The British government signed up to the provisions of the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro. This included committing Britain to a comprehensive programme of action to achieve a more sustainable pattern of development through local Agenda 21 policies. Subsequent government reports such as "Sustainable Development: the UK strategy" and more recently "Making Waste Work" deliberately understate the magnitude of the problems although they do attempt a comprehensive framework for addressing them.

However, whilst highlighting the need for a fundamentally new approach to achieve sustainability, in practice the government has opted for a pace of change based on short term political and economic gains. All too often the government has introduced measures that merely reinforce the maintenance of the status quo - an example which is then followed by local authorities in their attempts to implement Agenda 21.

Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in the waste industry, a sector whose importance is at present far greater than it would need to be if development were more sustainable. Britain is the last country in Europe to introduce a landfill tax; and even then the level of taxation has been set too low to have much effect in making industry produce less waste. At the same time, the government supports the delusion that industry's best available technologies for waste disposal (increasingly highly engineered landfills) work, in spite of scientific research proving otherwise. The government talks the language of waste reduction while taking a vested interest in landfill.

The Natural Law Party advocates the policies outlined below in order to address these issues immediately. Ultimately development can be sustainable only if it is in harmony with Natural Law; society has to use materials that Nature finds easy to dispose of and technologies that involve low risk. In the meantime, there has to be progressively less reliance on substances and processes that damage the environment and public health.

Natural and non-toxic building materials

The use of natural building materials has been shown to be a key factor in promoting better health and sustainable development. Yet measures to limit the damage caused to the environment by all aspects of development have focused mainly on energy-saving to limit the production of greenhouse gases rather than on cutting out technologies that cause other types of pollution. Such technologies include our share of the estimated 50,000 chemicals in common use in the European Union, of which 4,500 are demonstrably toxic and persistent in the environment with a tendency to accumulate in biological systems.

The Natural Law Party will promote an extensive education programme for producers, manufacturers, specifiers and builders, to inform them of the health hazards of these chemicals, the processes that produce them, and the natural alternatives. At the same time, we will introduce legislation to make natural building materials more widely available.

Local participation

Our society is invariably critical of how the Victorians handled industrial development. However, future generations may look back on our own time and say, "They became increasingly sophisticated at answering the wrong questions."

Asking the right questions requires a different approach and a shift in awareness from partial analytic solutions to holistic ones based on Natural Law. Sustainable development cannot be achieved by intellectually balancing all the relevant factors in order to try to bring minimum disturbance to the environment. Instead it requires a widespread recognition of the need to use natural resources wisely and the technology to meet the basic needs of all, thereby extending to everyone the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life.

The first approach is to bring the thinking and action of every individual spontaneously in accord with Natural Law through special educational programmes and by bringing national consciousness in alliance with Natural Law by establishing A Group for a Government. On this basis of increased awareness, local people will be more creative in finding natural, sustainable solutions to local problems, and will be more receptive to education about new methods that are more sustainable. These two approaches are complementary and interdependent.

Education alone is insufficient; for example, research has shown that no amount of publicity on the polluting effect of motor cars has been able to change people's driving habits. Only when there is an increase of coherence in national consciousness will education programmes bring solutions.

Reform of UK regulatory bodies

Regulation is the first line of defence the public has in order to limit pollution, given the difficulties of legal action against companies who cause environmental damage. The present government tries to encourage trust in regulatory agencies. Yet in many sectors, including the waste industry, the same authority that issues licences also investigates infringements of licences by operators. In many cases therefore these authorities have every motivation to cover up any infringement, especially as they are partially or wholly funded by the industry they are investigating. The existence of a licence implies that an industrial process is controlled, whereas in practice these bodies lack the technology, budget or will to investigate complaints properly.

The Natural Law Party will separate these two functions in order to eliminate regulatory corruption. This is an essential first step in dealing with the increasingly unknown and unforeseeable effects of pollution. Adequate resources must be allocated to research on the toxic effects of various chemicals and other substances. The present systems of regulation cover only pollutants acting individually; little is known about their combined effects. Yet recent research has highlighted the fact that combinations of chemicals, as they are now beginning to occur in our environment, can be considerably more toxic than the individual chemicals on their own, posing unprecedented threats to human health.

Regarding the issuing of licences to manufacturers to use chemicals or any other approaches that may be harmful in any way, the Natural Law Party advocates the principle that synthesised materials and chemicals are "guilty until proved innocent", rather than the other way round as is the case at the moment. The Natural Law Party would also strengthen the regulating bodies' power to operate the principle that "the polluter pays" for the pollution caused.

International co-operation against pollution

The spread of pollution does not recognise political boundaries. The framework for increased sustainability needs to change at the EU and international level in order to bring a unified solution to a transnational problem. Being active in over 63 countries the Natural Law party is uniquely positioned to foster international co-operation leading to deep and lasting solutions.