Responding to the announcement that the economist Dan Corry has been asked to review regulations at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Greenpeace UK’s director of policy Dr Doug Parr said:
“Our natural world supplies incalculable benefits for our health, not to mention the food we eat and vital services such as carbon sequestration and flood management. All of these things bring economic benefits that rarely appear in the spreadsheets of economists in Whitehall and the private sector.
“That’s why it’s concerning to see regulations being put in a separate column to ‘economic growth’. Regulations are a last defence for our few remaining wild places, countless species, our seas and waterways, and all of the value they provide to society. Of course Defra is a ‘key economic growth department’ by virtue of its fundamental role as custodian of the riches of the natural world.
“If Dan Corry’s role is genuinely to make regulations more efficient, we wish him luck. But the mood music sounds concerningly like the ‘bonfire of red tape’ so often touted by the last government.”
