Reform MP chair of Welsh environment committee may ‘undermine scrutiny’, says thinktank | Environment

The appointment of a Reform UK MP as chair of a key environment committee in Wales could “undermine the harsh vaccine of ministerial scrutiny”, a green think tank has warned.

Former Conservative MP James Evans, who defected to Reform England in January last year, has been appointed chairman of Wales’ climate change, environment, sustainability and rural affairs committee.

The committee’s role is to examine legislation and hold the Welsh government to account by examining its spending, management and policy regarding climate change and environmental concerns. It also conducts investigations into important matters and uses them to make recommendations to the government. The chair’s main role is to ensure that there is a fair balance of opportunity for committee members to ask questions and for experts to respond.

As it is the only environmental review committee in the Senedd, it really matters who leads this because that is the key way we hold the Welsh government to account,” said Ruth Chambers, senior fellow at the Green Alliance think tank.

Reform UK has vowed to scrap net zero, with the party’s leader Nigel Farage calling net zero policies “madness” and tearing up government contracts for renewable energy projects. Evans previously described rural Wales as “under attack“from large-scale green energy infrastructure and that Reform, if elected, would ban all new onshore wind farm developments in the country.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says Emissions from fossil fuels are the leading cause of the climate crisis, and global greenhouse gas emissions need to be halved from 2010 levels by 2030 to prevent devastating climate impacts.

“Wales has come too far on climate and nature to stumble any longer. It would be a tragedy if party politics undermined the hard graft of ministerial scrutiny, and we hope the new environment committee will seek to find common cause, not conflict,” Chambers said.

Evans, who has a farming background, said his duty as president was to be “fair, impartial and evidence-based” and that “review is most powerful when it includes diverse perspectives.”

“The committee chair’s job is not to drive personal agendas, but to ensure that the committee reviews policy properly,” he said.

Karen Whitfield, director of Wales Environment Link, said that after the last Welsh election, which saw a large recruitment of Reform MPs into the Senedd, some “fairly heated debates” on net zero policies were already underway. But he said only time will tell how Evans runs the committee. “We will have to see, and of course our members will be very keen to see that there is no bias in the selection of committee inquiries,” he said.

The process of appointing elected committee chairs is an opaque system in which political parties make collective decisions about which party will lead which committee. Climate Cymru’s head of policy and advocacy, Bethan Sayed, questioned why a Reform MP would want to lead this committee.

“[Maybe] “They want to push some of the polarizing agendas that they’ve had so far, or maybe they want to work constructively,” he said.

“We’ve seen throughout the election campaign Reform saying things like ‘we want to reopen the mines, we want to reopen the blast furnaces at Tata Steel’ and pushing these coordinated attacks on net zero, opposing some renewable developments, and so that’s a concern because that’s the current state of performance. The work of the other committee members is to encourage Reform to change that narrative and see things in a different light.”

“Whether people like it or not, reform has been chosen and we must act from now on. [with them] “I hope they will be able to do this through a serious parliamentary process,” he added.

Evans said previous Welsh governments “perhaps did not listen to committees as much as they should have”. He added: “We hope that as we put together the committee reports the government will listen and respect and take into account views on what our committee has to say, because the review is there to improve the legislation.”