Speeches by Creagh.

“May I wish you, Mr Speaker, all the staff of the House, and all those in our public services who will be working over the weekend a very merry Christmas and a safe and successful new year? The UK has a long history of championing the global conservation of endangered species. We are in the process of extending the Ivor…”

“I thank my hon. Friend for that question. My own city council in Coventry has introduced small electrical item take-back points in its libraries, which is an example of an excellent council innovating. I recently visited the Currys recycling plant in Newark, which shows the importance of recycling electricals to ensure…”

“Our policy is certainly intended to tackle fly-tipping and stop persistent organic pollutants entering the environment, but I will have to consult the Minister for water, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), before answering on that detailed point.”

“Incineration permit breaches are a matter for the regulator, the Environment Agency, but we are reviewing energy-from-waste capacity across the country and will be making a statement imminently.”

“As my hon. Friend knows, each week 8 million vapes—such as single-use, pod and big puff—are thrown away or recycled incorrectly, which is 13 vapes a second. That is why we have already banned single-use vapes and created 10,000 extra vape recycling points in store. We will ensure that online marketplaces and vape produ…”

“Not so much on that, but it would be remiss of me if we were to conclude without mentioning the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting in Busan, which was trying to conclude the global plastic pollution treaty. It finished on 1 December, and 170 countries were there. That is another convention that stems from …”

“I have no script here on this, so I am just doing it from memory—officials will all get nervous now—”

“We know that the ocean is under pressure from acidification, from warming and from the accumulation of persistent organic pollutants, which have been found in everything from plankton to polar bears. Industrial chemicals will be a huge part of that, but I think the research is emerging around microplastics and their ro…”

“At Cali?”

“I think it is disappointing. Quite a lot of the finance mechanisms are in flux and under review. There is quite a lot of complexity in the resource mobilisation space. As I said, we have worked to publish a transparency index to show where the money is flowing, from where and to where, but there is a review of the diff…”

“It has been a joy, Chair, thank you. I wish you all a very merry Christmas.”

“I think we are going to keep that target, but may I talk to you about a few other numbers? We can look backward at the woodland carbon code and the peatland code. Project registrations under the peatland code have more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, and over 2,000 projects across the UK were registered under the w…”

“As I said, we have asked the Green Finance Initiative to set out our baseline data, so I think we will have that early in the new year. I think what we can say also is that we are going to see a scaling up of philanthropic finance. We have our Projects for Nature initiative. It is currently a pilot, but it is aiming to…”

“As I said, we are working to scale up private investment in nature recovery and sustainable farming, centred on integrity. The last Government published an update in March this year. We set out our integrity principles at Baku. We have also committed to the British Standards Institution’s nature investment standards pr…”

“We launched the Projects for Nature pilot, which is about connecting businesses and other donors with screened nature-recovery projects. We have also launched mandatory biodiversity net gain, which requires developers to ensure that habitats for wildlife are left in a measurably better state than before development. We…”

“That is right. Look, 72% of our land is managed by farmers, and we are supporting them and other landowners so that they can take advantage of nature markets as an additional income stream, especially given that we have had some of the wettest weather that farmers have ever seen. We are therefore providing more sustain…”

“If I can come straight to agricultural property relief, at the Budget the Chancellor clarified very helpfully that any land used for the delivery of environmental objectives will be included in agricultural property relief. There was an uncertainty or a lack of clarity around that before, which led to understandable re…”

“What they have done is expanded the tax relief across to nature projects that were not clear.”

“They have brought them into scope.”

“What the clarification means is that land taken out of agricultural production permanently, for the long term—for an extended period—for nature benefits will not lose the tax relief. Before the Budget, that was not clear. That should make farmers more likely to want to carry out nature recovery. It is also potentially …”