When is a post-Brexit environmental watchdog not a post-Brexit environmental watchdog? When it hasn’t got any teeth

No sooner were the Brexit votes counted, than the worrying began about how Britain could protect its environment once we’d left the EU.

Currently, nearly all of our environmental laws are underpinned by EU legislation and that’s about to be a thing of the past.

To placate environmentalists’ fears, Environment Secretary Michael Gove promised a “world-leading” environment watchdog to ensure Britain remains green and pleasant outside Europe.

But it seems his plans, published for consultation today, fall very short of the mark.

“The proposals for a green watchdog amount to little more than a green poodle with only the ability to issue weak ‘advisory notices’,” says Martin Harper, Conservation Director with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

From protecting bats, and keeping sewage off beaches, to preserving clean air in cities, EU directives have guided UK environment law.

Successive governments have been held to account by them.

Failure to do so, incurred referral to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and fines.

For example, recent progress to force the government to tackle diesel pollution was achieved via this route.

But after the transition period, those directives will no longer apply, and, in all likelihood, neither will the ECJ.

Sure, all the protection for newts and ancient woods will be copied over in the Great Repeal Bill, but what worries green groups is that regulations to enforce them could be weakened and there would be no replacement body to uphold the laws.

The green watchdog is intended to fill that gap.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (DEFRA) proposal calls for a body that provides “independent scrutiny” and “holds governments to account," but to do that effectively, campaigners say the body must have the power to bring its own prosecutions, and hold government to account over its stated environmental commitments, like Theresa May’s 25-year environment plan announced in January.

There is no direct mention of that in the consultation.

A new environment act loosely modelled on the Climate Change Act which had strong cross-party support would do the trick campaigners argue, but the suspicion is, the government hasn’t got the stomach for such a move right now, especially given the uncertainties swirling around Brexit.

Without such legislative underpinning, the fear is that Mr Gove’s watchdog, like other environmental quangos of the past, gets quietly strangled the first time it creates any trouble for ministers.