Environmental Audit Committee
10 March 2026
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Environmental Audit Committee House of Commons
00:06 - 01:44
Speaker 1
Order. Order. Well, welcome everybody to the latest meeting of the environmental audit committee. And I'm I'm delighted to say that we're joined for the first time today by the secretary of state for department of environment, food, and rural affairs, Emma Reynolds. Secretary of state, welcome.
Thank you very much. I see that you are joined by officials. Our questions primarily will be aimed to yourself. If you want to to pass those on, we'll leave you to to make that choice. This committee recently held an away day with a a number of contributors contributors from from the the sector.
Sector. One former senior Defra official was invited to opine on the sort of great environment secretaries of the past. And it was interesting. There were two names that were sort of consistently brought up. The first was David Miliband, about whom it was said that he'd really sort of seized and prioritized the climate change agenda and started the process of sort of galvanizing globalized action.
And the second was Michael Gove, who through the Environment Act and and Biodiversity Netgain, had set out to show that a sort of post Brexit Britain could still be environmentally ambitious and and devised approaches that have been admired globally. Now neither of those were seen as sort of lifelong environmentalists, but they had a vision that they were able to galvanize their departments around. When historians look back, because they will do someday on what we hope will be a the glorious Reynolds tenure of office, What do you hope that will be the sort of 20 word summary that would define your time in this role?
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