Brexit: Environment and Climate Change

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am speaking in what in the speakers list was my noble friend Lord Grantchester’s spot, and he is going to speak near the end of the debate. We have just been castigated by the Minister in the previous debate for being so gloomy, so I will try to make one or two non-gloomy remarks. This is the second important debate today on issues of science and technology as applied to the environment and climate change. I declare an interest as an emeritus professor of climate change at University College, a fellow of the Royal Society and chairman of a small company that works on the environment.

This debate is not only about science and technology but about legislation, regulation and finance. We face big issues in improving the environment and dealing with climate change. How will the UK continue to work and collaborate with other organisations across Europe as the UK leaves the EU? Some of the organisations currently present in Europe, and with very important roles, are intergovernmental—such as those for the regional seas, pollution and nuclear energy—while some are specifically European organisations, such as the European Environment Agency. An important point to understand is that, whether these organisations are intergovernmental or regional, many of them are involved in programmes with the European Commission. They use a lot of their research programmes to help provide guidance, decision-making and data. We are going to leave the EU, so what is going to happen to our cross-involvement in the UN, regional organisations and so on? The EU currently involves non-EC countries and areas such as Norway, Switzerland, Israel and north Africa, and they are very effective on some of these environmental programmes. It would be useful to hear from the Minister how he sees the strategy. There needs to be consultation with all sorts of organisations. The research and environmental organisations of Britain are deeply involved in all these environmental organisations, which are proving very effective.

The other important point is that we need to evaluate the benefits of the different levels of these organisations. Some of them are involved in UK Government standards, but we need to understand exactly how Brexit will affect that. One of the consequences is that the UK will no longer have to maintain environmental standards, even though we should recognise that they have steadily improved over the past 40 years—for example, cleaner beaches and higher air quality standards. I am afraid the standards provided by the UK Government may well come under some suspicion because there have been some dodgy practices with air quality in London in the last couple of years. It is very important that we have clear verification of what is being done when we start out on our own.

Having Europe-wide standards has been very important in enabling local authorities and the Government to keep saying, “This is the reference standard against which we are working”. How will this confidence be maintained in future? We should hear that from the Minister.

Another feature of the worrying future is the UK Government introducing standards and providing data which will be almost unchallenged. On what basis will those changes be made? Some standard analysis is necessary. We need to evaluate the economic, health and environmental factors in such studies.

The report reviews the EU climate change legislation and the EU Emissions Trading System, which currently guide UK investment in carbon and non-carbon energy systems. Even if the UK follows the EU and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreements on reducing carbon emissions, that does not tell us how the UK will develop its future policy. It may be working on existing policies, but many of the standards—those run by the UN and those run by the European Commission—will change.

The question is how the UK will find a partnership to work with European and other major emitting countries and their organisations. Although the Prime Minister assures us that the UK will be in Europe, this general assurance needs to be explained. Will the UK focus simply on the IPCC, or will it develop some ad hoc discussions in, for example, the G20, and therefore rely on UN agencies to provide the standards?

Importantly, we must also ensure that we have extremely high standards of multilateral climate change research programmes. The UK has substantial and well-respected climate change research laboratories and centres, such as the Hadley Centre, Scott Polar and other arctic institutions. What future arrangements are envisaged for how those UK research institutions will work towards these practical objectives with other countries? I assume that Her Majesty’s Government expect increasing involvement of the UK research institutions to guide them in their transition.

Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, just talked about standards in the countryside—for example, concerning rubbish—and how they are distributed. In Italy, there is widespread use of data on the state of the environment, and there is an excellent webpage called Q-cumber. There are a lot of innovative ways in which we can use IT, and we have a lot of interesting IT companies in Britain to help us monitor the environment much more closely, which will be an essential part of this new world in which the UK is out on its own.

Flooding: Defences

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I am not in a position today to say what our domestic arrangements will be after we have left the EU. However, as I think we all know, “slowing the flow”—Pickering is a good example, as is the Defra-funded demonstration projects at Holnicote in Somerset and Upper Derwent in the Peak District—clearly demonstrates that natural flood-management measures are very important in reducing flood flow and height downstream. So, I think this is a very interesting proposal.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, can the Minister explain why government agencies have not been providing real-time warnings to individual houses and communities about flood levels, as happens in the Philippines’ NOAH system, where special hand-held communication devices are widely distributed so that people receive and send flood messages to control centres, leading to more accurate flood warnings for emergency services?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, that is precisely why—as set out in the letter I wrote and the Environment Agency paper Winter Ready 2016—the Environment Agency is extending flooding-warning service to more communities and improving the range of digital services on GOV.UK, to help people take action to minimise the impact. I very much hope the noble Lord will think of going to the meeting on 29 November, when the Environment Agency and other departments will be in Parliament so that all these matters can be discussed in more detail.

Air Quality

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, the Government believe that the Heathrow north-west runway scheme can be delivered without impacting on the UK’s compliance with air quality limit levels, with a suitable package of policy and mitigation measures. Indeed, final development consent will only be granted if we are satisfied that, with mitigation, the scheme is compliant with our legal obligations.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, would the Minister like to consider that in London there is a system called airText, which provides warnings for people, particularly those suffering from air pollution? It seems to me that that could be done quite immediately. The financial support and the arrangements need to be expanded, but we could roll it out throughout the country and if people know that tomorrow is going to be bad, they can then take steps. It seems to me that that should be done urgently—and of course, it is done in other cities.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, in order to give the noble Lord full details, I will take that point away, but it is very important that we provide information, particularly for vulnerable people. Given the air quality zones and the knowledge that Defra has on air quality across the nation, I suspect that that is within scope and that we could do it, but I will take this point away and inform the noble Lord and others about it.

Brexit: Environmental and Climate Change Policy

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate, introduced by the throaty noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. I hope that she recovers, as I did a few weeks ago from a similar problem. The debate gives us an opportunity to speak on the future of environment and climate change policy following the EU referendum. The Labour Party has been strong in its support of environmental policies and EU policies, so many of us were of course very disappointed by the Brexit decision.

The UK’s membership of the EU has provided many benefits in terms of influence on the environment, regulations, the financing of policies and practical actions to be taken. These have been set out in the helpful Library Note. Moreover, as other noble Lords have commented, the EU has been very effective in dealing with adverse climate change. I declare my interests, which are on the record. These benefits, with the UK leaving the EU, are under great threat and will affect considerably the UK’s future. We have seen that the UK Government have been criticised in the courts recently for not meeting EU environment regulations, and the question is whether they will permit such legal challenges in the future. For example, the tendency to use the courts successfully in the UK is a relatively recent affair. Some 30 or 40 years ago I met the chief alkali inspector, who commented that the British Government had never lost a court case to do with the environment, but I am pleased to see that they do lose them now, and that has been greatly helped by our being in the EU. The other feature, of course—and I was involved in work in the old CEGB—is that one of the first areas of tremendous European collaboration on the environment was in monitoring and dealing with acid rain. This began as an intergovernmental collaboration and later became a strong policy of the EU. Transboundary pollution will continue to have to be considered and, without our being in the EU, presumably we will go back to the intergovernmental arrangements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Equally important, of course, was the way in which the EU established regulations for local air pollution, particularly in urban areas these have been taken very seriously by urban and national agencies across Europe. The UK’s cities, and those of many other countries, are not meeting the required standards. In fact, in the UK 16 out of 43 areas are not meeting the standards. Furthermore, as we heard this week, the Treasury is not prepared to permit urban areas to develop their own standards because the Treasury says it has not got enough money. The inevitable result of having different standards across Europe will be costly and inefficient and will not help the motor car industry.

Although I have been in universities in the UK and working abroad on research collaborations to do with the environment and on practical benefits, this co-ordination has been greatly helped by the EC. We had a meeting last week at the Royal Society on the polar environment. It was very interesting that there was an organisation that deals with the environment in polar areas and co-ordinates research between countries not only in the EU but in the areas around Europe, in North America and so on. Quite interestingly, it says that it has been considering what is going to happen in future, and that the co-ordination work by the European Union will almost certainly continue but the difference is that the countries in the EU will have funding to pursue their research, whereas UK research people may be able to co-ordinate and go to meetings but there will be no EU money for their work. It is clearly very unlikely that the kind of funding that now arrives to UK institutions from Brussels will continue. That will mean that we will begin to fade out in terms of this leadership role. In fact, as I heard yesterday from one leading scientist, they are receiving very juicy proposals from universities in other parts of Europe saying, “Why don’t you come and join us? There’ll be lots of money from the EU, and you wouldn’t want to stay in Britain, would you, where there will be much less funding for your research”. It is going to be a very big issue.

I turn to the other question that many noble Peers have talked about, the water environment. It was interesting that when the BBC commented in relation to the way the EC has led on the environment, with nice pictures on the television, it emphasised the way in which the cleaning up of the coastline has been a considerable success and has been welcomed by tourist organisations and local authorities. It is, of course, impossible to understand why the areas of the country which have so benefited from these kinds of programmes are the areas which voted strongly for Brexit. Others may have some political solutions for that argument.

When I was thinking about this debate I recalled that it is not just a question of the EU having regulations that make us, as it were, advanced environmentally, but there have been examples of where the UK has made contributions to the environment of other parts of Europe. We should recall that. In fact, we have just heard about the UK helping greatly in fishery regulation. The UK was the first significant country to develop congestion charging, which is still moving very slowly in Europe. The other one, of course, which enables us to go into restaurants and bars across the rest of Europe, is the fact that we introduced the cessation of smoking in public places. There have been examples where we have led the way. Will that happen in future? I hope so.

However, the most important long-term environmental problem has not been mentioned: what to do with nuclear waste. This will slowly decay over tens of thousands of years—some people say even longer—and the storage and clean-up will need to be co-ordinated even if the UK leaves the EU, and negotiations are continuing about how we co-ordinate with Euratom, which has a big role in this. This is a field in which the UK has technological capability and should continue to do so in future. An interesting scientific area that Euratom has been able to work on, with UK participation, is the transmutation of radionuclides so that decay can proceed much faster, rather than having to rely on geological storage.

Of course, an equally long-term global environmental problem that requires European co-ordination is climate change caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuel combustion and other gases such as those emitted by refrigeration and air conditioning. The consequence of all these dangerous effects is that it is necessary to find ways in which to reduce the emissions, not only the ones that are produced by industry and transportation but those that are triggered, for example, by methane from the polar regions.

Currently the UK works effectively with other EU countries, as we saw in Paris. But the big question is whether we are going to come close to reducing the ultimate temperature rise to less than 2 degrees. We would expect that the UK’s participation will continue even if we leave the EU. Some of this will happen through the existing intergovernmental agencies such as the International Energy Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, but the Government need to publicise the role of these agencies and use it in their future negotiations.

Finally, the EU is making a very large financial contribution to much of that climate research and it will be very important that the UK Government make their contribution. The politicians who advocated Brexit said that there was going to be lots of money to do things in the UK—in research as well as in health and so on—and we are waiting to see whether that will actually happen.