they wanted to go or use cheap and convenient public transport fueled by renewable energy. It would have buildings designed to be energy efficient, heated by solar or other renewable energy and cooled by natural airflow designed into the building at the start. It would use all its resources efficiently and turn all its waste back into a resource to be reused again. It would have arrangements that allowed its inhabitants to share many of the things they needed (bicycles, vehicles, tools, etc) without having to buy or own them all, thus vastly reducing the carbon cost of producing, consuming and disposing of all the stuff we currently feel we have to each own ourselves. Our city might even grow much of its own food, including in so-called vertical farms – tall buildings or deep tunnels – and so avoid the carbon damage caused by transporting its food over hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles.

And our future city would not just stop being part of the climate problem. It would also be a major part of the solution. Its green areas – parks, woodland, grasslands, flowerbeds, football pitches – would all be acting as carbon sinks, taking damaging carbon out of the atmosphere and so reducing the extent of climate change. In its design and its infrastructure our city would be perfectly adapted to living safely and well in a climate-changed world. It would have flood defences that protected people from the worst that the violent weather caused by a changing climate could fling at it. It would have power and transport systems designed to cope just as well with periods of high temperature and drought as with record-breaking rainfall. Better still, its trees and plants would not just take carbon out of the atmosphere but cool the air and provide habitats for wildlife. Our city would not just be liveable: it would be beautiful. And by nurturing nature as well as the human spirit, it would lift us all up in mind and body.

The future is now

The good news is that this isn’t science fiction. A lot of this future is happening now, and the Environment Agency is helping it happen. I could replicate what follows from most of the cities in this country, but since we are in London let me give you a couple of examples from this city:

The London Olympic site. The Environment Agency worked with our partners before, during and after the 2012 London Olympics to transform what was a derelict and contaminated landscape into what was first the site for those fantastic games and is now Britain’s largest urban park and a vibrant new development with thousands of sustainable homes and businesses, better water quality, new habitats and lower flood risk – a better place for people and wildlife.

The Thames Tideway Tunnel. This is a new 25km sewer running from west to east London, mostly in a tunnel under the River Thames. It will address the problem of overflow from Bazalgette’s Victorian sewers, ensuring that after high rainfall sewage discharges are stored and treated rather than as now emptying straight into the Thames. That will bring the biggest single improvement to water quality in the Thames since Bazalgette. The EA has ensured it’s designed and built in ways which don’t just avoid damage to the environment but create something better. For example, a new piece of landscaped land jutting out into the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge which covers one of the main tunnel shafts will create a small park. And the project won’t just improve water quality in the river and provide amenities for the public. It will also help tackle the climate emergency, because it will increase London’s resilience to the higher rainfall that climate change is bringing.

None of us is as good as all of us: Imperial strength

So the future London, and the other future cities in this country, are being designed and built right now. But none of us is as good as all of us. If we are going to build the future cities we want – both in our heads and on the ground – we need to draw on all the energy, insight and expertise that’s out there.

Which is why I want to salute the role of the Grantham Institute and Imperial College in all this.

The Grantham Institute is delivering world-leading research on climate and the environment and – critically – turning that into real world impact. You are giving us all – practitioners, policymakers, businesses and governments – news we can use. And we are acting on that news. Keep giving it to us.

And here at Imperial you are doing all that and more. Your vision – a sustainable, resilient, zero-carbon future – is our vision. And your work is helping us realise that vision, including what you are doing on urban ecosystems, and your own Transition to Zero Pollution initiative.

It’s not just all of you here today and the rest of your faculty, researchers and academic partners who will change the world for the better. The students here at Imperial and in other institutions like this around the country will too. Because they are the people who over the next few critical decades will be playing leading roles in governments around the world, in research, in development, in businesses, in NGOs and the other major organisations that will be shaping the future world – and our future cities – in ways that can be better for everyone.

Before I conclude, please let me include a brief commercial for the Environment Agency. Our job is to create a better place. We are always looking for talented people who have a passionate commitment to that goal. There is a lot of that talent and commitment in this room, and at Imperial College more widely. So if you are interested in building the green cities of the future, or changing the world for the better in other ways, please think about joining us.

Conclusion

I said at the start of these remarks that it’s relatively easy to find people who will praise the country but there are fewer who will praise cities. That includes poets. But there are exceptions, including someone who is much more famous as a nature poet than as a writer about the urban environment.

That person is William Wordsworth, and I thought it would be fitting to end this speech – which is a speech in praise of cities in general and London in particular – with a poem he wrote over 200 years ago on Westminster Bridge. Wordsworth was looking at the London of 1803, a city that is long gone. But if we do the right things, in this city and elsewhere, his words could also be describing the city of the future.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The speech made by Sir James Bevan, the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, at the UEA in Norwich on 16 January 2023.

The speech made by Sir James Bevan, the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, on 29 November 2022.

Introduction: the story so far

Climate change is real and it isn’t to be taken lightly: on the contrary, it’s the biggest threat there is. But it’s often talked about in the same way in the same (rather techie) words, which can cause people’s attention (including mine) to drift off elsewhere. So today I want to tell you about climate in a different way, by using a fairy story – Cinderella – as an analogy. To be honest I’m not sure this really works, because as you’ll see it requires a fairly tortuous use of the story. But despite or maybe even because of that, I hope you will remember the message.

Cinderella is not a real person. But let’s start with someone who is, the UN Secretary General. “We are on the highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”. Those are his words at COP27 a couple of weeks ago. Not too cheery I know, but don’t worry, I’m going to get the positive bit in a minute.

First though I wanted to point out that many people are already living in climate hell. In the past two decades, climate-related disasters have nearly doubled compared to the preceding 20 years. They have killed thousands of people and forced hundreds of millions to flee their homes.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now estimates that nearly half of humanity is living in a climate-related danger zone. And it’s not just us humans – the species that caused climate change – who are in danger. More than 1 million other species are at risk of extinction.

And this isn’t just an issue for other people in faraway countries. 4,000 heat-related deaths have been recorded in England since 2018, drought has threatened our water supply this year (and continues to threaten it next summer if we don’t get good rainfall throughout the winter), sea level rise and coastal erosion are putting many British communities at serious risk, and flood events previously predicted to happen once a century are now nearly annual occurrences.

I’m not telling you all this to shock you into a state of helpless paralysis. In fact, despite everything I have just said, I am a climate optimist. Let me explain why.

Why the story can have a happy ending

I am a climate optimist because it’s clear that this story can have a happy ending. Tackling the climate emergency is not rocket science. We know what the problem is: greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are warming the planet, changing the climate and producing higher seas and more extreme weather. And we know what the solution is: we need to stop the emissions of the gases that are changing the climate (for which the technical term is mitigation) and we need to reshape our places, our infrastructure, our economy and our lifestyles so we can live safely and well in a climate-changed world (for which the technical term is adaptation). So the good news is that we know what we need to do. We just need to do it.

Writing a good story: mitigation and Prince Charming

And in many respects, we are starting to do it.

We have begun to make substantial progress on the first side of the climate coin: mitigation. That is happening at international, national and individual level.

We are seeing the global cooperation we need to tackle what is quintessentially a global problem, through the UN COP process, under which all countries are committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and to trying to keep global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Is that process perfect? No. Is it going as far and as fast as we would all like? No. But is it essential and is it making progress on reducing the causes of climate change? Yes and yes.

We are seeing many countries take action at national level to bring down their carbon emissions. The UK deserves credit for its own leadership here. In 2019 the UK became the first major economy in the world to legislate to reach net zero emissions by 2050. And since then we have cut our emissions by more than any other G20 country. That didn’t happen by accident. Planning, innovation, policies, prioritisation and resourcing the right things at the right time, actions that are being driven by many of you in the room today, have made securing a net zero future look both attainable and attractive, which is why many other countries are now doing what the UK is doing.

The Environment Agency plays a big part in helping mitigate the UK’s climate impact. We:

• regulate the carbon and other emissions of most industries, businesses and farms in this country. Since 2010 we have cut the emissions of greenhouse gases from the sites we regulate by 50%.
• administer the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, which caps and will over time further reduce the emissions of heavy industry, aviation and other significant producers of greenhouse gases.
• are walking the walk ourselves with our own commitment to make the Environment Agency and our whole supply chain a Net Zero emitter by 2030.

So the mitigation side of tackling the climate emergency is getting a lot of attention and airtime. Getting to Net Zero is popular with most people. It is something that almost everybody knows about. You could say that mitigation is the Prince Charming of the climate emergency.

Where we need a different story: adaptation

But there is a Cinderella in this story too: adaptation.

Even if we stopped all emissions of greenhouse gases tonight, those that have occurred over the last two hundred or so years since the Industrial Revolution mean that the climate will still continue to change. Which is why the other side of the climate coin – adaptation to make us more resilient in a climate changed world – is just as important as the mitigation which Net Zero provides. And here the story is less good.

While the 2015 Paris COP established a Global Goal on Adaptation, progress has been slow. And the complexity of articulating, measuring and implementing good adaptation means it has been largely ignored in favour of focussing on the easier to understand and measure mitigation targets. Which is one reason why in 2020 only about a third (36%) of global climate projects were related to adaptation. And why the UK Committee on Climate Change described adaptation as ‘The Cinderella of climate change, still sitting in rags by the stove: under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored’. And that has consequences.

Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy has said that the UK has so far largely failed to adapt much of its critical infrastructure to the climate emergency, threatening the country’s security and prosperity. Unless we can start closing the widening gap between adaptation action and worsening climate risk, various ugly sisters will rear their heads. We will see significant and growing threats to our habitats, our soil health, our crops, our power systems, our physical and mental health, and our economy.

And the longer we leave it to adapt, the bigger the bill we are handing to our children. Because it will be them who are forced to pay for the deterioration of our climate-vulnerable infrastructure and the disruptive consequences of climate impacts. Today flooding causes £670m worth of damage every year to non-residential properties across the UK. Unless we take further action to adapt, under a very plausible 2°C by 2100 warming scenario, those damages will be 27% higher by 2050 and 40% higher by 2080. This is not what the next generation need on top of the rising cost of living.

Writing a new and better chapter: adaptation and resilience

Luckily, Cinders may get to go to the ball after all, because a new chapter is in sight – one in which we do put as much emphasis on adaptation and resilience as we do on mitigation.

Last year’s COP26 in Glasgow started the process of transforming the Global Goal on Adaption into concrete actions. The agreement at the recent COP27 in Egypt on a new funding arrangement for loss and damage will help those countries most affected by climate disasters. And the COP27 negotiations prompted new commitments from the rich world to help, including from the UK which pledged to triple its international funding for climate adaptation.

Meanwhile here in the UK the government is gearing up to publish its third five-year National Adaptation Programme next year. This will set out the actions that the government and others will take to adapt to the challenges of climate change in England from 2024 to 2029, and there’s widespread agreement that it needs to be the most ambitious yet.

My hope is that the people in this room and others in government and the wider public sector will help shape and deliver that plan because, done right, it will benefit all of us. No Whitehall department, no public sector organisation and no private sector business is immune to the climate challenge: we all conduct activities or deliver services that need to be climate resilient, we all have or depend on assets and systems which need to withstand climate impacts, and we all have a duty to help protect the people we serve from the natural disasters and other consequences of a climate changed world.

The UK government has a leading role to play in this, and it is playing it. But in one sense governments, here and elsewhere, can only be the fairy godmother of climate adaption, because while governments can change some things, including by giving political leadership, setting standards and addressing market failures, they cannot change everything. For that, every section of society needs to play a part in making us resilient to a climate changed world: from businesses, to NGOs, to each one of us personally.

The cost of adaptation will always be an issue, especially at a time of pressure on public expenditure and people’s own cost of living. So let me make two points about the money. First, adapting to climate change is excellent value: every £1 invested produces up to £10 in net economic benefit. Second, most of the money we need to adapt to climate change won’t come from the government (which means the taxpayer) but from the private sector. That’s because only the private sector has the scale of the resources we need to tackle a challenge of this magnitude, and because private sector companies increasingly recognise that mitigating their own impacts on the climate and adapting their business for a climate changed world is not just the right thing to do but good business. Companies that do so will thrive, and those who don’t will not survive.

The Environment Agency is also playing a leading role in helping the UK adapt to the impacts of our changing climate.

We build, own and operate most of the nation’s flood defences, including the Thames Barrier which is keeping us in this room safe right now. Those defences – thousands of them now all over the country – are a practical example of how to adapt to the changing climate. And they work – over the last decade or so hundreds of thousands of people, homes and businesses in this country have been spared the trauma and loss of flooding because of those defences. Which is why we will keep on building and maintaining them, and why we are already planning now for the replacement of the Thames Barrier around 2070.

We are helping the country adapt to another risk that climate change is bringing: the opposite of flooding – bigger and more severe droughts. We’re working with the water companies to help increase supply, including by designing new reservoirs and water transfers, and to reduce demand, including by adjusting the licenses we issue for water abstraction so that only sustainable amounts are taken from our rivers and aquifers.

The EA is also playing a major part in helping create more resilient communities across the country through our statutory planning role, where we work with developers and local authorities to design and deliver places which are not only better adapted to a changing climate but better places for people and wildlife to live.

When the clock strikes 12: incident response

The EA is also helping the country to cope with the impacts of climate change in one other way: responding to the more extreme weather incidents and the growing threats to communities that climate change is bringing.

The EA is a Category One responder under the Civil Contingencies Act to flooding and other environmental incidents, which means that we – along with the emergency services and local authorities – are at the core of the response. We warn and inform communities when flooding is threatened. We operate our flood defences and deploy other hardware to reduce the risks and protect communities. And we put our people on the ground to help those communities when flooding happens. In February this year we helped manage the combined impacts of Storm Dudley, Eunice and Franklin by warning 60,000 properties of the potential risk of flooding, deploying 1,700m of flood barriers, and coordinating the on-the-ground response 24 hours a day, for ten days straight.

Services like this enable people to live with the risk of environmental disasters whilst helping to retain the value of places by protecting them from the worst that nature can throw at them, as well as enabling a quick recovery after an incident.

They also help keep the country going. For example, our warning and informing services enable other critical national infrastructure providers to continue their operations through an incident and help them plan for potential disruptions to reduce the time their services are offline. This helps to ensure things like our power supply and our rail lines are stable, reliable and safe during weather disruptions: a lifeline for growth, productivity and wellbeing.

And like all other climate resilient activities, investment in our incident management service provides excellent value for money. For every £1 spent on managing flood incidents there’s £6 of benefit to the nation. Plus, it helps keep people alive: priceless.

Putting Prince Charming and Cinderella together

How will the climate story end? Like Cinderella and Prince Charming, mitigation and adaptation need to go hand in hand if we are to have a happy ending. And the best interventions on climate change do both mitigate its future extent and adapt to its impacts.

That is why the EA favours nature-based solutions whenever possible, such as planting trees to prevent flooding by slowing the flow of water rather than building concrete walls, and to keep rivers cool and so protect freshwater habitats and the wildlife in those rivers. These sort of interventions don’t just deal with the consequence of climate change – more violent weather, higher rainfall, hotter temperatures – they also help reduce its extent, because they are carbon sinks.

Future fairy-tale or horror story?

I think I’ve probably stretched the Cinderella metaphor way beyond what it or you can bear. So let me conclude by bringing this back to the real world, to COP26 in Glasgow last year and a leader who is always worth listening to: Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados. In her powerful speech at the summit she said: “Our world stands at a fork in the road; one no less significant than when the United Nations was formed in 1945. But then the majority of countries here did not exist. We exist now. The difference is we want to exist a 100 years from now.”

We in the Environment Agency share that ambition for the world. We too want a happily ever after ending: a climate resilient world that is not just still here but better than the world we have now, for all of its inhabitants. The Cinderella story does have a happy ending, and if we do the right things, so can we.

And with that, I will stop and take some questions before I turn into a pumpkin…

The speech made by Sir James Bevan, the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, in London on 8 November 2022.

Introduction: reasons to be cheerful

These are dark times. So let me start with something radical: optimism. The biggest of all challenges we face is the climate emergency. If we fix that we can fix anything. And I’m here today to tell you that not only can we fix the climate emergency and build a better world, but that we will.

Now, the Environment Agency is an evidence-based organisation. And I try not to say things I don’t mean. So let me give you a couple of facts to underpin that upbeat assertion.

Fact one: it’s not rocket science. We know what the problem is: greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are warming the planet, changing the climate and producing higher seas and more extreme weather. We know what the stakes are if we don’t stop this: the survival of our species. And we know what the solution is: stop the emissions of the gases that are changing the climate and adapt our places, our infrastructure, our economy and our lifestyles so we can live safely and well in a climate-changed world. So: we know what we need to do. We just need to do it.

Fact two: we are starting to do it. If we are to beat the climate challenge we need several things to happen at once.

We need international cooperation. We cannot tackle the changing climate unless all the countries of the world work together, because the causes and consequences of climate change are global. And we are seeing that global cooperation, through the UN process that has set targets for all countries to meet and which will be taken further forward in Egypt later this month.

We need national action. Governments around the world are taking that action, including here, where successive UK governments have shown strong leadership. The 2008 Climate Change Act was the first time a major economy set legal limits to reduce its own emissions. In 2019 the UK became the first major economy to pass laws to end its contribution to global warming by getting to Net Zero by 2050.

We need businesses to play a central role. That’s because economic activity – mostly private sector – is the source of most of the carbon that is changing our climate, and because most of the power, resources, knowledge and innovation needed to turn that around is in the private sector. And we are seeing businesses step up to the plate, partly because it’s the right thing to do but mostly because it’s the smart thing to do. Businesses which are part of the solution to the climate crisis will ultimately outperform and outlast those which are part of the problem.

And finally we need ordinary people, each of us in our daily lives, to change how we think and behave. And that is happening too. Around the world people are waking up to the reality of climate change, adapting how they live their own lives to help reduce its extent and impact, and – critically – demanding that their own governments take action. That is not just happening in developed countries: people in developing countries are even more badly affected by climate change than we are, and they are demanding change. And it’s not just happening in democracies like ours: authoritarian countries are also experiencing this popular demand. Dictators know that staying in power ultimately requires them to address the concerns of their own people.

So the second big fact is this: that the things that need to be true for us to tackle climate change successfully – international action, national government action, business action, popular action – are true. Does that mean that we will definitely succeed? No. But does that mean that we will succeed if we sustain this coalition, maintain this momentum, and build on it to go further and faster? Yes.

And we can and are doing that. Let me give you some examples from my own organisation, the Environment Agency.

Strategy

Organisations need to know what they are for. It’s the job of their leaders to define that and make sure the organisation does it. As they teach aspiring CEOs at Harvard Business School, the main thing is to make sure that the Main Thing really is the main thing.

And at the Environment Agency we have made tackling climate change the Main Thing, and put it at the heart of everything we do. Our current strategy – EA2025 – sets the organisation’s strategic goals. The first of those is making our nation resilient to climate change. We put tackling climate at the very top of the list because without it we know we won’t achieve our other strategic goals: healthy air, land and water; green growth and a sustainable future.

Action: Net zero/mitigation

We are taking action to reduce the pace and extent of climate change by reducing our own and others’ greenhouse gas emissions.

We regulate the carbon and other emissions of most industries, businesses and farms in this country. Since 2010 we have cut the emissions of greenhouse gases from the sites we regulate by 50%.

We administer the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, which caps and will over time further reduce the emissions of heavy industry, aviation and other significant producers of greenhouse gases.

And we are trying to walk the walk ourselves with our own commitment to make the Environment Agency and our whole supply chain a Net Zero emitter. by 2030. In 2017/18 our carbon emissions totalled 32,450 tonnes, mostly from pumping water and pouring concrete to build flood defences. By the end of last year (2021/22) we had got that figure down to 20,485 tonnes, a cut of more than a third. Meanwhile we are offsetting more of our remaining emissions through tree planting and creating wetlands and new habitat.

Action: Adaptation/building back better

Everyone talks about net zero, and I just have. That’s important: the lower our carbon and other emissions, the lower the extent and rate of climate change. But climate change is already happening now and will keep on happening. Even if we stopped all emissions of greenhouse gases tonight, those that have occurred over the last two hundred or so years since the Industrial Revolution mean that the climate will still continue to change. Which is why the other side of the climate coin – adaptation to make us more resilient in a climate changed world – is just as important as the mitigation which Net Zero provides.

The EA is active here too. We build, own and operate most of the nation’s flood defences, including the Thames Barrier which is keeping us in this room safe right now. Those defences are helping us adapt to the changing climate and they work – over the last decade or so hundreds of thousands of people, homes and businesses in this country have been spared the trauma and loss of flooding because of our defences. We will keep on building and maintaining them, using natural flood risk management methods – tree planting, creating wetlands and storing water upstream to slow the flow downstream, etc – wherever we can.

And we play a major part in helping create better and more resilient places across the country through our statutory planning role, where we work with developers and local authorities to plan, design and deliver places which are not only better adapted to a changing climate but better places overall for people and wildlife to live.

As a species facing a climate changed world it’s not an exaggeration to say that we must adapt or die. But the point is not just to survive. If we adapt right we can thrive too. That’s because climate adaptation offers all of us, including every single business, a world of new opportunities. There are economic opportunities: to innovate and drive growth, and many companies are seizing those.

But the most exciting opportunity of all is the opportunity to create a better world: to build back better when flooding or drought damages homes and businesses; to create cleaner, greener cities which are more beautiful and better to live in than the ones we have now; to ensure that when it rains heavily our roads and railways don’t grind to a halt and our sewage systems don’t flush directly into rivers; to enhance nature at the same time as we lock up more carbon; and so on.

Conclusion

Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb, said that “The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true”. I guess on that definition I’m neither an optimist or a pessimist. I’d like to think I am a realist. This is certainly not the best, nor the worst, of all possible worlds. But if we tackle the climate emergency effectively, and my pitch to you today is that we have started to do so, then I do think that we can and we will create the better world we all want.

The speech made by James Bevan, the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, on 1 November 2022.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And in my experience everyone dislikes regulation until they need it, and then they want even more of it than we regulators can supply. All the politicians I meet, all the media that scrutinise us, and all the local communities in which we operate want more not less regulatory action from the Environment Agency (EA) to tackle things like waste dumps, smelly factories, dirty rivers and so on.

It’s a good problem to have. And a reminder that the answer you get to any question often depends on how you ask it. Does any of us want red tape and bureaucracy? No. Do we want clean water, air that’s safe to breathe, a green country, jobs and growth? Yes – and those are some of the things you get from regulation when it’s done right.

My pitch to you today is this: good regulation is essential for most of the things we all want. The report we are launching today “Regulating for people, the environment and growth” – the clue is in the title – sets out what the EA does to support those things.

But no regulatory system is perfect, including ours. Brexit is a massive opportunity to rethink how we do regulation in this country. The government has embarked on that process, and we welcome the debate. Today I want to suggest some pointers about where that debate might usefully take us and the key principles that I think should guide it.

Regulation works

Let me start with an important fact: regulation works. Examples:

Water security: the EA regulates the abstraction of water in this country. If you want to take more than 20 cubic meters a day out of a river or the ground, you need an EA licence. The EA has been reviewing, changing and in some cases revoking these licences to bring them into line with what is sustainable. That has removed the risk of the abstraction of some 1.7 trillion litres of water. That’s enough water to supply London for two years. Nature, wildlife and all of us are better off as a result.

Water quality: in 2021, due to the EA’s regulation of water companies, a record 99% of bathing waters around England’s coasts met or exceeded the minimum quality standard. That is the highest level it has been since new tougher standards were introduced in 2015. Thirty years ago most of our bathing waters would have failed to meet even the minimum standards we have now. Regulation did that.

Air quality: since 2010, emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the industrial sites we regulate have decreased by 72%, sulphur oxides (SOx) by 90%, and small particulate matter (PM10) by 52%. So our air is cleaner than it was, and cleaner air means people live longer and healthier lives. Regulation did that too.

Waste: I have called waste crime “the new narcotics”: it harms people, places and the economy, including by undercutting the legitimate waste industry. Our regulation of the sector ensures waste is managed safely and our fight against the criminals helps the economy: every £1 we spend on it brings at least £4 of benefit to the economy. The right regulation helps deliver growth.

Climate: in 2021 the climate change emissions trading and energy efficiency schemes that the EA manages delivered a nine million tonne reduction of CO2 compared to 2020. And since 2010, emissions of greenhouse gases from the sites we regulate have decreased by 50%. The planet is better off as a result. Regulation works.

Rethinking regulation

But no regulatory system is perfect. Both the regulations themselves and how regulators behave need to move with the times. They need to reflect changes in technology, in the needs of business, in the risks we are trying to manage, in public demand, in government policy and the law, and in the wider world around us.

Brexit is a massive opportunity to rethink how we do regulation in this country.

The government has embarked on an exercise to remove, revise or retain the body of EU-derived law currently in force, much of which is the basis for most environmental regulation in this country. We welcome that. We think it is a great opportunity to deliver better regulation and better outcomes – for people, for business and for nature.

There is already a big debate as to what pieces of legislation should be retained, what should be reformed and what should be repealed. And there should be a debate, because this really matters and because if we make the right calls we can do what the Environment Agency exists to do: create a better place.

There will be examples of laws we find we don’t really need. There will be examples where changing the law will allow us to achieve better outcomes for the environment and nature and support economic growth. And there will be some laws that it will make eminent sense to keep.

Let me give you a real-life example of each. These are my personal views, not those of the EA or the government, but the point I want to illustrate is that we should not regard the current body of laws as sacrosanct.

I would repeal the Floods Directive. This requires EU member states to carry out flood risk assessments, create maps of flood risk and flood risk management plans. That is all very sensible, which is why the UK was already doing those things before the Directive arrived and why the EA will carry on doing them now, because they are good practice and policy. But the purpose of the Directive was to drive cooperation between continental EU member states that share river basins – clearly we are not in that category.

I would reform the Water Framework Directive (WFD) in order to drive better environmental outcomes. Each time I say this I get flak from everyone, so let me say again for the avoidance of doubt, I’d reform it in order to enhance water quality and restore nature, not degrade them. The WFD rightly sets high standards for water quality in rivers, lakes, estuaries and groundwater. But the way it requires us to categorise the status of those waters is complex, and can be misleading about the real state of those waters, both for better and for worse. And because the Directive stipulates that waters can only get “good” status if they tick all of several different boxes, it can force regulators to focus time and resources on indicators that may not make much difference to the actual water quality, taking focus away from things that would. I wouldn’t repeal the WFD. But I would reform it, to ensure it drives action that will deliver the clean and plentiful water we all want.

I would keep the Bathing Waters Directive, which protects public health and the environment by keeping coastal waters free from pollution. It has done exactly that, driving the water companies, the regulators, the local authorities and local communities to make huge improvements in water quality at most of our beaches. High quality bathing water benefits health and wellbeing as well as boosting local economies. According to Visit Britain, the 135 million day visits taken to the seaside in England in 2019 were worth £4.4 billion to the economy. A great example of good law and good regulation producing better outcomes for nature, people and the economy.

Principles of good regulation

As we have this debate about what kind of regulation we want for the future, let’s be guided by a few principles. Mine would be:

• Reframe how we think: good regulation is not red tape. It’s what gets you green growth and a blue planet.
• Focus on outcomes. Start and finish with the ones we want: safe and healthy people, nature restored (not just protected or its degradation slowed), sustainable and inclusive growth.
• Believe in better. The test for any regulatory change should be whether it will produce better outcomes.
• Less is more: have fewer regulations, better targeted. Regulate only the things that need regulating.
• Do it right: when you do have to regulate, do it well. Good regulation is proportionate, risk-based, evidence-driven, outcome focused, and (provided businesses do the right things) business-friendly.
• Strong regulation needs strong regulators: if regulators are going to do their jobs they need the right powers, the right resources, the right laws and the right support.

Conclusion

Ronald Reagan said that Government’s traditional view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it”. He was, it is pretty safe to say, not a natural fan of regulation or indeed of government. But he also said: “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”

That’s a good distinction. Regulation doesn’t exist to protect us from ourselves. It exists to protect the things we value – people, nature, our economy – that would otherwise be harmed. So let’s have no more regulation than we need, and let’s have the right kind. But when we need it, let’s make sure we have it.