Government Plan for Net Zero Emissions

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) on obtaining today’s debate. It is truly important, but should not have been obtained by a Back-Bencher. It should have been scheduled in Government time, on one day, as I called for a few months ago when we passed the Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order 2019, amending the Climate Change Act 2008 to move to net zero. That was a 90-minute debate on an amendment, and this is our next debate on the matter.

In the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), it is not good enough. We need urgently to debate this matter properly. An indication of why that is so important is the tremendous turnout of hon. Members today, and the informed and thoughtful contributions from around the Chamber that hon. Members have had to gabble through on a two-minute time limit because there is no opportunity to debate the topic properly, on the Floor of the House, in Government time. The first thing I ask the Minister is whether he is willing to ensure that a debate is obtained at the earliest possible opportunity, to discuss this important series of events properly and do it justice on the Floor of the House.

We might ask ourselves why it is that a debate has not been scheduled. Is it that:

“Overall, actions to date have fallen short of what is needed for the previous targets and well short of those required for the net-zero target”?

Maybe that is why this issue does not seem fit for a debate. Is it because:

“The Government’s own projections demonstrate that its policies and plans are insufficient to meet the fourth or fifth carbon budgets…This policy gap has widened in the last year as an increase in the projection of future emissions outweighed the impact of new policies”?

Is it because the Government:

“has been too slow in developing plans for carbon capture and storage”?

Is it because:

“The ‘Road to Zero’ ambition for a phase-out of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 is too late”?

Is it because:

“Policies are not in place to deliver the Government's ambitions on energy efficiency”?

None of those words are mine; they are all the words of the Committee on Climate Change’s 2019 report to Parliament, which set out a coruscating catalogue of things that should have happened and have not as far as policy development is concerned. That underlines a theme that has been part of our debate this morning. It is not that nothing has been done since 2008, when the Climate Change Act was passed; it is just that nothing much has been done, and that ambitions for doing things next fall woefully short of what is needed, given the climate change emergency that we have declared and that we know is underlined by the people now demonstrating outside Parliament.

It is not that nothing has been done on climate change in particular areas, but, as the Committee on Climate Change itself indicates, the only area where any significant progress in reducing carbon emissions has happened since 2008 is in the power sector—not even the energy sector as a whole, because nothing much has happened on heat. The power sector has been responsible for 75% of emission reductions overall since 2008. Every single other sector has been level or increasing—in transport, housing and industrial sectors, emissions are level or going up. Those are areas where we can go further than saying that nothing much has happened: nothing has happened in those areas over the period.

It is the Government’s responsibility to ensure that those things happen, and they are woefully failing to set policies that can really shift those numbers on climate change, given the 12 years that were set out by the IPCC as the time available to achieve measures that move us toward the zero-carbon economy. We have set ourselves that target, but we have no policies in place to achieve it. We have 12 years to get those policies, not only on paper, but in place in reality on the ground.

[Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to look seriously at how we live in the homes we already have and the energy efficiency needed in our homes, not only in Wales, in Cardiff North where I am, but across the whole UK, as well as ensuring that the new homes we are building are built to a very high sustainable standard?

[Dr Whitehead]

My hon. Friend has read my mind, because I was just about to come on to that. She is absolutely right, and it is one element of the difference between the ambition we should have for the extent of the changes we need to make, and what we see before us in terms of the existing clean growth plan, which, as I have emphasised, is not meeting its own targets even on the old emissions levels, and is certainly not addressing what we need to do with our new targets. We need a comprehensive, country-wide, house-by-house energy refit, and it must be done urgently—in stark contrast with the pick-and-mix approach that has been taken so far on energy efficiency management, with the occasional person getting a refit.

There are a whole series of other areas where the numbers that we need to achieve bear no relation to the ambitions currently in Government policy. To achieve our energy ambitions, we urgently need to increase our offshore capacity sevenfold over the next few years. We need to increase solar provision threefold over the next 10 years. As the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) mentioned, we need to really get going on carbon capture and storage, not just with a few projects but comprehensively across industry across the country.

We need trees, as has been mentioned, but we do not need to put a few trees in here and there, important though that is. In order to replace the forest cover lost in this country over the years, which is absolutely central to capturing and maintaining carbon stores, we need to plant 2.4 billion trees over the next 10 to 20 years— 30,000 hectares per annum of new forest cover—to get us anywhere near the sort of levels we need to achieve our ambitions. That is solely lacking in the Government’s actions at the moment.

I will just draw attention to one little thing that came out recently.

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

Very briefly.

[Dr Whitehead]

Very briefly. The 2019 spending review came out with the fabulous figure for decarbonisation of £30 million. To get some scale on that—

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

Let’s not get some scale on that; let’s wind up.

[Dr Whitehead]

Indeed; I am about to wind up, Mr Gray. For scale, “Paddington 2”, the movie, had a budget of £32 million.

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. It is time for the Minister.