Labour pledges legal right to clean air and water: Exclusive
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Your support makes all the difference.BRITONS would get legally enforceable rights to clean air and water under a Labour government, according to proposals that the party will release next week. Labour would create a special new division of the High Court, where polluting firms could be sued.
The ''green rights' - also including a 'right of unfettered access' to open countryside - are detailed in a wide-ranging policy document, prepared by six shadow cabinet ministers with trade union and local government leaders. The 58-page paper marks the greening of the Labour Party and will push environmental issues back up the political agenda.
It says Labour will publish an annual environmental plan, which would be 'as prominent a part of the political calendar as the unified Budget or the Queen's Speech', and set up a powerful parliamentary commitee to monitor its implementation. The party would also launch an 'Environmental New Deal' to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in tackling pollution and other damage.
The paper promises to introduce a moratorium on new road building; to cut sulphur pollution by 90 per cent within a decade; to create more national parks; to increase more than tenfold the use of renewable energy; to support a 'major expansion' of chemical-free organic farming; and to introduce measures to clean up dog mess - the subject of an Independent on Sunday campaign.
The policies, which were approved by Labour's National Executive Committee on 29 June, were drawn up by a commission headed by Chris Smith, the shadow environment protection secretary, and including Robin Cook, John Prescott, Michael Meacher, Marjorie Mowlam and Frank Dobson.
Entitled In Trust for Tomorrow, the document calls for 'an environmental revolution, similar in its scope and significance to the earlier agricultural and industrial revolutions'. It says that strong green policies would provide 'high efficiency' and create as many as 680,000 jobs, largely through the creation of new pollution-control technologies. 'We reject the view,' it adds, 'that environmental policies must be the hair-shirt politics of sacrifice'.
Labour aims to enable 'all citizens to act as environmental watchdogs' by 'placing on the statute book a list of the environmental rights of British citizens, which will be legally enforceable . . .'
These are 'a right to clean air; a right to clean drinking water: a right to information on the state of the environment; a right to be consulted over local environmental issues; a right of unfettered access to common land, open country, mountain and moorland; and a right to consultation on environmental issues in the workplace'.
There would be an environment division of the High Court. So long as the case was judged to be in the public interest, losing plaintiffs would not have to pay defendants' costs.
The report also proposes an environmental ombudsman to investigate complaints about companies, and to introduce legal protection for 'whistle- blowers' who reveal that firms are breaking green laws.
Other policies include:
An 'environmental task force' using school leavers voluntarily on green projects.
Minimum fuel efficiency standards for new cars.
A 50 per cent increase in Britain's forest cover by 2010.
Bans on disconnections of water supplies from homes and on compulsory water metering.
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