Budget Statement

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Friday 12th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as co-chair of Peers for the Planet. Given today’s excellent maiden speeches, I hope that we may even gain a few recruits.

I share the disappointment of other speakers that the Budget failed to provide the coherent, cohesive underpinning necessary to meeting our national and international obligations on climate change and biodiversity, and ignored the Climate Change Committee’s recent call to front-load investment and policy rollout this year, this Parliament and this decade.

Many have spoken of the extraordinary scale of the economic challenge caused by Covid-19. Coronavirus is indeed the crisis of our time, but climate change is the crisis of our age, and the Budget fails to rise to the scale of that challenge, with big gaps in policy and funding for the decarbonisation of heating and transport, and no mention of nature-based solutions or biodiversity.

I will not follow my fellow Wulfrunian, the noble Lord, Lord King of Lothbury, on the remit on the Bank of England, but I agree that the prime responsibility is with the Government and their failure to introduce a carbon tax along with the freezing of the vehicle excise duty. Equally, the Budget is silent on the future of the green homes grant, yet a recent report by the Green Finance Institute has shown that an extensive retrofit programme could cut emissions and create 200,000 highly skilled jobs across the whole of the UK by 2030. Such a programme could be a prime candidate for the new national infrastructure bank, whose creation I welcome, and provide an example of a cross-cutting strategic approach we so badly need.