The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) has called for the government to aim high and act now to ensure it achieves its ambitions for the environment.

The news of the OEP publishing its first report was covered widely by Sky, the BBC and the Guardian. The OEP report can be read here and in its press release the OEP said:

‘In publishing its first monitoring report on the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan, the OEP recognises the plan’s ambition but states that progress has been slow. It presses government now to take stock, and take purposeful, coherent and decisive action so that the environment is restored, protected and enhanced for future generations.

To support this, the report, ‘Taking stock: protecting, restoring and improving the environment in England’, sets out a framework of six ‘building blocks’ that need to be in place.

The six ‘building blocks’ identified by the OEP are:

1. Understanding environmental drivers and pressures
2. Creating a vision
3. Setting targets
4. Coherent strategy and policy
5. Governance
6. Monitoring, assessing and reporting

Under these headings, the OEP makes 16 recommendations to government. These include:

• A comprehensive stocktake of the condition of the environment
• Immediate prioritisation of environmental concerns
• A clear, coherent and evidence-based vision for the 25YEP
• A commitment to the environment and environment strategy across all government departments
• Ambitious long term statutory targets
• Coherence across targets and clarity on how the range of targets in the same policy area relate to each other
• Accountability for the delivery of the 25YEP across government
• All key government strategies and policies that affect the environment must be aligned with government’s ambitions for the environment
• Develop and publish an evidence-based, accessible, consistent and transparent way of assessing progress against the 25YEP objectives.’

The full news release from the OEP can be read here.