I was invited on to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire this morning to respond to the move of North East Cambridgeshire’s MP Stephen Barclay from Health to Environment.

What did I say?

Well, I made the obvious point that the deckchairs may be in a different place, but the Titanic is still heading towards the iceberg.

I pointed out that there are national challenges he needs to address, like climate change and the water pollution scandal. But I said Cambridgeshire also faces local environmental issues.

• Flood risk in the north of the county; water shortages in the south.
• The need to get 25,000 homes off oil, and retrofit many thousands more.
• Carbon emissions from our peatland, and how to cut these while continuing to farm and to feed the nation.
• Transport, the biggest source of carbon in Cambridgeshire.
• And being asked to tackle all of that while meeting demands for huge growth in and around Cambridge.

There are things the new Environment Secretary can do directly. Implement sensible funding regimes, not ones where bidding rounds for funding open, then run dry within ten minutes. Real serious investment in flood defences to protect vulnerable communities and in decarbonising our homes and buildings.

But he also needs to be the voice calling for action across Government. He needs to be talking to Transport ministers about money to repair and rebuild the fen roads damaged by the effects of extreme weather on their soil base; and about major public transport and active travel investment, and an electric vehicle charging network that meets the growing demand. He needs to be talking to Defra about being helpful to Cambridgeshire in trying to move to weekly food waste collection under new Government demands when we are constrained and limited by a waste PFI (private finance initiative) contract that runs until 2036.

But most of all, we need to know where we stand with Government. David Cameron is now back in Government as Foreign Secretary, but when he was Prime Minister it didn’t take him long to move from hugging a husky to demanding that the Government should ‘cut all the green cr*p’ (a direct quote that earned a rap on the knuckles from presenter Louise Hulland). The present Government is moving away from its environmental targets as fast as it can, in response to vociferous and powerful lobbying.

Stephen Barclay needs to answer one very simple question: is this going to be a Government that is serious about tackling climate change and the threats to our environment, or not?