Climate Change

Lord Deben Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for introducing this debate so moderately and reasonably, and I look forward to the maiden speech from the noble Earl, Lord Russell.

I am sure the House will remember that the Global Warming Policy Foundation to which my noble friend Lord Frost adheres used to say that climate change was not happening. Then it said it was happening a bit and now, evidently, it says that it is happening but other people ought to deal with it and we should not be involved at all. We are not talking about that, happily, but I look forward to a debate with my noble friend when I shall be quoting the science and he will be quoting the prejudices.

I have been a businessman all my life—except when I was a Minister—and I am always interested in finding certainties. We have a certainty here: the weather is changing dramatically and we have to sort out our acceptance of it. That means that we cannot talk about deaths, as my noble friend Lord Frost did. I do not think that the families of people who die because of heat are very much cheered by the fact that there are fewer people dying because of cold. The fact is that we have to deal with these problems. We have to do something about our care homes, most—not just many—of which are entirely unsuited for the weather that we are going to have.

We still have not had the future homes legislation to bring new houses up to date. A million and a half crap houses have been built, and the next generation—the people who have paid for them and contributed to the profits of the housebuilders—are the ones who are going to have to change those houses.

We have rising sea levels, but I see very little in this report about how we are going to deal with that. However, I want to concentrate, in my short time, on water. I come from East Anglia, which is now a semi-arid region. The local water company has announced that it cannot produce any connections for new commercial businesses until 2032, because it has not got any water. In south-east England, South East Water has not been able to provide water for quite a number of its people for this part of the year, and we have not got into August yet, nor have we had the kind of withering hot weather we had last year.

We must make sure that we are making the changes that are necessary, and it will be cheaper to do it now than pay the costs and have to do it later. That is the difference. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that it is not just 2:10; it is the cost in between times that not having spent lays on our shoulders. We in the Climate Change Committee—I declare my interest as its former chairman—gave the Government a list of things that could be done, and needed to be done. We expected not only that the Government should accept them but that they should be able to measure whether they had done them and that the outcomes would be available for people to know. That has not happened. I say to my noble friend that unless you measure it—I come back to being a businessman—you do not do it.

If this were presented to me as the company report on how we were to deal with the problems of climate change, I would have to say that the person who presented it should be sacked. That is how I feel about this report.