Climate Change Committee Progress Report 2021

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the chair, Sir Christopher. I think we may have another Back-Bench speaker whose name somehow did not make it on to the list. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) stole my gag about climate debates being like buses—two turn up at once but they are not electric buses.

I was one of the MPs who went outside yesterday to see the people who are pressing for more zero-emission buses. They had buses there from Ballymena, Falkirk, and Selby near Leeds to highlight the fact that, while the Government have pledged 4,000 zero-emission buses, only a small handful have appeared on the roads. Although the Transport Secretary responded to questions from one of my colleagues in the shadow Transport team to say that 900 were in production, we have pressed him on that since, asking where they are in production and when they are appearing, and he seems to have gone very quiet.

I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) on securing the debate, and I congratulate him on his optimism. We do need optimism when it comes to the fight against climate change. It can seem like a pessimistic environment. The zero-emission buses are an example of where the Government’s actions do not match their announcements. Unless we see an acceleration of action, not just warm words, we shall be nowhere near meeting the targets, which are good and ambitious. They set an example to the rest of the world, but if we cannot go to COP and demonstrate the real things that are happening on the ground, it all becomes greenwash, to put it mildly.

The Committee on Climate Change report is huge, but one recommendation goes to the heart of everything. There is a recommendation for No. 10 and the Cabinet Office that says:

“Ensure all departmental policy decisions…are consistent with the Net Zero goal and reflect the latest understanding of climate risks.”

That is where we need to be. Everything the Government do should be through the prism of trying to achieve net zero. We have the announcement of new fossil fuel projects—the Cambo oilfield and the Cumbrian coal mine. Lord Deben, chair of the Committee on Climate Change, has written to the Government to say that it is simply incompatible with our stated ambitions to allow those new fossil fuel projects to go ahead. Compare what is happening with airport expansion with the recommendations of the Committee that there should be no net airport expansion. The word “net” is important. Although it does not work in the current context, where Heathrow and everywhere else is pressing for expansion, there is an argument that, if capacity declined at Heathrow, regional airports such as Bristol would be able to expand, creating regional jobs and economic growth as part of that net calculation.

Take the Transport Secretary and the road-building programme, in which billions of pounds are going towards the construction of new roads. He was advised by his civil servants that that needed to be subject to an environmental impact assessment to see whether it was compatible with the Government meeting their climate change ambitions, and he refused to do so. I know that the Minister answering today is not from the Department for Transport, but that is another example of the actions of the Government just not squaring up with this recommendation in the Committee on Climate Change’s report.

The Australian trade agreement is another example. How can we claim to be serious about climate change and protecting the environment when we are more than willing to trade away environmental protections as part of a trade agreement? When the Minister was in his previous post, I asked him about potential trade agreements with Brazil and the relationship with that country in general. On one of his overseas jaunts, the Prime Minister congratulated President Bolsonaro on being an environmental champion. This guy is almost single-handedly destroying the Amazon by allowing huge numbers of people to be displaced from their land, and allowing swathes of forest to be burned and used for cattle ranching or the growing of various commodities—soya for livestock feed, palm oil, and so on.

It was sad how little attention was paid to that issue when we debated the Lords amendments to the Environment Bill yesterday. On the one hand, we have a Government who like to boast about how many more trees they are going to plant—at the last election, every party was trying to outbid the others as to how many millions of trees they would be able to plant—but that means absolutely nothing in terms of the net number of trees across the planet if we are allowing Bolsonaro to burn the Amazon to the ground.

One of the Minister’s colleagues in the Trade team once answered a question that I asked them about this issue by pointing to the UK Government’s giving money to Brazil for certain forest protection programmes, conserving parts of the rainforest or even planting new trees there, but if we look at how those numbers stack up against the proportion that is being destroyed, they are nowhere close. It is a token effort; it is well-meaning, but unless we do something through pressure in trade negotiations and at COP to stop Bolsonaro and others in their tracks, we will be destroying a huge carbon sink. We are now in a position where the Amazon is a net emitter of carbon: we used to talk about the Amazon as being the lungs of the world, but that is no longer the case, and that is something that the UK Government could do something about.

We now have the 1.5° target that we agreed at Paris, so COP should be about how we go about achieving that target, and we do need a lot of countries to set more ambitious nationally determined contributions. We are very concerned that China and now Russia will not be sending their leaders, so can the Minister advise us on what impact he thinks that will have on the negotiations? Will Brazil come to the table, and what pressure will it be put under at COP? Finance is incredibly important—trying to secure that $100 billion a year—but as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on small island developing states, I would make the point that whenever I talk to those states, they say that this is not just about how much money is committed, but how they can access it. These are tiny countries with very small levels of resources.

[Tony Lloyd]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. This is not just about money, but about the transfer of technologies. One of the things we saw during the covid crisis was that we were unfortunately quite reluctant to transfer technology, even in our self-interest. We have to allow the small countries that she has described to have access to the technology, as well as the finance, that makes the difference.

[Kerry McCarthy]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. In some cases, the populations of those countries are smaller than the population of our constituencies, so it would not be a huge effort on the part of the UK Government to prioritise them and help them make the transition to renewable energy. In some cases, it involves getting out of very difficult contracts, sometimes with companies that are based in the developing world and are tied into electricity supplies based on fossil fuels. There is a lot that we could do to help them. The main plea is that we have to simplify the process. We all know of small organisations in our constituencies trying to apply for, say, lottery funding, or bidding for other funds. They face a similar situation; the paperwork and bureaucracy are immense.

I was concerned to read today in The Guardian that a third of Pacific islands have said that they are unable to attend COP, partly because of covid. That goes back to the size issue. The people who would be coming over from those islands cannot afford to take a fortnight off work to quarantine at the end of the conference. When I asked the COP26 President, the right hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), about that, he told me two things: that the UK would ensure that all people from small and developing states could be vaccinated, and that there would be funds available to bring them over. The reason that delegates at Paris moved from 2° to 1.5° was partly because of the personal testimony and presence of the Pacific leaders in particular, and leaders of small island developing states in general. That really made the change. Their presence and their voices at Paris shamed the world and highlighted the fact that in some cases those countries will literally disappear underwater if we do not keep 1.5 alive.

I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views on another of the recommendations in the committee’s report. It came up briefly at International Trade questions today, but the Minister did not have much time to outline the Government’s position. The report lists as a priority recommendation that the Government should

“Develop the option of applying either border carbon tariffs or minimum standards to imports of selected embedded-emission-intense industrial and agricultural products and fuels.”

Hon. Members can see why I had to write that down; it is quite a long phrase. As I understand it, we need to measure the embedded carbon in the products that we are importing into the country and find a way of dealing with it, and border tariffs may be one way of doing that. The report recommends that that should be discussed at the G7 and at COP, which is why I wanted to flag it up today. We should have those discussions.

I am aware that I have been speaking for quite some time, although I am also aware that, given that this is a three-hour debate, I could probably go on a lot longer. I am sure that people do not want to be detained, so I will just mention one more thing. It was reported this week that a nudge unit report on behaviour change, which recommended reductions in meat eating and measures to curb aviation demand, was buried. Can the Minister explain why that report has not been published and is not being discussed? We can talk forever about technological change, what the Government need to do and what needs to be financed, but behavioural change is a significant part of how we will meet our climate objectives.

In previous conversations, Ministers have suggested to me that they are quite reluctant to intervene in issues around the food agenda, plastic use and anything involving an element of personal choice. Ministers from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said to me that individuals could choose to bring their keep cup with them—like I have done today—so that they do not use single-use plastic, or that they could choose to eat less meat, but that this is very much a matter of personal choice: the market will respond if the public want it.

Particularly with meat eating, the market has responded, but some Ministers, from an ideological point of view, do not see a role for the Government in nudging it along. There is a real debate about whether it is acceptable to nudge things along rather than wielding the stick to make people do things. That is the crux of the issue of whether we act upon the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations. For example, they recommended a

“20% shift away from all meat by 2030”.

That is pretty unambitious, but there is an ideological debate about whether the Government’s role is to encourage people to make the shift or to make them make the shift—using all the levers, whether they be carrots or sticks.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, but on that point, is it not true that people have a choice in the supermarket between buying a meat product or an equivalent plant protein alternative, but that nearly always—particularly at the bottom end of the price scale—the plant protein equivalent is much more expensive? The Government could introduce fiscal measures to level that up or even make the plant protein choice cheaper, given the climate benefit to that, but they are choosing not to do so. That would make personal choice easier. At the moment, the choice for people who cannot afford it is to buy the meat every time.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I agree with my hon. Friend. We had this discussion during the Agriculture Bill Committee, and I know that organisations such as Sustain were very keen on the idea that we could use agricultural subsidies to bring down the price of healthy food. However, we get into a difficult discussion about rewarding farmers for producing so-called healthy food. We could say that a potato is a healthy food, but if it gets turned into a bag of crisps it is not. If a tomato gets put in a ready meal with all sorts of other junk, it is not healthy. It is quite a difficult thing to grapple with, but I do not think that the idea of a meat tax is the way to go. I know that some people suggest that, but I think we need to look at how we can make healthy choices, and more sustainable choices, more affordable for people.

The same goes for electric vehicles. I very much welcome the zero-emission vehicles mandate that was announced this week, but the Government have been cutting the plug-in grants for electric vehicles year on year, and there are rumours that they will be axed entirely. From what I hear from the Chancellor, I think we are okay for the next financial year, but not beyond that. It almost feels as if the Government have decided that the grants that have been given out so far have done their job. They have stimulated the market, but if we are to get to where we want to be and have a vibrant second-hand market by the time that the ban on the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles comes in, a lot more has to be done. At the moment, EVs are simply not affordable and accessible for many people, and that is partly because of the charging infrastructure points as well.

I have spoken far too many times about EVs in this place as it is, so I will draw my speech to a conclusion—as I am sure you will be very pleased to hear, Sir Christopher. As it stands, I do not think that what the Government are doing will get us to net zero by 2050, I do not think that we are on track to achieve the pledged 78% emissions reduction by 2035, and very sadly I do not think that we are on track to keep 1.5 alive.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a real pleasure to be back in Westminster Hall in person and to serve under you chairship, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) for securing the debate. He said that a similar debate is taking place in the main Chamber, which means that so many Members from across the House will be talking about the most important issue facing humanity: the climate.

I know we are talking about the Climate Change Committee, and I could quote Lord Deben at length, but I will start by quoting Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific officer, whom we have seen many times during covid:

“Only rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in this decade can prevent…climate breakdown”.

He is obviously the chief adviser to the Government in this area, aside from the Climate Change Committee.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and as we found out from “The Great British Bake Off”, baked goods that look great do not always taste great. That is the test for the Government. This week they have published their net zero strategy, with so many accompanying documents and reports that I have not had time to read them, so the Minister might be correcting me and others at the end of the debate because there is an answer to our questions. However, while things have looked good for a while, they have not tasted good, because the delivery is not there.

I will talk about the role of local government. Before I was elected to this place, I was the lead on climate change sustainability for Leeds City Council for a number of years. We started doing some great, groundbreaking work, but we could not complete some of those initiatives, because of Government policy and intervention, which stopped us in our tracks. Let me give two examples.

First, we installed 1,000 solar roofs on the homes of council tenants who could not afford to put solar panels on their roofs. We took those 1,000 households out of fuel poverty. We were able to do that because of the feed-in tariff. The cost of those solar roofs would be repaid in nine years because of the benefit of that feed-in tariff. When we were installing the solar roofs, the Government announced a reduction in the feed-in tariff and then another reduction, and it became uneconomic to complete the programme. We had an aim of 7,000 roofs. Interestingly, at the beginning of the programme, people did not want them. They said they looked ugly, but as soon as the first person in the street got them and reported how much they were paying for electricity, everybody wanted solar roofs, but we could not fill the demand because of Government intervention.

There is a real issue in my constituency. On one side of the main road we have a social housing estate where external wall insulation was provided because the eco-funding provided for that, and we managed to complete it after the eco-funding was cut, because we got a European regional development fund grant, which again is something that is no longer available to us. On the other side of the road, there is no external wall insulation, because there was no funding to complete the programme, and the people live in fuel poverty. That is an example of where Government interventions restricted a local authority’s ability to deliver on climate action. It is important that the Government give local authorities the tools, funding and support to complete the work.

There are big gaps. First, local authorities do not have the staff to do the work because of year-on-year Government cuts. We are not talking about local authorities’ statutory duties; we are talking about local authorities having set net zero dates themselves. The earliest one I heard was Nottingham’s, which was 2028. Leeds’s was 2030, and I think Manchester’s and Bristol’s were the same.

[Kerry McCarthy]

indicated assent.

[Alex Sobel]

Yes. So a lot of local authorities have quite short time periods to deliver net zero. They are not hamstrung by their own actions, but by Government actions. I hope that in the documents released this week there will be answers to local authorities’ questions.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the Government have not reached out to leaders in the city regions ahead of COP? We know that on day 11 of COP there is a city regions day, but the Mayor of Bristol told me that there has been no discussion with Bristol, which is at the forefront of trying to introduce measures to get us to net zero. There seems to be a lack of communication between the Government and the people in charge of delivering the policies on the ground.

[Alex Sobel]

I have mixed news for my hon. Friend because the Mayor of West Yorkshire will be there on the 11th, and the Government have given her blue zone accreditation.

[Kerry McCarthy]

The Mayor of Bristol is going to COP and has blue zone accreditation, but he says there have been no conversations about all the documents the Government are publishing, and no discussions with city regions about what will be raised at COP and how things will go, and they are being left to the last day, on day 11.

[Alex Sobel]

I completely agree that metro Mayors have been an afterthought in terms of COP. My first COP was in Paris and I went, before we had a metro Mayor, as the lead representative. The French Government and the Mayor of Paris put on a huge set of events and incorporated cities from around the world. Given the issues that were emerging in the United States at that point, it was decided that the real deliverers of climate change measures on the ground would be cities and regions. The Paris COP was just after the election of Donald Trump. Thankfully, we are through that period now and we have a President of the United States who wants to take serious climate action.

On support for local authorities, they have their own internal staff to be able to deliver, but there is a huge skills gap across all the different areas. I would like to see the Government step up and fund skills training in all areas. We now have a situation where we have shortages of workers in a whole range of areas. It is really important for the country that we retrain workers in fossil fuel industries into these new industries and that we train young people into these jobs.

The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire mentioned the ambition around heat pumps. Apparently, 7 million to 11 million heat pumps are required by 2035. How many air and ground source heat pump installers have been trained in the UK so far? Not many. The number is in the low thousands—I am sure that the Minister will have the exact number. That is woefully insufficient to deliver the ambition of the Government’s programme. There are university technical colleges and building colleges all around the country that could be funded to train tens of thousands of people in these industries, which is what we will need, and not just in those industries.

To digress slightly, my next point is about the supply chain. I recently went to ITM Power in Sheffield, which is a manufacturer of electrolysers. Those are what we need to convert off-peak renewable electricity into hydrogen for use in buses and heavy goods vehicles, potentially in heating, in making steel, and in other industrial processes. ITM Power has 320 people in its plant and is training people, but it says that its big issues are support for skills training and demand for electrolysers in the hydrogen sector, because there is a lack of skills training for the industries that would use electrolysers. So the supply chain issues are huge, and I will come back to them. However, I have digressed a little from local authorities.

What do the Government need to do to support local authorities? For a start, what we are seeing now, in terms of the Climate Change Committee, is five-year carbon budgets. As we have seen, we are not on track to meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets. We will wait until the Climate Change Committee reports to see whether it says that, with the new plans, we will now meet those budgets; I still think that we will fall short of meeting them, because we have lost so much time. Because time is so acute—for local authorities, we are talking about timeframes of seven, eight, nine or 10 years to get to net zero—we need a practical framework for annual carbon budgeting, and we need to have shorter periods for measuring it.

Planning is a huge area; it is a really difficult area for local authorities. Time and time again, we see planning committees in local authorities—I know that it happens in my local authority in Leeds—where councillors want to turn down volume planning applications. I am not talking about somebody’s extension on their house; I am talking about big developments. They want to turn them down on climate and environmental grounds, but the legal advice and planning officers say that they cannot turn them down, because they will lose on appeal.

We do not have a good enough planning framework to meet our net zero obligations, and those need to become non-negotiable. When the planning Bill is brought forward, I hope that that is where the Government will take it and that they will not, once again, lean in to the volume property developer community, which wants to do the absolute minimum. That community has really influenced the Government twice already: once when we had the code for sustainable homes, which was introduced in 2009-10 but scrapped as soon as the coalition Government came in; and then towards the end of the coalition Government, when the zero carbon homes initiative was also scrapped after the 2015 general election. We have lost 11 years on this issue; we cannot afford to lose any more time just because volume house builders cannot meet their climate obligations. They have had 11 years; they should have caught up. In every other European country, such developers have caught up, including in Holland, Belgium, Germany and Denmark. They need to catch up in the UK.

It is not good enough that we are still building homes without alternative fuel systems and saying that we will retrofit them in 2035. How much more will it cost us to retrofit those houses, rather than building them now with an adequate low-carbon heating system? Local authorities also need access to net zero funding streams to meet their own obligations, or the Government’s obligations, around net zero.

I will just talk a little about the supply chain, because I realise that I have already talked for a considerable length of time, although I know that we have a little bit of time left in the debate. I keep speaking to people who are quite early in the supply chain; I just mentioned ITM Power. Yesterday, I spoke to people who provide the ships and the construction crew for offshore wind. I speak to people in the early stages of the supply chain for low-carbon solutions in every area. They raise the same issues every time. One issue that generally does not exist is lack of access to finance. The finance exists, but the problems are, first, the very short timescales for contracts and contracting. The Government need to provide confidence in long-term contracting.

Secondly, there are real issues around manufacturing capabilities. We do not have the shipyards and we do not have the number of buses being produced. Can somebody point me to a hydrogen heavy goods vehicle that has been produced in the UK? Not a single HGV has been produced in this country that will take hydrogen fuel. There are a few in other countries, so we are behind that curve. We need to be in a position to provide the confidence and the demand for low-carbon manufacturing and construction. Otherwise, we will be left behind once again, as we were on manufacturing wind turbines, where Denmark and Germany took a clear lead, and a number of other areas we could talk about, such as district heat and power and so on. Those are two areas.

The other area, and the most important thing, is that we do not have an end-to-end green industrial strategy, which means that people do not know exactly where they fit into the net zero pathway and the roadmap. All the Government’s ambitions and targets need to fit into an industrial strategy so people know how everything works. Germany has an industrial strategy; the UK does not seemingly have one now. If the Government have published a really good one this week, I apologise to the Minister and he will tell us all about it at the end.

I will finish on this: my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) referred to the fact that a report came out from the nudge unit but was then withdrawn. It can still be found if people know where to look on the internet. That was the one I read in quite a lot of detail, because it is always interesting to know why the Government have withdrawn something after putting it out. There is one thing in there that was interesting.

One of the big challenges at COP26—it will be a success and I will give praise to the Government if their COP presidency stands out from that of every previous COP from Paris onwards—will be getting an international agreement on aviation and shipping emissions. There is a lot of talk about technological solutions to both aviation and shipping, but I am afraid that they are a long way away. If we talk to anybody in the industry, it is clear that we are still at a very early research and development phase. As to having this at scale, it is probably past the point of no return in terms of the climate.

We are going to have to manage demand, and on aviation the nudge report suggested that the Government should consider looking at a frequent flyer levy. The reason for that is that 70% of flights in this country, pre-covid, were taken by 15% of people. Demand for aviation is not evenly spread, whereas it is much more so with car travel. It is a small group of people, whether because they are involved in business travel or because they are individually well off. There are not many ways to change that behaviour, but the frequent flyer levy is one. I am interested to know why that report was withdrawn, why that is not being considered and where we are on managing demand if we are to have no net increase in aviation emissions in this country.

I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire again. I hope we can get this right and we can get an international agreement right at COP26. The climate and climate science will not compromise with us. This is not a political problem that we can negotiate with another country; this is a problem that is based on science, and science will not wait.

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Hands]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. I will come on to the point about installation. He also makes a very good point about insulation and the importance of well insulated homes, which I think nobody denies. But let me just return to the points that he made in his speech.

Local government and local delivery are incredibly important. It is very important that local leadership is seen on climate change. I see it from Mayors such as Andy Street and Ben Houchen and also some Labour Mayors. I think Andy Burnham, the hon. Gentleman’s local Mayor, has been quite good in this space as well. It is important that we all see climate change and taking action on climate change as a cross-party issue involving all the tiers of government and all the available parts of government across the whole United Kingdom.

On energy usage, the hon. Member for Rochdale asked what more the Government can do to address consumption and reduce emissions. The heat and buildings strategy addresses consumption in homes. For example, we provide increased support for low-income households through the home upgrade grant. We are committed to upgrading fuel-poor homes to energy performance certificate band C by 2030 where reasonably practicable. And there is our social housing decarbonisation fund, with £800 million provided. I think that the hon. Gentleman also asked about hydrogen investment. The net zero strategy confirms the industrial decarbonisation and hydrogen revenue support scheme, supporting blue and green H₂ production. It could lead to 1.5 GW of new capacity.

The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) asked about quite a number of things, some of which are familiar themes. I just remind her that Cambo has already been licensed as a field, in 2001 and 2004.

I could fill the remaining time on airport expansion. Mrs Murray, you will remember that I resigned from the Government in 2018 over airport expansion at Heathrow. I note that, since I resigned, that airport expansion has not happened and I am not seeing any sign of it happening anytime soon.

The hon. Lady asked about trade agreements.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Would the Minister like to advise us as to whether, if proposals to expand Heathrow are resurrected—obviously, over the last couple of years there has been the pandemic, which has hit aviation—he will resign again?

[Greg Hands]

Again, that is a temptation down a particular road, but let me say this. The Government are absolutely clear that all further airport expansions must be consistent with our climate change obligations. Government policy is absolutely clear on that.

Net Zero Strategy and Heat and Buildings Strategy

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

I refer the hon. Gentleman to the annex of the net zero strategy, which sets out in some detail our response to Lord Deben’s annual report earlier this year. I think he will find in the annex a lot of the good mentions of local government for which he has been looking.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

The zero-emissions vehicle mandate is welcome, although, as the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) said, the Government do need to get a move on. They have been cutting plug-in grants year on year, and there are now reports that the Chancellor wants to axe them all together. What in this strategy will actually help to make the purchase of electric vehicles more affordable for the average consumer?

[Greg Hands]

Nobody should doubt the Government’s commitment to getting a switch to electric vehicles. I certainly hope that the shadow Secretary of State has been taking an interest in that in recent times—

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

I thank my hon. Friend for his welcome. As he has pointed out, the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution sets an ambition to grow the market to 600,000 heat pump installations per annum by 2028. The heat and building strategy, due soon, will set out the policies that will deliver this target in a fair and affordable way, including for his High Peak constituency.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Experts have concluded that to reach net zero by 2050, there should be no new oil and gas fields approved for development and no new coalmines or mine extensions from the end of this year. Does the Minister agree with that assessment by the experts, and if so, does he agree that the Cumbrian coalmine and the Cambo oilfield surely cannot go ahead?

[Greg Hands]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. Of course, we look carefully at what the Climate Change Committee has recommended at all times, and we are in the process of meeting last year’s recommendations very well. I can tell her that the climate checkpoint will apply to all future licensing rounds. Cambo is of course already licensed, and projects that are already licensed are already accounted for in our projection of emissions from future oil and gas production. So those emissions are already accounted for in our plans.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab) [V]]

The shadow Business Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), spoke earlier about the post-war years, Ernie Bevin and the need to build back better, then and now. In Bristol—where Bevin started work on the docks at the age of 11 and fought for workers’ rights as a trade unionist, before becoming one of the giants of the post-war Labour Government—we are hugely disappointed at the lack of any funding in the Budget for our biggest project, Temple quarter. The regeneration of the area around Brunel’s historic Temple Meads station would mean 22,000 new jobs, 10,000 new homes and an economic boost of £1.6 billion per annum for the city. That is exactly the sort of “shovel-ready” project that the Government were asking for. We have to ask why places such as Bristol are being overlooked for levelling-up funds in favour of far more affluent areas.

The Chancellor’s offer to extend support to the 600,000 newly self-employed is welcome, but that still leaves more than 2 million freelancers and limited company directors excluded—and that is a conscious decision by the Chancellor. People on legacy benefits are being treated as second-class citizens, and the freezing of income tax bands will hit those on modest incomes the hardest. Events supply chain companies in my constituency are desperate for targeted support. When I raised this issue recently with the Prime Minister, he assured me that we would be hearing more on this from the Chancellor in the Budget; we listened, but we heard very little.

We also heard nothing new on support for our failing social care system and nothing on child poverty. What was meant to be a 2.1% pay rise for nurses has been whittled down to 1%—a real-terms pay cut—in the interests of austerity; and we know how well austerity worked last time.

Finally, we were promised a green Budget, yet we got nothing of the sort. We needed to see measures that would kick-start a transformative green recovery, but what we got was a pitiful lack of ambition from the Chancellor. Although I welcome the £4.1 million allocated to reducing car usage in the west of England, this kind of piecemeal funding is no substitute for a national strategy for decarbonising transport and encouraging take-up of active travel. Ahead of hosting COP26, we should be leading the way on tackling climate change and biodiversity loss, yet the Chancellor is more concerned with boosting his own leadership prospects and “brand Rishi” than with showing the international leadership that we need from our senior politicians on this issue.

The UK is being eclipsed in green recovery spending at an international level. For instance, France and Germany have both delivered substantial green spending packages to decarbonise their economies. Labour has already set out its plan for a £30 billion green stimulus to support 400,000 new green jobs. I urge the Chancellor to read those plans, which might just help him to think bigger when it comes to protecting our planet.

Climate Change Assembly UK: The Path to Net Zero

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my colleague, neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) on securing this debate. As the then vice-Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, I attended one of the sessions of the Climate Assembly in Birmingham. I was impressed by the set-up: how assembly members had been selected, and the huge amount of work and expense that went into trying to ensure it was representative and reflective of the general population. I was also impressed by the contributions of expert witnesses and the efforts that were made to ensure that their work informed deliberative discussion in each group.

There were disadvantages. I share some of the scepticism of the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) about the exercise. It is expensive, certainly if we are looking to replicate it at a local level, as we are in Bristol. If we want to do it right, we have to put in quite a lot of resources. It also takes time. There is the question: we actually know quite a lot of these things, so why do we not just get on with it, rather than having an exercise that will inevitably delay things? One Conservative Member spoke about how the Government were introducing a deposit returns scheme. He implied that that had come out of the Climate Assembly report. The Environmental Audit Committee has been making these recommendations and investigating that side of things for a long time, and that was already on the agenda. On electric vehicles, the December 2019 Labour manifesto called for a phase-out of petrol and diesel by 2030. It did not really need the Climate Assembly to nudge the Government in the right direction; they could have just listened to the Labour party instead.

Having said that, I was won over by going along and listening to the discussions. There is a quote in the executive summary from an assembly member, who said that he or she—it was someone called Chris, so I am not sure—was worried when they got there that the debate would be somewhat one-sided and it would all be people who were very passionate about the climate emergency. They said it was refreshing to see that it ranged from people for whom it was a complete crisis to those who were in complete denial about the issue. Getting that balance is what an exercise like that should be about, but I worry that it means that the process will inevitably lean towards consensus. That could lead to a watering down of ambition when the scale of the twin crisis—the climate crisis and the ecological crisis—means that more radical solutions are needed.

Some people have criticised the assembly for not reaching the right conclusions and have said that that was because they were not asked the right questions. These are people who feel that the 2050 target is not ambitious enough. It is worth noting that proposals to bring forward the 2050 date, without a specific date in mind, were put before the assembly but were rejected, with quite a significant proportion of people unsure about it.

I attended the sessions on what we eat and how we use the land, which is a particular interest of mine. I was pleased with the recommendations on low-carbon farming, food waste and natural climate solutions such as peatlands and forestry. It was interesting to see that, by and large, people were coming quite new to those arguments, whereas perhaps if it was a discussion about transport they would have given it a lot more thought in their everyday lives. It was interesting to see the further information they were asking the experts for and how willing they were to shift their views as they listened to the answers they were given.

In the final few seconds I have to speak, I wish to reflect briefly on the additional recommendation that we should get to net zero without pushing our emissions to anywhere else in the world, which was endorsed by 92% of assembly members. The fact is that we are already doing that. We cannot tackle climate change in this country unless we also look at our global carbon footprint.

Alternative Fuelled Vehicles: Energy Provision

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 6th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Betts. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on an excellent and comprehensive speech. As he said, fuelling vehicles through alternative means will be vital if we are to meet net zero, and there are exciting developments in the field.

I confess that I was a sceptic about the role that alternative fuels would play in significantly reducing carbon emissions from aviation. It seemed that often they were put forward to deflect discussion of the demand for flights. However, since taking up my current role as shadow Minister for green transport I have spoken to a lot of firms in the sector, such as Velocys, which will be producing sustainable aviation fuel sourced from waste in the UK, and the Electric Aviation Group, which hopes to have hybrid electric planes operating in UK skies by the end of the decade. It is not the only answer to rising aviation emissions, but it is part of the mix. I have discussed alternative fuels with Maritime UK, and we are closely watching ongoing and planned trials of battery-fuelled and ammonia-fuelled shipping in Scandinavia.

Electric and waste biofuel buses are already on our roads, including the biogas buses in Bristol. However, they need additional support, particularly now that the bus industry is struggling with collapsing revenues because of the pandemic. The same is true for rail firms, which want to move away from dirty diesel rolling stock. However, they have been failed by the Government on electrification and need support to develop or purchase trains fuelled by renewable alternatives. We also need sectoral support for aviation, conditional on climate action. Many others have spoken about hydrogen, and I do not have time to go into that now.

On electric vehicles, recently, along with my colleagues from the shadow Business team, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), who is replying to the debate today, and my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), I wrote to the Transport Secretary calling on the Government to bring forward the planned phase-out of petrol, diesel and hybrid cars and vans to 2030—at the moment, the manifesto commitment is 2040—and plans to make that transition smooth and feasible. That is important not just to meet our carbon objectives, but to support our car manufacturing sector. I do not quite agree with the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) that we have missed the opportunity to develop electric vehicle production in the UK. We also need to think about electric bikes and electric cargo bikes. We used to be so good at producing bicycles in this country, and I think we need to do more of that.

We have only 5% of the charge points that we need if we are to stick to the 2040 target and have half of all new car sales represented by zero-emission vehicles by 2030. If we bring that date forward to between 2030 and 2032, we will have to accelerate installation of those charging points. I hope the Minister can reassure us on that point.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

We now move on to the Front Bench Members, who I am sure will be equally co-operative. I am getting ahead of myself. Anthony Browne, you have sat there patiently.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 29th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

The Chairman of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee of course raises an important point, and he will know that I have come to the House on previous occasions and outlined the detailed discussions we have. I set up a range of taskforces, where we had discussions on issues around the industrial strategy back in June, and we converse on a daily basis with sectors across the country.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I was really disappointed by the answers the Business Secretary gave to my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband). I have global exhibition companies in my constituency that are on the verge of going bust. They do not need to be told about the kickstart scheme or apprenticeships, or to be told that universal credit is available for them. These companies are calling for an extension of business rate relief and a new grant scheme, bearing in mind that many of them were not eligible for the retail, hospitality and leisure grant. Will the Secretary of State consider this, and commit to publishing a provisional date when conferences and exhibition events can reopen, as has been happening in parts of Europe? Will he also agree to meet the sector? I have tried lobbying the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on this, and I am getting nowhere. Will he pay attention to this sector?

[Alok Sharma]

As the hon. Lady outlines, this particular sector is the responsibility of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. However, I have been talking to representatives of the sector, as have my ministerial team and, as I have said, we will continue to have such conversations. As I have also said, the Chancellor set out a significant package of support since the start of this pandemic, and people are still able to make use of that support.

A Green Industrial Revolution

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I am very disappointed that the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) has mentioned the 75% figure, which was also mentioned by the Foreign Office Minister who gave the statement on the bushfires last week. It is fake news that is being spread by climate change deniers in Australia. A letter to The Guardian from a number of well-renowned climate academics, including several from Bristol University, was published yesterday. I think the true figure for arson is less than 1%. I would like to make sure that that is absolutely on the record.

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

I thank my hon. Friend for her point because she is quite right.

With reference to civil society groups like Extinction Rebellion who have been urging those in power to tell the truth about climate change, I was alarmed by reports that the Government’s response was to defend the recommendation to list them alongside neo-Nazi terrorists. That is an absolute disgrace. I urge the Secretary of State to speak to her colleagues about this. It is absolutely absurd that our school strikers and our climate activists who were trying to fight to be heard here in Westminster are being listed alongside terrorist organisations when they are simply trying to save the planet and deliver a world for their future and that of their children and grandchildren.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell)—that is clearly where he gets his ease of manner, and he already seems like a veteran of the Chamber. I have never visited his constituency, but perhaps it is about time I did.

I wish to pay tribute to my colleague, Sue Hayman, who represented another Cumbrian seat. I wish she were here today to contribute to this debate, because she did so much, particularly on Labour’s “Plan for Nature” and animal welfare manifesto, and as our Front-Bench speaker shadowing the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She will be very much missed.

The planet is facing a climate and ecological crisis, but forgive me, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I do not have complete confidence in the Government’s ability to rise to the challenge. Since we returned after the election, two ministerial appearances at the Dispatch Box have raised my concerns. We had a statement on the Australian bushfires, and the Foreign Office Minister managed to get through her entire opening statement without putting the situation in the climate context. When a number of us challenged her and said, “Surely, if you are talking about the Australian bushfires, you should be talking about why they are happening?”, she got quite cross with me and said that we should be treating it like some sort of disaster where we just come in afterwards and patch things up, rather than looking at the root causes. As we have already heard, she repeated the 75% arson claim, which has been thoroughly debunked.

We also had an urgent question on Flybe yesterday. Again, in the Minister’s initial response, with regard to bailing out an airline and possibly cutting air passenger duty on domestic flights, there was no mention at all of the impact on carbon emissions and pollution. Surely, no matter what your views on whether Flybe provides an essential service, you have to mention climate change if you are serious about trying to reach net zero.

Another thing that really worries me is that the COP25 climate change talks took place during the election campaign. A number of us had been hoping to attend, but were obviously unable to because of the election. We have not had a ministerial statement on COP25. We should have had an oral statement, particularly as we are hosting COP26. COP25 is widely regarded as a failure—very little was achieved. I would have expected, at the very least, a written ministerial statement assessing what did not happen in Madrid and putting forward a plan for how we can get things back on track as we host COP26 in Glasgow later this year.

In terms of what is in the Queen’s Speech, I welcome the direction of travel set out in the environment Bill. I particularly welcome the decision to locate the new Office of Environmental Protection in Bristol. I can think of no better place for it, given the level of expertise we have in the city. My concern, however, is particularly that the long-term targets do not need to be set until 2022 and potentially cannot be enforced for almost two decades. Reference has already been made to the fact that the carbon budgets, which give us interim targets, are slipping. We know that we are not going to meet the recycling target for this year. We cannot just have one goal that we aim to reach two decades into the future. We have got to have a way of monitoring it and holding the Government to account in the short term as well.

The OEP will not be truly independent and will lack the power to hold the Government to account. In the previous Parliament, I sat on both the Environmental Audit Committee and the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which undertook pre-legislative scrutiny. Both Committees made that point. There is also no commitment to non-regression. When we should be seeking constant improvement, we can do better than our current standards. We certainly should not be going backwards. National infrastructure projects will not be subject to biodiversity net gain. Increasingly, net gain is looking like net parity. Again, we should be seeking improvements and not trying to just hold things as they are. The National Trust is particularly concerned that the historic environment has been excluded, even though the 25-year environment plan put it on a level playing field with the natural environment. There is no commitment to a national tree strategy, which is a crucial nature-based solution. While I am here, I would also make a plea for us to restore our peat lands. They can be an incredible carbon sink, but if we allow grouse moor owners to set fire to them, the environmental degradation that goes with that releases a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere. We need action on that.

On a global scale, we heard the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) talk about the need to measure consumption, rather than just production. There is absolutely no way that we are looking at the true picture unless we do so. The UK, for example, consumes 3.3 million tonnes of soy per year. Some 77% of that comes from high-risk deforestation areas in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. We know that land use is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services.

On UK Export Finance, it is a shame that the Secretary of State is no longer in her place. She was boasting about some of the work we do on reducing carbon emissions overseas, but, as the Environmental Audit Committee found, UK Export Finance spent £4.8 billion on fossil fuel projects overseas between 2010 and 2016. In fact, well over 90%—I think 95% or 96%—of the amount it spends on financing energy projects overseas goes on fossil fuel projects, rather than on cleaner renewable projects. That is almost equal to the total spending on international climate finance. There is no point boasting about what we do on the one hand, if we then finance the private sector to do damaging fossil fuel exploration on the other hand.

The agriculture Bill has not been mentioned yet. Last time it was before us, I spoke on Second Reading and served on the Bill Committee, which concluded in December 2018. There is a sense of déjà vu to hear it announced again. I think it was published a couple of hours ago and there have been only a couple of minor tweaks to the previous Bill. That is disappointing. It is disappointing that the Government did not use this opportunity to think again about how farming can tackle the climate, nature and health crises all together. Those three dots simply have not been joined up. From my perspective, it requires a transition to sustainable agroecological farming by 2030, as proposed by the RSA’s Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. I hope, in the new Parliament, to reconstitute the all-party group on agroecology, which I chaired for a number of years, and I will be tabling the same amendments in support of whole-farm systems that I tabled in the previous Parliament.

I would also like the Government to adopt the previously proposed new clause on supporting county farms. We have heard a lot of warm words on this. In a session I chaired at the Oxford Real Farming conference, the former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), made clear his commitment to county farms, which are a great way for new entrants who cannot afford to buy land at today’s prices to enter the market. They are also a good way to direct the growing of local healthy food and restoring nature. I hope we can pin the Government down on that.

We need a long-term financial commitment, which farmers have been asking for, on delivering public goods to be set out in the Bill. The Government have now ring-fenced the overall farm funding budget for the next five years, but there is still no indication as to how it will be divided up. Based on independent analysis by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Trust and the Wildlife Trust, at least £2.9 billion is needed for the new environment land management schemes. The Bill is also missing a duty on the Government to routinely assess the scale of financial need and a strong baseline of regulations for land managers to adhere to.

I tabled new clause 1 in the Report stage of the Bill, which then suddenly disappeared in December 2018. I think one of the reasons it disappeared was that the Government were convinced they would lose on new clause 1. New clause 1 was designed to ensure that there would be no lowering of environmental, food safety and animal welfare standards in any future trade deals. The Government talk about that a lot, but when I raised it at Brexit questions last week, mentioning the National Farmers Union’s concerns and its request for a trading standards commission to be established, the Minister was incredibly dismissive. We know that the Government will come under significant pressure from the Department for International Trade to lower standards in any future trade deal once we leave the EU, and that will lead to a race to the bottom. As I said, it is not just environmentalists but the NFU and everyone involved in the food sector in this country who do not want to see that.

Finally, if I can just ask where we are in terms of some of the animal welfare proposals. There is a lot of support for the sentencing Bill, which will increase the sentences for animal cruelty from six months to five years. I hope that will be brought back soon. Where has the sentience Bill got to? Again, the Government promised several years ago, I think in 2017, to introduce a sentience Bill. They still have not done so. I urge the Government to bring it forward as soon as possible.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We now come to another maiden speech—Mr Gary Sambrook.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)]

Good-quality flexible working is important to all employees and is central to good work. Workers’ rights matter. Over 97% of employers offer some form of flexible working, and our recent consultation looked at how further to increase the prevalence of flexible working by advertising jobs as flexible and by requiring large employers to publish their policy.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

T2. British companies have been shown to be complicit in the fires and deforestation in the Amazon through their investments and supply chains. Will the Minister look at introducing mandatory due diligence to address this?

[The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)]

This subject has come up, and we need to look at how companies and exporters tackle serious carbon emissions. What they are doing in the Amazon is not acceptable. We need to engage with that and have a dialogue.

International Climate Action

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 26th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The UK Government have committed to spending 0.7% of our national income on aid. Analysis shows that without urgent action on climate change, development progress is at risk. Tackling climate change and protecting the environment is bound up with development, so it is right that it has to be a priority for UK aid. It is also very important that the OECD criteria for official development assistance include addressing climate change, and that is what we are doing.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State has mentioned the £140 million package for protecting and restoring forests around the world. That is all well and good but if we are still bound to the trade in beef and livestock feed for the Amazon, we are contributing to the problem. When is she going to say something about that?

[Andrea Leadsom]

As the hon. Lady will know, that would be a matter for comment by the Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I am sure that the opportunity to raise the issue will come up at DEFRA questions soon.