Green Economy

Debate between Ben Gummer and Joan Walley

Thursday 28th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Joan Walley]

I, too, want everybody in the Chamber to get into the debate.

Let me bring to the attention of the House the two reports that the Environmental Audit Committee has produced, and which for the benefit of Members we have tagged on the Order Paper: the Committee’s twelfth report on “A Green Economy” and its sixth report on “Budget 2011 and Environmental Taxes”, which shows how we have examined the Treasury’s role in the matter.

We intended the two reports to be a starting point and an overarching basis on which the discussions that now need to take place throughout business, local government, the private sector and international development might be brought together, so that our policies—including what we do, and how we keep scrutinising what happens, in Parliament—can be tied to that agenda. We found that two years after making the commitment to increase the proportion of tax revenues accounted for by environmental taxes, the Government still have no strategy for achieving this commitment. In addition, they have not published their definition of an environmental tax. In our further follow-up inquiries, we will do what we can to obtain that definition and to scrutinise what is happening so that we get some real progress.

A further relevant aspect is the Rio+20 summit that took place last week. Its outcome was extremely disappointing given the lack of a highly ambitious outcome and follow-up action plan. However, all the different parties who were there, from business people, to legislators, to parliamentarians, to members of civil society were in absolute agreement that if the high-level leaders cannot come up with significant outcomes, everybody else has to raise their game. So it is with our Parliaments. I urge the Economic Secretary to demonstrate that she understands this issue by saying what she is doing through Treasury policy and in making sure in Cabinet meetings that there is a joined-up approach towards environmental taxes.

I want to raise issues relating to my own constituency, because we will not deal with this situation nationally or internationally unless we can deal with it locally as well. It is a matter of great concern to me that a large number of people in Stoke-on-Trent are living in fuel poverty. Indeed, of the 40,678 households in Stoke-on-Trent North, 10,120 are in fuel poverty, which is absolutely outrageous. It is a rate of 24.9%, which compares with the UK average of 18.6%—and even that is shocking. If ever there was a reason we should be getting support from the Treasury to address these environmental issues, it is that. We have a commitment to eliminate fuel poverty by 2016, and we will not achieve that unless we scale up everything that is done and look at how revenues can be reinvested so that whole communities see the importance of moving towards the renewables future that is so urgently needed.

I say this as someone who represents a constituency where the industrial revolution started because of our reliance on carbon.

[Ben Gummer]

Will the hon. Lady comment on the fact that the Labour Government spent almost £5 billion on trying to eradicate fuel poverty through various measures, with the consequence that fuel poverty went up in their 13 years in power?

[Joan Walley]

I am not going to get involved in any kind of partisan debate. Unless we can bring in measures that deal with fuel poverty in the short term and the long term, and get people’s commitment to work on this agenda instead of making political capital at the expense of everybody else, we will not deal with the problem.

In Stoke-on-Trent, we want to work with the coal authority to extract geothermal heat, which we see as one part of the solution in the context of all the other things that need to be done, to provide the jobs that are required, to provide training for people in the skills that will be needed for the new investment in renewables, and to see what we can do to bring about district heating schemes for city centre developments. We want to use the water that is underneath our city—albeit in what is, to date, an innovative way—to do what other countries, such as the Netherlands, have done to get the investment that is needed. We cannot do that without fiscal changes and incentives, and ways of getting innovation and new technology on board very quickly.

On fuel poverty, yes, we have had investment, but we have seen that piecemeal investments do not deal with the whole issue. That is why the previous Government invented the CERT—carbon emissions reduction target—scheme. If we deal with whole communities, often in areas of Victorian housing where there are huge issues with energy efficiency, it is possible to get the investment that is needed in one fell swoop. That is the kind of scaling up that is now so urgently needed.

We have aspirations to decarbonise our city. We have an untapped renewable resource, but at the same time we recognise the need for investment across a wide range of different industries and sectors. If this debate helps to take that agenda further forward, and if our Select Committees can examine and scrutinise every single action that the Treasury is taking to make these aspirations a reality, given the urgency of the need for greater energy efficiency, it will have been worth while.