Climate Change and Flooding

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

I accept that nuclear is part of the mix—that is our policy—but it is not the only solution to green energy in this country, which seems to be the Government’s point of view.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

Whatever the solutions, one of the key conclusions from COP 21 is that, in order to drive down from 3.5° to 2.7°, 2° or 1.5°, the UK will have to reset its rest—as it has been phrased. We need to do more faster and with greater urgency, and that is exactly what Lord Deben and the CCC have said. Does she agree that, whatever the solutions, one of the most important things is for the Government to accept the fifth carbon budget and narrow the gap with the fourth carbon budget?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. There is almost a consensus that the UK needs to do more, go faster and introduce stronger targets.

Business needs certainty, but people in Cumbria and other flood zones need it too. Last week, I visited Carlisle and Cockermouth with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. We are grateful to the councillors, business owners and residents who showed us around their communities and homes, and we left impressed by their resilience and determined that the Government must do all they can to rebuild their communities and reduce their future flood risk. They should never have to go through this again.

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[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, following as it does the excellent news from Paris and the rather more depressing news of recent flooding.

I have just lost two of my favourite Ministers from the Front Bench—although they are staying for a moment—but I have another still on the Front Bench. I am delighted to have their temporary audience. Like my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I congratulate our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change on her part in helping to deliver a deal in Paris. Colleagues across the Chamber will doubtless debate how important and how effective that deal is and how it contrasts with Copenhagen, from which the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) bears such scars. Despite much of the detail being left for future work, I think we have a framework from Paris which can give us hope for the future. The intended nationally determined contributions provide the building blocks with which we can go forward. We have in place in the agreement the promise of not only a stocktake, but a review and, we hope, a growth in ambition over time.

Following Paris, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has two things to do. One is to ensure that UK decarbonisation proceeds within the framework provided by the Climate Change Act 2008 and the fourth and fifth carbon budgets—our most current—which have been produced by the Climate Change Committee. We have not always got it all right. For instance, in the case of onshore wind, which is the lowest cost form of renewable energy that we have, there was a misdiagnosis of the problem.

The diagnosis of the problem, which people like me helped to provide over many years on behalf of our constituents, was that our constituents did not like having onshore wind turbines foisted on them, their local councillors ignored and a distant inspectorate insisting on them being built, resulting in our constituents losing any sense of control over the local environment. What local people wanted was to have control over their local environment. In those areas where there was least opposition, or where the recompense was adequate, onshore wind turbines should be allowed, but where local people were set on not having them, they should not go ahead.

That was a mistake that Labour made in government. With various Ministers in place I tried to get them to see that we would ultimately end up with more if we went with the grain of local opinion rather than trying to fight against it, but inevitably those whose local environment would be dominated by those constructions and who had had no say on it would find a political voice and eventually bring the scheme to a halt. We would end up with fewer, rather than more, wind turbines. So it has proved.

The misdiagnosis lay in the fact that my party came to the conclusion that the difficulty was not the planning, but the subsidy, even though it is the lowest subsidy of any form of renewable energy. So we got to the bizarre situation where there is no subsidy for the cheapest form of renewable energy, at the same time as we talk about lowering costs to consumers. We should have removed the right to appeal to the inspectorate and allowed the developers to provide packages which won support in certain parts of the country. Personally, I felt that we would have ended up with more, but somehow we have ended up with the cheapest form of renewable energy in effect receiving no support, which is a bizarre outcome. We do not want to make further such mis-steps.

On the positive side, in my local area we have offshore wind. By next year we should have 6 GW of offshore wind in this country, more than the rest of the world combined. By 2020 we should have 10 GW and, as the Secretary of State laid out recently, as did the Chancellor in the autumn statement, there is every hope that we will see a doubling of that between 2020 and 2030. So we are making significant progress in offshore wind, and it is only because of the pipeline that we have seen the supply chain and manufacturers able to invest and lower cost.

The big task for the Secretary of State is to work out how we are going to deliver decarbonisation of the UK economy at the lowest possible cost. It became apparent to me 10 years ago at the Montreal COP—conference of the parties—that we had to get the costs down. Sadly, hand-wringing environmental concern is not widely shared among the general populace of this country, among parliamentarians or across the world. We need to get the costs down so that it becomes more politically acceptable to people to do that which is compatible with tackling the risks suggested by the science.

My advice to the Secretary of State is that in every decision she makes in this area, she needs to think about creating a framework which encourages that investment. The state is only a relatively small player. Sometimes Ministers of successive Governments in this country talk as if the state is the key driver. The state is not the key driver; it is a small player. We create the framework, then we get the investment. It is that investment in solar by private companies in China and elsewhere, partly driven by the German market, that has led to the massive reduction in costs for solar. It has been the private sector investment, with the help of the Green Investment Bank, which has helped accelerate the cost curve downwards for offshore wind. That is what we must do—create a consistent environment.

There was a lot of positive rhetoric under the Labour Government about tackling climate change, but remarkably little action. In the end, in 2010, there had not been the progress that we should have seen. In the United States, by comparison, the rhetoric has always been negative but the policy environment for investment has been more positive. That is why there has been a great deal of investment in the United States, as well as more innovation and more jobs created than in this country, even though we, through the Climate Change Act and other things, have tried to be, and appeared to be, world leaders.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I cannot let the hon. Gentleman’s comments pass without intervening, but I will try to say this on a cross-party basis. The success in offshore wind, which is now quite remarkable and we need to keep it going, was built on the back of the pipeline that was set up during the period of a Labour Government. That Government—I was an Environment Minister at the time—put in place things such as the £60 million investment in the ports facilities that is now allowing Siemens to carry out manufacturing in this country, and gave the go-ahead for the licensing.

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is right to make those points. Quite a lot of the progress that has been made in the past five or six years was built on that, but in the 13 years of Labour Government remarkably little progress was made. If we compare the investment environment in renewable and other green technologies in the United States, despite all the negative rhetoric, with the investment there has been in this country, we do not come out all that strongly.

The second challenge that faces the Government, after UK decarbonisation, is helping others to fulfil their national contributions to the INDCs and to build confidence at each national level to go further. Thus, when we have the review in five years’ time, we will be able to raise the ambition so that we are not heading, as now, for under 3°, but are genuinely able to head for a sub-2° world. There is a tremendous amount to be done in engaging with parliamentarians. I should declare an interest as the chair of GLOBE International. Colleagues from across the Chamber attended the summit of legislators in Paris the weekend before last. We need to engage more with parliamentarians. That is equally true in Parliaments such as ours where, despite today’s attendance, there are remarkably few colleagues with much interest in or knowledge of the subject matter. We have to engage more people so that they take more interest and ensure that we get the frameworks that deliver the investment. There is a huge role for the UK to play in developing countries through climate diplomacy and work with GLOBE and others to make sure that we engage with these parliamentarians, who, after all, pass the laws, set the budgets, and hold Governments to account. That is certainly what GLOBE aims to do through its chapters around the world.

I want briefly to say something about flooding, following my earlier intervention on the Environment Secretary. The threat to the Humber is real and growing, with rising sea levels. Last December, we saw a bigger surge than in 1953. If the wind direction and other factors had been slightly different, there would almost certainly have been loss of life. This is a growing issue and we need to find a long-term solution. My personal thought is if we leave it to Governments, who have to decide between investment in schools, hospitals and so on, and long-term investment in flooding, they always have a tendency, when not under the shadow of a recent flooding disaster, to cut back that long-term investment. Would it not be better to set a regulatory standard on which we could rely by handing it over to water companies, whose job is to borrow money from the international markets and invest for the long term at the lowest possible cost, to deliver an agreed standard? If we had a statutory standard with a duty placed on those bodies to deliver, and all the water tax payers of the country picking it up, we would not only save the Chancellor from the cost hitting the Exchequer directly, but could have in place lower-cost intervention, to an agreed standard, for the long term, and stop having these fervent and heated debates every time we have a flood disaster, which, given climate change, is likely to happen more often in future.

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[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to speak in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall), who is a fellow member of the Environmental Audit Committee.

I will take leadership as my theme today. I am talking about the leadership that has been shown during the negotiations not just by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change but by the whole team that was out there. I was delighted to meet up with Lord Nick Bourne, an old colleague of mine from Swansea institute, and to urge him to show that leadership. The outcome was good, but I am sure that the Secretary of State and her team will agree when I say that it is as nothing unless we now rise to the challenge that it has set up. We are looking at 3.5° to 3.7° based on our current trajectory of global warming. If all the actions within the current package are delivered, we may be able to achieve 2.5°, or even 1.5° if we ratchet up our actions every year or every five years. The scale of this transition is huge; it is enormous. We cannot base it on our current plans, so the leadership that has been shown should be commended. We now need that leadership to turbo-charge what we do both here within the UK and in our international negotiations.

Once again I applaud the leadership that has been shown on the ground in areas of flooding, including in Hawick in Northern Ireland, in Wales, and in Workington, the scenes from which were described in the remarkable and emotional words of my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Sue Hayman). I was in Workington back in 2009, after what we thought was the worst flooding we had ever seen. That came on the back of the 2005 floods, and here we are again. Back in 2009, more than 2,200 properties and 250 farms were affected, 25 bridges were closed, and 40 waste treatment works were closed—again there is that issue of resilience—and here we are again.

In response to the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies), whom I love dearly, I have to say that he is completely wrong. We are not talking about this one event being down to climate change. It does not matter whether we are talking about the traumatic incidents in Cumbria, Scotland, north Wales, Ireland, Bangladesh, or the Maldives, it is a pattern of climate change that is unarguable and we must deal with it.

In the short time available, I must say to the UK Government that, if we are to make the Paris commitments work and go further, we really need a step change now. We need to go further on the international stage. I strongly urge the Minister and her team to go back and look at what we are doing at an EU level. I suggest that we are not being ambitious enough to meet that 1.5° or 2° target. In terms of this country, the right hon. Lady has admitted that we have a policy vacuum at the moment, specifically in regard to the closure of various schemes. I will not argue the pros and cons of it, but we have a policy vacuum none the less, whether it relates to energy efficiency in homes, the type of clean green energy that we produce, demand reduction, or residential or commercial properties. We are consistently being told by business people and others that there is a policy vacuum in all those areas.

[Neil Parish]

Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that a tidal lagoon in Swansea would be a very good way to produce tidal energy, and that we could use that idea all around the United Kingdom?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My admiration for the hon. Gentleman has gone up hugely, because I was not going to be able to get in that point. He is right. We were a little frustrated by the lack of announcements on the Swansea Bay lagoon and strike prices in the autumn statement. Let us now see a commitment that will take forward not only the Swansea Bay lagoon, but the Cardiff Bay lagoon and all the ones that come after it. One of my recommendations to the Secretary of State would be this: let us use this as an opportunity to create jobs and to be a world leader so that we can export that technology, that know-how and those jobs. It is there for the taking. When Stern warned us about the challenges of climate change, he told us to make the early investment to save money down the line. That is what we must now do.

[Rebecca Pow]

I have enormous respect for the hon. Gentleman, the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. I wonder whether you might want to comment on this: with the plan you are suggesting, we need much more—

[Rebecca Pow]

I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Will the hon. Gentleman comment on whether we need more detailed inspection within Government Departments so that we are all doing our bit? We have a green investment strategy in the Department for Transport, but what about all the other Departments? Should we be working together more?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The hon. Lady, who is so committed on these issues, is absolutely right. The approach needs to be cross-departmental and rigorous, and it needs a step change. We have been trying to turn the supertanker around slowly, but Paris says that that is not fast enough. Lord Deben, the chair of the Committee on Climate Change, has said that we need to do more. We heard recently from the head of the National Audit Office, who said that we need joined-up thinking and leadership in government. The hon. Lady is absolutely right.

One of the biggest commitments the Government could make—the Secretary of State and her team would have my support—is fully to accept what the Committee on Climate Change says about the outcomes of Paris. It said in its June report that we need to go further and faster. We will now need to go faster again and deliver more. There are opportunities with that. I ask the Secretary of State to accept that—I ask her to do it and get on with it, and in fact go beyond it if she can. She should look at how we can do that. What technologies should we invest in? Where will the private sector put its money? What do we do with the green investment bank? How does it play its part?

The Secretary of State should also fill the current gap from the fourth carbon budget. That is to do with leadership. It is great coming back from Paris with excellent commitments—they are better than many people were expecting. The UK played a leadership role there. We now need to take it to a whole other level. Paris means that it is not business as usual for us or for many other nations. Let us keep on leading and let us go further. I look forward to the Secretary of State saying how we will do that.