European Union (Withdrawal) Act
Debate between Barry Gardiner and David T C Davies(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner
No, I will not give way again to the right hon. Gentleman.
I move on to immigration, which was a key part of the referendum debate. Like many Members, I was outraged by the dog-whistle politics of the Vote Leave campaign’s very own “Project Fear”: that millions of Turkish citizens would be queueing up for entry into the UK. That was a lie, and those Members who associated themselves with that campaign should feel ashamed.
I also want to express my disgust at those who have sought to paint leave voters as ignorant racists; it is that sort of demonisation of our fellow citizens that is so damaging to the discourse around Brexit. It precisely obscures some of the real concerns that leave voters did express, and had every right to. Their concerns were about the lack of housing, the strains on the NHS, and being undercut in the workplace by unscrupulous employers who often exploited migrants and paid them less than the minimum wage. All those issues are about public services and domestic enforcement. They will not be solved by our leaving the EU, but they will also not be solved by our remaining. What is needed is a change of Government policy, or, better still, a change of Government.
Immigration is a vital element of our economic growth, and of our trade and trade negotiations. We need migration. The Government’s own economic assessment shows that European migration contributes 2% of GDP to the UK. The Government’s proposed £30,000 salary threshold would actually preclude three quarters of EU migrants. I am not referring simply to seasonal agricultural workers or careworkers; even some junior doctors do not earn more than £30,000 a year. The Government’s supposed skills threshold is really a salary threshold, and it would do serious damage to our economy.
The irony is, of course, that EU net migration is coming down. Statistics published just last month record the number as 74,000. The Government have been complaining that free movement gives them no control over those people. Presumably they mean the sort of control that they have always been able to exercise over migrants coming from the rest of the world. Is it not strange, then, that the figure recorded for net migration from the rest of the world is 248,000?
This is why politicians are not trusted. They tell people that we need to abolish freedom of movement to bring migration down to the tens of thousands when our own rules, over which the EU has never had any say, are allowing three times that number. What we should be explaining to people is that net migration should go both up and down in line with the needs of our economy. As long as we have fair rules and competent and reasonable management of migration, this country will be better off. The trouble is that we have had lies, arbitrary targets that bear no relation to our economy’s requirements, and, frankly, administrative incompetence.
As with regulatory alignment, so with the exchange of people. The deeper the trade deal we want, the greater the need for an exchange of people. Foreign companies that invest in the UK want and need their indigenous workers to get visas, and the harder we make that process, the less investment we will secure. When the Prime Minister went to India two years ago to secure a trade deal, she was rebuffed on precisely that issue. The Times of India summed it up on its front page with the headline “You want our business. But you do not want our People”.
Barry Gardiner
No. I have not spoken for as long as the Secretary of State and I do not intend to, but 80 Members wish to speak, so I will make some progress.
Our universities and colleges represent one of the greatest exports that our country has: education, which contributes hugely to our economy, not just through fees but through the industrial spin-offs from our world-leading research. That depends on our bringing top brains from all over the globe, and encouraging them to see the UK as their intellectual home. However, the bogus colleges scandal, and the way in which we have treated students whose colleges are closed down or go into receivership, has been a disgrace. They are victims of fraud because our system of certification has been so poor, but we treat them as if they were the criminals. They are given just 60 days to find another college, often in the middle of an academic year, and then to pay another full year’s fees before they are classed as illegal overstayers. No wonder students from key future trading partners in China and India are now turning to Australia, Canada and the US as their first choices for higher education and research. [Interruption.]
The Under-Secretary of State for International Trade, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), asks why I am running down our education service. If he had listened carefully, he would have heard me talk about our world-leading research and our top-quality universities. What I ran down was the incompetent administration of the certification of bogus colleges, and the incompetent administration of the immigration rules thereafter.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change
Debate between Barry Gardiner and David T C Davies(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
This is interesting because the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies) is one of those who believes that in meeting their climate change commitments the Government are wrongheaded and that man-made climate change is somewhat overblown as a hypothesis. He is, in effect, a climate change denier—[Interruption.]
David T. C. Davies
Up until that point, the hon. Gentleman was quite right and I was nodding. I have never ever denied that the climate changes. In fact, on every single occasion that I have spoken on this subject, I have made the point straightaway that of course the climate changes, but that it has been changing for a lot longer than 250 years. The real deniers are people like the hon. Gentleman who seem to deny that the climate changed prior to the industrial revolution.
Barry Gardiner
I was of course referring to the hon. Gentleman being a denier of anthropogenic climate change, and he knows that.
However, there are sane heads who understand that when the world’s largest superpowers ratify a climate change treaty that commits the world to a net carbon future by the second half of this century, it is time to do what President Obama said last week and
“put your money where your mouth is.”
Last year, global investment in low-carbon technology was $286 billion. The problem is that investment in developing countries outpaced that in richer nations. We are locked in a low-carbon race and we are losing. The reason I want us to get on and ratify is not because Paris is some sort of totemic environmental symbol, but because political leadership sends a strong signal to attract investment. Countries with a clear policy framework are the ones that attract investment. Countries with a stable policy framework attract investment. The UK has had neither over the past few years.
On solar, the Government plan this month to hike the tax on businesses with rooftop solar installations through a six to eight times increase in business rates. In 2015, they cut all solar subsidy for commercial installations of over 5 MW and reduced the subsidy for the rest by 65%. The Government’s own figures show that that has resulted in a 93% fall in UK solar deployment and the loss of more than 12,000 jobs in the industry.
On wind power, the Government decided to end all subsidy for onshore wind farms despite them being the cheapest source of renewable power. For offshore wind, they took away all investment certainty by announcing that they would extend the levy control framework only to 2021.
On biomass, I wrote to the Secretary of State only a few days ago to ask why regulatory changes to the tariff structure of combined heat and power biomass plants were rushed through this summer, using secondary legislation to amend the renewable heat incentive without proper consultation. No impact assessment was made of the risk to business, and trade associations estimate that £140 million of investment is now at risk.
On carbon capture and storage technology, the Government broke their manifesto promise, cancelling £4 billion of promised finance—the latest £1 billion was cancelled last year just six months before it was due to be awarded, sinking the White Rose and Peterhead projects.
On energy efficiency, the Government ditched the zero-carbon homes policy and finally scrapped their green deal policy despite having no idea about how to replace it with other household efficiency measures.
On transport, the Government reduced the vehicle excise duty incentives for low-emissions vehicles. Is it any wonder that in just four years we have sunk from fourth to 13th in the Ernst and Young index of the best places for investment in low-carbon industries?
Just to make the investment picture complete, they took the quite monstrous decision to sell off the green investment bank. A bank that was precisely set up because there was a market failure that the private sector simply could not address. By abolishing the GIB, they are now prepared to starve low-carbon industries in the UK of the investment that they need at a critical phase of development.
However, not all parts of the energy nexus are being hit by this Government. In 2013, they announced that fracking companies would pay half the tax paid by conventional oil and gas producers. The then Chancellor called the tax regime the
“most generous for shale in the world”.
CCS, commercial solar, business rates on rooftop solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, biomass, the levy control framework, the green deal—is there any part of our energy sector that I have not mentioned? Oh yes, nuclear. Hinkley—oh dear. Dithering, delay, incompetence and an overpriced contract have led to a contract for difference that will now cost the bill payer, not the Government, not the £6.1 billion originally calculated by the Government but the £30 billion as determined by the National Audit Office.
The Hinkley project has already been delayed for eight years, and the Prime Minister has now thrown in into chaos. Two and half years ago, the Government should have reviewed the project on grounds of cost. To do so after the EDF board had taken a final knife-edge investment decision is to show a level of contempt for investors in our energy infrastructure and a lack of understanding of how company boards actually take decisions, sending out the most damaging message and turning investors away from the UK as a market of preference for low-carbon investment.
David T. C. Davies
The hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but that is a fact. There was a cooling from the 1940s onwards. That is why, when I was growing up in the 1970s, people were worried that the next ice age was coming.
From the mid-1970s until about 1998 there was a significant amount of warming, but from 1998 until now there has been no statistically recognisable warming. People keep referring to the third hottest year on record, or whatever it is, but the reality is that when we look at the actual temperature increases, we see that they are absolutely minute. They are almost impossible to detect. Scientists who are asked about it will also have to admit that the margin for error within those increases is much greater than the increases themselves. Given the level of increase that we are seeing, it is perfectly possible to explain it away, because we are not comparing like with like. We are using slightly different temperature gauges, the areas in which we are using them have moved, some of the areas that they are in have changed over the years, and they can be subject to something called the urban heat island effect or to other natural factors. So there has not really been an increase since 1998.
Members may shake their heads, but I have raised this with the Met Office, and also with Professor Jim Skea. Scientists refer to it as the Pause, and they have come up with numerous explanations for it. I have heard about volcanoes, for instance, and the heat going into the ocean. At a meeting in this building, Professor Skea suggested that a pause over 16 or 17 years was statistically insignificant, which prompts an obvious question: if 17 years of temperatures not rising are insignificant, why are 30 or 35 years of temperatures increasing slightly so significant that we have to make radical changes to our economy and our industry to try and tackle that?
Barry Gardiner
Of course I have not dismissed the possibility that the hon. Gentleman might be right and that all the meteorological experts in the world are simply mistaken, but does he accept that if his thesis that there is natural as well as anthropogenic warming is correct, we are in a much worse position than we had thought, and therefore anything we can do to minimise the anthropogenic causes becomes all the more important, rather than less so?
David T. C. Davies
I do not of course dismiss the possibility that the experts may be right. I have never said they are wrong; I have merely suggested that they ought to be able to answer some fairly basic questions if they expect us as policymakers to go ahead with policies that are going to be profoundly unpopular with the public and which, in many cases, the NGOs that support those policies will not support the consequences of—I will come back to that. The point the hon. Gentleman is making is that if some of this warming is natural, the amount of warming that is not natural is that much greater in terms of the percentage of CO2 that has caused it. [Interruption.] Well, there is another issue that I am tempted to go into, but I have been asked by the Whips to keep it short and I will respect that, and that is whether or not this is a logarithmic increase. In other words—[Interruption.] Yes, I am getting looks from all around. In simple terms, if X amount of CO2 has caused Y amount of warming, would 2X of CO2 cause twice as much warming? People seem to have made the assumption that it would, but of course, in nature things often do not work that way.
Let me return to the Paris agreement. It talks about limiting temperature increases to about 2° of what they were in pre-industrial times. With due respect to the Minister, which pre-industrial times is that? I do not mean to look angry, but which times is he talking about? Presumably 1800 is about the base figure, but pre-industry goes on for about 4 billion years longer than that. We could quite easily go back a few years further and say 2° above temperatures in the medieval warm period, when they were around the same level as they are now. They were around the same temperature as they are now in the Roman optimum, too. I am probably going to mess this point up, but a Greek philosopher—I think he was called Thracius—was writing about date trees in Greece and how they could be made to grow but could not produce fruit, therefore intimating, through that, that temperatures were about the same then as now in Greece because date trees behave in the same way as they did 2,000 years ago. The point I am making is if we took as a pre-industrial basepoint the year 10 AD we could probably carry on merrily putting CO2 into the atmosphere for quite a while yet before we hit 2° degrees above that period.
Climate Change Act
Debate between Barry Gardiner and David T C Davies(10 years, 7 months ago)
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David T. C. Davies
I will take that as a hint, Ms Clark.
I know Germany extremely well, and the German politicians that I have spoken to about that think, in private, that it is barking. They will tell anyone that Germany has to buy in energy—nuclear power from France—because it simply cannot get enough from wind.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman talked about our country legislating for this area and leading alone, but will he peruse the GLOBE International report on 33 countries, 32 of which are making what I would call progress—I am sure he would not—in the area? Britain is not doing things alone; 32 like-minded countries are passing legislation to similar effect.
David T. C. Davies
I look forward to hearing from the hon. Gentleman in a moment.
Energy Bill
Debate between Barry Gardiner and David T C Davies
Barry Gardiner
Of course. The hon. Gentleman must be forgiven for not having a memory retention of more than 10 seconds. I did, in fact, say that the lower-end figures were £25 billion to £45 billion, and that the higher end of the spectrum led to the estimate of £100 billion. There we have it. If we compare the £7.6 billion that the Secretary of State has negotiated with the lower-end range of £25 billion to £45 billion, we see what the Climate Change Committee has said the gas strategy might cost us in comparison with a low-carbon investment strategy.
Critically, the Climate Change Committee says:
“Only if the world abandons attempts to limit risks of dangerous climate change would a strategy of investment in gas-fired generation through the 2020s offer significant savings.”
David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)
Is it not the case that the climate has been changing for the last 4.5 billion years, while surprisingly there has been no increase in temperatures for the last 15 years, so growing numbers of people think the whole thing is hogwash, and they are going to support quite reluctantly what the Government are doing as the least worst option?
Barry Gardiner
Yes, the hon. Gentleman is right to say that the climate has been changing over billions of years. If, however, he cared to read the report from the Met Office and from meteorologists around the world, he would find that the fluctuation over the past 10 years, to which he referred, relates to the context and background diminishing rather than the effect of emissions reducing. Again, if he bothered to read the report, he would find that it says that once the background comes back to normal or back to the average, the effect of the increased emissions would then produce a correspondingly sharp rise in climate change. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there have always been changes in the climate and there are risks that we must factor in, but when we do so, we must take full account of the scientific data. Failing to do so is the mistake he made in his intervention.
So here we have the United Kingdom Government, who proclaim themselves to be a leader in the international climate negotiations in the run-up to the United Nations framework convention on climate change agreement in 2015, adopting a national strategy that their own independent expert advisers have told them will make economic sense only if the world abandons its attempt to avoid dangerous climate change. If it were on “Mock the Week”, we should all be in hysterics.
This is not the advice of some partisan body funded by industry. It is the advice of the independent committee that we established and expressly charged with the task of advising Parliament on the most cost-effective measures that can be taken in order to deliver on the UK’s legally binding commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050. What that committee is telling the Secretary of State is that the £7.6 billion that he has negotiated needs to be set against at least £25 billion to £45 billion of increased costs to the UK public. The House should not wilfully choose to disregard the advice of the Committee on Climate Change unless it hears very specific evidence from Ministers that refutes its conclusions. To disagree with the Committee without such evidence would be wilfully to embrace higher energy prices than are necessary to our emissions objectives, and to accept lower economic growth and the likelihood that this policy will fail.
Amendments 11 to 20, which we will press to a vote this afternoon, require the Secretary of State to set a 2030 decarbonisation target for the electricity sector by 1 April 2014, at a level that
“must not exceed the level deemed consistent with a low-carbon trajectory as advised by the Committee on Climate Change”.
I am most grateful to the 43 Members on both sides of the House who have chosen to add their names to the amendments. They, like the hon. Member for South Suffolk and me, believe that a 2030 decarbonisation target is essential to the success of the Bill. Let me repeat those words: “the success of the Bill”. We are not trying to wreck the Bill, for it is too important to play politics with. Ministers should distinguish between those who bring a spade to bury their endeavours and those who, like the hon. Member for South Suffolk and me, bring a spade to shore them up. I am conscious that the Government Whips have been given a good deal of extra work by the amendments, and I will happily buy a refreshment for any of them who feel aggrieved by having to argue with their colleagues against both common sense and principle.
So far, we have identified a number of arguments that have been adduced in the Government’s defence. Front Benchers have been keen to tell their troops not to worry, because they have introduced a provision to set a decarbonisation target in 2016. Well, that is not strictly accurate. The Secretary of State did not need to give himself the power to set a decarbonisation target in the Bill, because he already had that power under the Climate Change Act 2008. What the Government actually do in the Bill is make it illegal for him to set a 2030 decarbonisation target before 2016. There is no compulsion for him to set it even after that date; there is only a permission and an acknowledgement that he may do so.
The Government specifically claim that the enforced delay makes sense, because by that time the Committee on Climate Change will have published its fifth carbon budget, which covers the year 2030. They say that it is best to consider the committee’s budget recommendation along with any decarbonisation target. Interestingly, the committee itself does not agree with that view. In fact, it has repeatedly disagreed with it. In its recent report on electricity market reform, it is quite explicit in saying:
“We recommended to the Government in summer 2012 that a carbon-intensity target aimed at reducing 2030 emissions to around 50 gCO2 /kWh should be set under the Energy Bill, which is currently progressing through Parliament.
In response, the Government has taken a power in the draft Bill which would allow it to do this in 2016. It has argued that setting a target any earlier would be premature, given that the fifth carbon budget covering the period 2028-2032—and setting the economy-wide emissions limit for 2030—will not be legislated until 2016.
However, it is not necessary to wait for the setting of the fifth carbon budget to take a decision on the 2030 carbon intensity target, given clear evidence to show that investment in a portfolio of low-carbon technologies is a robust strategy with low regrets and significant potential benefits across a wide range of scenarios.
Neither is it necessary to wait for the fourth carbon budget review in 2014 to set a carbon-intensity target. Although the Government has linked its approach to EMR implementation with the review of the fourth carbon budget, it will remain economically desirable to invest in a portfolio of low-carbon technologies whatever the outcome of the review, given the 2050 target in the Climate Change Act.
Moreover, delay in setting the target will allow current uncertainties to be perpetuated, with adverse consequences for supply chain investment and project development”.
The committee concludes:
“We therefore continue to recommend to the Government and to Parliament that a carbon-intensity target aimed at reducing emissions to around 50 gCO2/kWh should be set as a matter of urgency.”