Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank dedicated to achieving ambitious

leadership for the environment. I'm Ruth Chambers, Senior Fellow at Green Alliance. We thought it was a good

time to take pause and reflect, as believe it or not, we're coming up to five full years of Brexit. So we wanted to have a

think about what this is meant for environmental protection in the UK, including for those laws that

we inherited from the EU, but also the ones that we've made since we left. And as somebody that

works every day on this agenda,

I genuinely find it really hard to keep pace with all of the changes.

So earlier in January, we together with the UCL Center for Law and the Environment

and the UK Environmental Law Association,

gathered together a group of experts, practitioners, academics, students,

and campaigners to help us take stock of what has happened over the last five years.

I'm delighted to welcome Professor Maria Lee to our podcast today. Maria is a professor of law

at University College London, a member of the former

Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and a renowned legal scholar on environmental law.

Maria, we're absolutely delighted that you've been able to speak with us today.

Delighted to be here, Ruth. One reflection I've been musing, and I'd love your thoughts on this, Maria,

is that environmental laws feel closer now to us than they did perhaps when we were a member of the EU,

partly because they exist in our domestic legislation, like the Environment Act, but also, I think,

because the people managing these systems, like the Office for

Environmental Protection, they're known to us, aren't they?

So I wondered, what do you think about how Brexit has changed our relationship with

environmental law?

...