Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Grand Committee

Asked by

[The Earl of Selborne]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress has been made towards implementing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030.

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, it is now a year since the Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction 2015-2030 was agreed in Japan and later endorsed at the United Nations General Assembly. Therefore, it seems appropriate to table this Question for Short Debate to review how we are doing on our share of the implementation.

The Sendai framework was the first of three landmark agreements made as part of the United Nations’ post-2015 agenda. The other two were the sustainable development goals, finalised in New York in September last year, and the Paris climate change agreement in December. The Sendai framework builds on the legacy created by the Hyogo framework, which embraced the 10 years from 2005 to 2015. This emphasised disaster-risk reduction as a priority within regional, national and local agendas. The Sendai framework gives greater emphasis to the need to address disaster-risk management, to reduce existing vulnerability and to prevent the creation of new risks. In other words, the key message is effective risk management, which will in turn lead to risk reduction.

What Governments around the world are ultimately required to deliver by their citizens can be summarised in very simple terms as the delivery of health, well-being, resilience and security. All these depend on social, physical and natural infrastructures, and we are all critically dependent on these being maintained for the essentials of life. When they fail, whether by reason of, for example, epidemic, flooding, the collapse of a structure or any other such disaster, it is the national Government who will be held to account.

The Sendai framework does not in any way reduce the primary responsibility of each state to reduce disaster risk but recognises that co-ordination and partnership between regions and nations is essential for disaster-risk management. In order to reduce risk, we need to identify and roll out best practice, we need to promote the collection, analysis, management and use of scientific data, and we need to ensure that these data are available to everyone.

The United Kingdom has a lot to offer to the international community in the field of the assessment and management of risk. It is one of the few countries to have a publicly available national risk register, based on a classified national risk assessment, with a strong and deeply embedded civil contingencies secretariat and well-rehearsed disaster prevention and management protocols and procedures.

The Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Mark Walport, in his first annual report published in 2014—that is, before Sendai—said that the United Kingdom should continue to develop the role for innovation, as well as evidence and risk evaluation, in the delivery of resilient infrastructure. He said that the United Kingdom would need further to develop the national risk register as a key part of the debate on national infrastructure and resilience investment. I suspect that our national infrastructure in respect of electricity generation in this country is now looking less fit for its purpose than it was when he wrote that in 2014, with margins between demand and supply now tighter than had been previously predicted. Of course, shortage of electricity would certainly risk disastrous consequences. Can the Minister tell us whether the national risk register has, indeed, been further developed and, if so, how?

Disaster experts are cautious of labelling any disaster a natural disaster, although clearly nature may be the catalyst which sets off a disastrous chain of events. Environmental hazards become disasters as a result of the risks and vulnerabilities that people are exposed to on a daily basis. As a result of technological change, environmental depletion and climate change, the complexity of the risks faced by humanity increases year by year. Policymakers must define an acceptable level of risk. Developed economies typically have regulation in place which is designed to protect their citizens and limit such risks, whether generated by environmental change or man-made disaster. However, this could be at the expense of other parts of the world where regulation may be less appropriate.

Looking back at what is now almost history, the Bhopal gas tragedy in India of 1984 was a notorious such example. The consequence of that disaster was political unrest generated not just by the explosion in the chemical factory but by the failure of the recovery and accountability process. It was such scandalous examples of disaster management that led the United Nations to convene the first world conference on natural disasters in Yokohama in 1994.

Disaster impacts are strongly influenced by such issues as poverty, inequity, poor urban planning and inappropriate land use. The Sendai framework recognises that essential to addressing these issues, which lead to communities’ exposure to risk, is the contribution of science and technology. We are, of course, the leading European country in terms of scientific output and we are rightly proud of our contribution to generating scientific evidence, which will, in turn, underpin risk management. It is through mobilising the expertise residing in our research institutions and commissioning the appropriate research that we can make the greatest contribution to implementing the Sendai agreement.

I commend the initiatives of Public Health England that were listed in the helpful briefing pack produced for this debate by the House of Lords Library. It included a paper from PHE’s global health committee which refers to, among other health disaster issues, its contribution to controlling the outbreak of Ebola in Sierra Leone. I hope that PHE is now adding an assessment of the contribution that UK science should make to the control of the Zika virus.

In answer to a Parliamentary Question from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, in November, the Minister said that the Government were still assessing the full implications of the Sendai framework for DfID programmes. I wonder whether she is now able to give us any further information on DfID’s response.

I have no doubt that in responding to the Sendai framework we will benefit greatly from our membership of the European Union, which in this respect has a supporting competence. Will the Minister confirm that in addressing this 15 year-old non-binding agreement, which recognises that each state has the primary role in reducing disaster risk, we benefit enormously from close collaboration with our fellow EU members and from the European Union’s supporting competence?

In Europe, over 80% of current disaster losses are caused by weather-related hazards and these are expected to increase in frequency, yet only a minority of the flood risks, for example, can be attributed to climate change. The rest can be attributed to human behaviour, such as building in risk areas. Most so-called natural disasters are nothing of the sort. With effective contingency planning, risk assessment and risk management, we can enhance resilience. Above all, we need to identify clearly and explicitly how our impressive science and technology capacity in the United Kingdom can underpin our contribution to global risk disaster and risk reduction.

Agriculture and Food Industry

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, like others, I must start by declaring an interest as a farmer and, perhaps uniquely, I am a fruit grower; I am not sure anyone else here is. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Plumb for having initiated this debate.

I want to concentrate my remarks on trying to illustrate to what extent over past decades—and, I am certain, in future decades—the agricultural sector was and will be dependent on its research base. It always interests me how quickly policy, as determined by successive Administrations and Ministers, changes for this sector. For example, in the early days when my noble friend was starting his career at the NFU, food security after the war and the need to ensure that farm incomes matched urban incomes would have been important, hence the deficiency payments.

However, to back up the rapid changes in agricultural production, there was massive and very successful investment in agricultural research, development and extension. This led to a dramatic increase in productivity. We farmers would like to claim the credit for this, but if we are absolutely honest, we knew that we were enormously lucky to be able to exploit some rapidly moving technology in agricultural engineering, plant breeding, animal husbandry and the like. But, of course, in the very seeds of success lay the future problems, such as surpluses, leakages into soil, air and water—in other words, environmental damage—and animal welfare issues, as husbandry lots got ever larger. People resented the changes to the landscape. They noted the loss of biodiversity. Frankly, it was not surprising that, if you were trying to crop ever larger areas ever more intensively, there would be losses to biodiversity, as indeed there were. Of course, the agenda changed to meet some of these issues. Human nutrition has been referred to, and there have been a number of startling food safety issues, arising sometimes from production systems but very often from imported diseases which, in an era of globalism, become ever more prevalent.

So there was little enthusiasm, for more than 25 years I would say, for supporting production systems. When I say that the policies changed, I have to reflect with some shame that on my farm I have not only, 40 years ago, taken grants for taking out hedges, but 20 years ago I took another grant for putting them back in again. That illustrated how one tries to do what is right by the system of the day, though successive generations may not welcome what we have done.

Research emphasis in recent years has been particularly on enhancing farm biodiversity. Much can be done on this; it does not have to be organic. As we heard in the earlier debate, there are many other ways of delivering on this. Delivery of ecosystem services is rather a jargon concept, I admit, but it is nevertheless a very important point. Farmers have instinctively understood that soil conservation, flood control and water purity are services that the land manager provides. Of course, we now understand how this can be encompassed into food production systems in a way that does not lead to adverse consequences. As a fruit grower, I am now very much more aware, as I should have been in earlier years, of just how reliant we are on insect pollinators—not just imported honey bees but a wider range of insects. That is where getting the biodiversity of the plants right, at least in the pollinator strips, can play a very important part.

Likewise, there has been a greater emphasis on the non-food crops: biofuels, vegetable oils, pharmaceuticals and plant based chemicals. There is nothing new in this. Agriculture has always provided for industry, manufacturing, energy and transport, but with the range of non-food crops we are moving into some new areas of cropping.

The long and the short of it is that food production is the core business of agriculture. Food production must be done, in modern parlance, sustainably—in other words by reducing its adverse impacts on the environment and delivering, so far as is possible, enhancement to the environment. We have been encouraged—this has been successful—to get closer to the customer and add value to our products. Farmers’ markets and shops have been a useful way of making the consumer more aware of where their food comes from.

I go back to the present occupation. We are back to taking food security much more seriously; not so much in the United Kingdom and Europe, but globally. The figure of 9 billion people who need to be fed, requiring at least a 60% increase in production, has already been mentioned. Companies such as Syngenta, which represent a large part of the research base, not just here in Europe but elsewhere, have set themselves the target of increasing average productivity of the major crops that they support by 20% without using more land, water or inputs. This is a challenging target, but a sensible one and I am absolutely certain, given the success that we have had in previous generations, that it is realistic.

The Government are to be congratulated on having recently introduced the new industrial strategy for the field of agri-tech. My noble friend Lord Plumb referred to robotics, satellite tracking and the like and the prevalence of new entrepreneurial farmers adopting systems that come out of molecular biology and other biological sciences. All this is very valuable. The investment of £160 million of new money in this industry-led strategy is to be welcomed. But, again, I say that unless you bed all this down in agronomy and in farming systems that are demonstrated to work and to reduce impacts and leakages, we will miss the vital connection. I worry enormously about the great loss we have had within the research and development sector over the past 25 years. Frankly, universities have very little, if any, capacity to do field research now. I used to chair something called the Agricultural and Food Research Council. That is now subsumed into the BBSRC. Those institutes have almost all gone—not John Innes or Rothamsted, which have been mentioned, but so many of the others. There is no horticultural station left. As a fruit grower, I worry enormously that East Malling research station, which is a private, charitable trust, has an enormous responsibility but very little funding any more. Again, we are seeing whole sectors of our agricultural production and horticulture—strawberries, raspberries and the like—being left without a research base.

We should not rely on Holland and other European countries, as I do. We need to take stock of our national capacity and recognise that, if we do not keep the research infrastructure in place, in future we will lack the capacity to achieve the great success that farmers have witnessed in adopting new technologies.

Water Bill

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, I am always impressed by the fervency with which my noble friend Lord Redesdale promotes the cause of sustainable development. Who could disagree with him that the sustainable use of water is clearly desirable? But does the more specific mention of sustainable development in the Bill help towards those causes or duplicate what is already there and in previous legislation? Does it give a much clearer direction to Ofwat? None of us would dispute that the major issue that must be addressed is long-term sustainable management of water resources. None of us disputes that the new resilience duties on Ofwat are extremely helpful. However, my noble friend Lord Redesdale did not remind us that this issue of whether the situations of Ofgem and Ofwat are totally parallel was looked at by the Gray review in 2011, the advice of which was to reject that. I accept that the Government rejected much other advice—from the Cave review and others—so that is not a roadblock. However, it must be recognised that there are already duties on Ofwat to promote sustainable development.

I am always a little nervous about those who find themselves supporting sustainable development. The concept has three pillars: the economic benefits, the societal benefits and the environmental benefits, all of which must be interconnected. The argument put forward by my noble friend Lord Redesdale was almost entirely based on the environmental and water efficiency benefits. Those are very worthy and very important, but I have also heard sustainable development prayed in aid of some pretty harsh economic messages. Clearly, that is not an appropriate way to interpret it. Is the Minister really sure that this is going to help to clarify Ofwat’s roles? I am not as convinced as my noble friend Lord Redesdale.

[Lord Crickhowell (Con)]

My Lords, at Second Reading I said I was green with envy that the environmental regulators will now have the Bill rather than the legislation that I had to deal with as chairman of the National Rivers Authority when I was in almost continual friendly conflict—I emphasise the word “friendly”—with Ian Byatt the economic regulator. It was so friendly that I have two cartoons at home, which were sent to me by a notable newspaper, showing both of us in the boxing ring. In the first, we are engaged in a vigorous fight, and the second shows us collapsing together exhausted at the end of the exchange. We have made huge progress since then, and the existing sustainable development duty, as I understand it, is now being given statutory authority in the Bill. The clear steer that has been provided by the Government is now being given statutory effect in the Bill. As I understand it, Ofwat now has sustainable development as a central objective. It will have to take account of that. It will have to carry out its functions in accordance with the strategic priorities and objectives identified by the Secretary of State.

So while I entirely understand and, indeed, sympathise with the arguments advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale—and perhaps it is because we have made such a huge advance from the position with which I had to deal when the economic regulator just did not think he had any obligations to provide for the environment and blocked almost every proposal that came from Europe or from us—I would like my noble friend to clarify what is to be gained or lost if we accept the proposition put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, over what we have already in the Bill. I find it very difficult to understand exactly what benefit we would gain. If there is nothing to be lost by including it, I would not be against including it. Against the background of a huge step forward having been taken, I am seeking from my noble friend clarification of the benefits and possible downsides of having this written into the Bill in the way proposed.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Selborne]

My Lords, I am sure that the Minister will help my noble friend Lord Cathcart, but the short answer is that, unless a water company is operating in an area of water stress, it needs the Secretary of State’s permission to introduce a universal metering programme. As the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, has pointed out, that is an unhelpful provision. I am sure that we all agree that, if we could move faster on metering, we would see some of the long-term objectives of the Bill delivered much more quickly.

The White Paper, Water for Life, to which we referred so much at Second Reading, gave one every encouragement that the Government would be promoting universal metering. It points out how universal metering changes our attitude to water, as the noble Lord, Lord Curry, has reminded us. Metering helps you determine where the leaks are, particularly when they are within your property—you suddenly take a great deal of interest when it is going to be reflected in your bill as opposed to that of society as a whole. It allows you, without in any way raising the spectre of de-averaging, to introduce all sorts of innovative incentivisation such as summer schemes, where you pay more on a summer tariff than on a winter tariff, and water reduction devices.

All these measures can and have been achieved once universal metering programmes have been introduced. In the Southern Water area, because we are a water-stressed area, these measures have been introduced and the water industry is looking with a great deal of interest at a number of the lessons which have been learnt from this programme. It is clearly correct that water use goes down. That is the first and most important message, but as the probing amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, points out, there are many other societal benefits. It is a no-brainer and we need to go for it.

[Earl Cathcart]

I thank my noble friend for correcting my wrong conclusion that the power lies with Ofwat. I should probably change my question to ask what the Secretary of State is going to do to change his attitude in this regard.

Women: Special Operations Executive

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for initiating this debate. My grandfather, Lord Selborne, succeeded Dr Hugh Dalton in February 1942 as Minister of Economic Warfare and, as such, he had ministerial charge of the SOE for three years. In fact, near the end of his life he revealed that about three-quarters or four-fifths of his time was spent on the SOE, for the Ministry of Economic Warfare was of course a convenient name to disguise what was going on.

I had the great privilege of speaking at the unveiling of the SOE Memorial on the Albert Embankment on 4 October 2009. I suppose that I was really speaking for my grandfather and all those who had had such respect for, and first-hand knowledge of, SOE agents. I pay tribute to the trustees of the Public Memorials Appeal who raised the money for that monument—the first for all SOE agents—to be placed here in London. I also pay tribute to their foresight in having a female agent, Violette Szabo, represent all agents on it. That memorial faces us here at the Palace of Westminster and it could not be in a more suitable location. We have already heard that Violette Szabo was one of those posthumously awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre.

The SOE’s activities were not universally welcomed by other armed forces. Air Chief Marshal Portal described the agents as assassins, and the Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS, now known as MI6, viewed the SOE with great suspicion. I can quite imagine that the SOE did indeed confuse issues so far as MI6 and the Foreign Office were concerned. My grandfather spent a lot of his time defending his colleagues in the SOE from being undermined by other branches of government. Churchill could always be relied on for robust support but at the end of the war the SOE was unceremoniously wound up. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was no supporter, nor indeed was Anthony Eden, but Lord Selborne and Sir Colin Gubbins, the last executive director of the SOE, and many others felt that the astonishing bravery of the SOE agents and the very great contribution that the organisation had made to winning the war both in Europe and the Far East had not been adequately recognised. Certainly, the agents would not reveal their role to their own families and they were certainly not going to talk about their achievements. Therefore, this short debate could play a very important role in redressing this long historical grievance.