Diary of a Dying Nation (@DiaryofaDyingNation)

#Bees Defra breached law when it let farmers use bee-killing pesticide, watchdog says Office for Environmental Protection finds failures by department when it granted emergency authorisation in 2023 and 2024 The UK government breached environmental law on several occasions when granting farmers permission to use a bee-killing pesticide, a watchdog has found. In 2023 and 2024, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in the then Conservative government granted emergency authorisation to allow farmers to use a banned neonicotinoid pesticide on sugar beet crops. The pesticide, Cruiser SB, contains the active ingredient thiamethoxam. One teaspoon of this is enough to kill 1.25bn honeybees, according to Prof Dave Goulson, a bee expert at the University of Sussex. After a complaint by the campaign group ClientEarth, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), which was set up after Brexit as England’s environmental watchdog, launched an investigation into “possible serious failures” by Defra. The OEP has now concluded there were failures to comply with environmental law on four occasions. These include a failure to consider the authorisation’s impact on protected sites, and to understand, avoid or mitigate the known risk of harm to those sites. Dr Doug Parr, the chief scientist and policy director at Greenpeace UK, said the “absolutely shocking neglect from past governments would have had “deadly ramifications for our beleaguered wildlife”. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/02/defra-breached-law-farmers-bee-killing-pesticide-watchdog