Brexit: Environmental and Climate Change Policy

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Parminter for securing this most important and timely debate. We have had excellent contributions from Members on all sides who have clearly understood the potentially negative impact that leaving the EU could have on our environmental, energy and climate change policies as well as the few opportunities.

There will indeed be huge challenges. My noble friend laid out with absolute clarity the crucial need for the Government to recognise the environmental benefits of access to the single market in their negotiations. Of course, as energy and climate change spokesperson, I implore the Government to recognise the equal need to ensure that energy and climate change take centre stage in those negotiations.

My noble friend called on Her Majesty’s Government to commit, in the forthcoming 25-year environmental plan: to set ambitious targets enshrined in an environment Act; to put the Natural Capital Committee on a statutory footing to drive delivery; to ensure that food and farming policy and allied fiscal measures build a natural health service, producing healthy food and protecting our environmental resource; not to revise transposed EU environmental legislation unless environmental outcomes would be improved; and to build the principles of the circular economy into their industrial strategy.

We have heard a number of important comments from across the House. I shall not go through them all as it would take more than my time. The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, said that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ensure sustainable economic growth. I could not agree more. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said that we will have lots of opt-ins instead of opt-outs and that most of those opt-ins will need to be agreed on both sides for our well-being in the future. My noble friend Lady Scott reminded us of the improvements in air quality, beaches, animal welfare, native habitats and species extinction and that the single market has given us the benefit of common EU rules. Without such rules, how will we trade?

The noble Baroness, Lady Young, asked what would replace monitoring, compliance and enforcement, as she tries to keep her enthusiasm in the blackness that follows Brexit. My noble friend Lord Teverson spoke to us of climate change, fisheries policy and Defra, and reminded us that Britain had been a major driver within Europe of the Paris agreement. He asked where we would stand, who we would work with and who our allies would be in the future. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, raised the question of whether the UK Government would permit legal challenges. My noble friend Lady Miller asked how we will combine successful farming with people’s need to be in the countryside and biodiversity. How will they thrive together to work with nature?

Obviously, I want to have my two pennies’ worth, but before I go on to address some of the specific issues on energy and climate change that concern these Benches, I want to preface what I am about to say with an overriding concern about Her Majesty’s Government—this Conservative Government—and their commitment to the green agenda. In the relatively short time I have been in your Lordships’ House, this now Conservative-only Government have taken a number of retrograde steps on this agenda.

We had been doing so well during the coalition years, but the undermining of Britain’s growing green industries, and the destruction of investor confidence by measures such as the precipitate withdrawal of support for many forms of renewable energy and the abandonment of commitments to investors in carbon capture and storage, mean that investors have seen this Government put party before country. Their nervousness can now only be magnified by the huge uncertainty of Brexit. We led in Europe on climate change, and although our Climate Change Act 2008 still stands, our ability to influence and raise the game of other EU countries will be lost.

The UK will no longer have to meet targets within the EU renewable energy directive, and as it stands the UK is off track to meet the 2020 renewables targets. I would have thought the Committee on Climate Change report, Next Steps for UK Heat Policy, made grim reading for this Government, who appear to be doing nothing much in terms of effort to meet that target and who are way behind on renewable heat. Without the pressure of being a member state signed up to those targets, I fear there will be even less chance that the Government will feel obliged to keep to them. Once outside the EU, a future Administration could simply overturn the Climate Change Act if they wanted and move climate policy in a completely different direction. All that would have to be changed would be UK law, as it would no longer be subject to any EU law. If that is “taking back control”, then I have to say there is absolutely no gain in taking back control.

There is now huge uncertainty about what leaving the single market will mean for energy. EU countries already have significant control over their own energy policy, which is why there is this huge variety across EU countries. If we stay part of the energy union, we will need to continue to follow EU law, but we will not have a seat at the negotiating table. Energy is not like other types of trade. It is not so easy for us simply to say we will do trade deals with other countries such as China instead. We are connected to Europe—literally. Interconnectors, the guarantor of our energy security in terms of managing peaks and flows, are, not surprisingly, connected with our European neighbours. We need to trade energy with them. We can already feel the short-term impacts of Brexit in, for example, the dramatic decline in exchange rates, which is pushing up energy bills. Do we really think that the European Investment Bank will still invest in us when we are outside the EU? I think that is highly unlikely.

We have been a strong voice within the EU for liberalising the energy market. Without the UK there, the direction of EU energy policy may well change and we will simply have to deal with that without having any influence. The independent report by National Grid shows that leaving the EU could cost the UK up to £500 million per year in the 2020s due to the uncertainty of energy and climate investments. The most significant Brexit risk to the energy sector, according to that report, is that it will lead to higher investment costs.

What about trading emissions and the internal energy market? The Government need to move swiftly and certainly to guarantee our commitment to the environmental, energy and climate change agenda—not just with words, but with actions. New nuclear, enabling and encouraging more fossil fuels such as shale gas and ignoring the differentials relating to good or bad biogas are not going to lead to the sort of thriving, go-ahead atmosphere for energy supplies in future, let alone an economic miracle. HMG seem determined to ignore that.

This is a world that is hungry for low-carbon services and products, which was the growth market after the 2008 crash. With the Paris agreement and the sustainable development goals, those are the very products and services that we could be offering to the world if the Government had any sense. Instead, we are falling away from the global race.

We need to be bursting with ambition to capitalise on economic opportunities. We need to drive innovation. We need an industrial strategy that invests in renewables in time for that industrial strategy. We need a green regional strategy that addresses structural funds. We need to be strong in our assurances and demonstrate our commitment to the low-carbon economy. We need to ensure that we do equal or better.

Life does not, and should not, stop at Brexit. We need to push ahead. Brexit should not mean a threat to the broader context of environmental legislation. It is vital to keep on improving. Now more than ever we need the Government to step up and demonstrate international leadership on climate change; not to strip back our investment in renewables but to be bolder than ever before; to step into new growth areas such as the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon; to have a clear plan on how we are going to fulfil the Paris agreement; to retain the EU 2020 climate and energy package; to participate in the 2030 package; and to bring forward a new clean air Act to tackle pollution, protections for nature and wildlife, and strong animal welfare legislation.

I reinforce my noble friend Lady Parminter’s point about a new farming policy to provide much-needed subsidies to farms that deliver public goods, including the care of the natural environment. I am afraid this Government have been found wanting on environment, energy and climate change policies. Brexit must not be their excuse to resile, undermine or take us backwards.