Public Services: Economic and Climatic Challenges

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Rooker]

That this House takes note of the resilience of the United Kingdom in the face of economic and climatic challenges and pressures on public services.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I have not come to moan or blame climate change. While all the issues that I shall raise are not the fault of the coalition, they are not the fault of the previous Labour Government either. I shall not deal with threats or malicious actions, but concentrate on hazards, natural accidents policy et cetera. This is also an opportunity to thank emergency services personnel for their magnificent work so far this winter. The statutory services have delivered. Environment Agency staff deserve special thanks if for no other reason than that they do not normally get the recognition they deserve. Then there is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, funded exclusively by the public so that Whitehall’s hands are not anywhere near it. It has been courageous in coastal waters and vital in the inland floods. I declare an interest as a governor member.

The Cabinet Office, which will answer this debate for the Government, has published each year since 2008 an unclassified version of the national risk assessment in the form of the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies. It is an incredibly useful tool, though it does not cover all aspects of what I want to raise today, some of which includes the resilience of society at large in a social sense. I am also well aware from my time in government of the massive amount of planning and the exercises that take place to prepare for emergencies and test our resilience. The proof of proper planning and preparation preventing poor performance is the 2012 Olympics, but we seem in some ways to be scrimping along as a nation. That is a worry and why I want to raise these issues today.

On power supplies, the energy bosses from npower and EDF—as well as the former boss of Ofgem—spent a good deal of airtime in 2013 warning of power cuts due to lack of investment. National Grid’s Winter Outlook this winter says that the margins are tighter than we have ever seen. Ofgem says that if we get a 1-in-20 bad winter there will be real trouble as the risk of blackouts has tripled. Yet I opened the paper today only to see that E.ON is about to close one power station and run three others down—now, in the middle of winter. I accept that that is not all the fault of the coalition but it does not demonstrate the urgency that we need in this matter. The national risk register almost boasts that we have never had a total power outage—a point that it makes more than once. On gas storage, it remains the case that, unlike Italy, Germany and France, which can store between 59 and 87 days’ supply of gas, UK storage remains at 16 days. No action has been taken on that.

I also want to raise the issue of animal disease. We are only ever a phone call away from a vet in the field reporting a major outbreak. Heaven forbid that we have another foot and mouth outbreak, but we will at some point. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology’s POSTnote No. 392 tells us that measures for dealing with foot and mouth were exercised in 2011 under the codename “Silver Birch”. Do we have the vaccines at the ready and a willingness to use them, or, as was the case in 2001 and 2007, will industry be allowed to call the shots and avoid for a third time using vaccination? We dealt effectively with bluetongue in sheep and salmonella in poultry by vaccination. Are we ready for foot and mouth, as we were—as that POSTnote explains—in the exercises?

Last December, in a panic, the Department for Education made over £2 billion available for the rising school population. The children affected have all been born since the coalition formed—let us get that one out of the way. We are in a crisis where some local authorities will require 75% more places by 2015 than they had last September, and I would cite Norfolk, Thurrock and Croydon. Very substantial increases will be required in several other local authorities by 2016. Can we deliver on that? Local authorities are both a service delivery organisation for schools and a strategic education authority for an area. However, they can only extend local authority schools—they are not allowed to build or open any new schools and have no power to direct academies or free schools to open in a particular area. Who will spend the money on that? Surely we need a single capital pot for an area, irrespective of who runs the school. We are walking into a crisis affecting early years schooling. It is not too late to change that, but we cannot plan to have school places in the right locations quickly enough under the present system.

I do not have an issue with making local authorities and services more efficient, more accountable and better value for money—we are in desperate times—but with some councils it can appear that their own vested or narrow political interest is sometimes put above what the local citizens require. We have got to the point where the cuts now threaten key services—that has not really started yet. Street cleaning, adult social care, children’s services and the arts and libraries are all for the massive chop. Those areas affect our public, physical and mental health. We need the arts and libraries just the same. Much council spending is invisible to the population because most people do not actually use the services and only the vulnerable will feel the impact. For most people, when the services collapse what they see is the rubbish uncollected in the street. Then it comes home to them that someone from the local authority should have dealt with it. There is a problem of visibility there.

I am sure that some noble Lords will raise NHS issues in this debate. I do not intend to go down that road but observe that we are in a national obesity crisis. Yet my question to the Minister is: are we prepared for the increase in malnutrition among young children? That is an inevitable consequence of attacking the poor, both those in and those out of work. We know that Ministers do not like food banks, which makes matters even worse; yet the food banks are now under such pressure that they have to supply cold boxes and kettle boxes for those who cannot afford to use gas or electricity to cook food. There is also some evidence—I do not have the details of this as I heard it vaguely only yesterday—that more people are shopping day to day for food. The supermarkets can track this very tightly in urban areas. That means that if there is interruption from either power or transport our resilience as regards food may not be as good as in the past.

I also want to raise with the Government the issue of science laboratory capacity. I hope that somebody is doing something about it. We actually had a laboratory close at the height of the horsemeat scandal last March and many laboratory tests had to be sent out of the UK to other countries. Our laboratories are the ultimate mixture of academic, private, independent and local authority, and they are a vital UK strategic national asset. In my view, the Government’s chief scientist should lead on this. We need the laboratories for regulation and investigation as well as for the assurances required by industry for all kinds of events—that is, food, human and animal events as well as chemical, nuclear and biological threat events, which I will not raise today. We are on the edge of a real capacity problem as regards laboratories and the numbers of public analysts. The president of the Association of Public Analysts, Liz Moran, has on more than one occasion told parliamentary committees that we are in serious trouble in terms of our capacity. There were 41 analysts in 2007. There are 29 currently and that is due to go down to 28. That is a real problem for consumer and citizen protection, which will be the loser. It is a serious issue and has to be treated nationally.

Housing policy has never been politically sexy, at least not since the time of Harold Macmillan. That applies as much to my own party as to others, and I speak as someone who carried the portfolio for some years in opposition and briefly in government. There is no sense of a national plan. Demand is up due to the open borders demanded by the CBI and others to help keep wages down. Yet supply is so small that the inevitable happens: mobility ceases, debt for individuals goes sky high and we spend billions of pounds supporting landlords’ lifestyles rather than adding to stocks of bricks and mortar. The nearest we ever got to a plan in recent years was the communities plan published by my noble friend Lord Prescott in 2003. The successors of both parties seem to have got quite bored in delivering that.

The coalition appears to be at a complete loss about this major national, regional and intergenerational housing crisis, with millions of hidden homeless people in addition to those on the street. Land is not a problem. Some 1% to 2% of land plus the brownfield sites would solve our problems for 20 years. The reasoning is simple. Urban developments at present amount to about 11% of the land, national parks to 8%, areas of outstanding national beauty to 16% and the green belt to 14%. That adds up to 49%, so over 50% is available to take the 1% to 1.5% that we need to solve our problem. That is simple. Without building on any of the areas I have just touched on, enough land is available. Yet the best summing up of this I have found was a sentence in a very old essay:

“Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes”.

That describes the coalition’s housing policy but it was actually a sentence from the seminal 1931 essay by Winston Churchill in the Strand Magazine.

Weather events happen with or without climate change, let us be clear about that. The national risk register covers the lot. Two years ago, drought was a key crisis. We have to think about the serious volatility of changes in climate. The Thames barrier has a limited life. I had already put this in my notes, and I was really worried when I heard yesterday about the delay. The Thames barrier is sinking, and we are going to wait until 2070 before we start having a look at it. Flood defences are more than walls and dams: they should be environmental as well. I commend to the Government—I am sure that someone has read it—the major article by George Monbiot last week. It appeared first on Tuesday in the Guardian and then on two pages in the Mail on Sunday. True, the latter newspaper used it to attack the EU but the article was the same in both. George Monbiot highlighted the methods for preventing floods that UK scientists have being using for years in the tropics—planting trees in the hills to save and protect communities down stream from flooding. Here, we pay farmers to grub up trees and hedges and plant the hills with pretty grass and use sheep to maintain the chocolate box image, and then we wonder why we have floods where we should not really have them and which we could prevent if we took the advice. Monbiot says that water sinks into soil under trees at 67 times the rate that it sinks in under grass, so why are we not doing that in the UK in areas that we know flood unnecessarily?

My last point on floods is to express concern that the plan for sustainable insurance known “Flood Re” has again been delayed. I will not go into detail but the Swiss Re system for terrorism insurance has worked incredibly well, and I do not see why it cannot work for major floods. It could work for major animal disease outbreaks. The taxpayer is protected because the system allows a market in terrorism insurance to operate. If it is a good enough system to cover buildings in the City of London for terror attacks, the principle should be good enough to ensure that insurance is available for householders in major floods. The pool system works at all times except the most catastrophic, which is when the Treasury stands behind the pool. It is cheaper for the taxpayer in the long run.

Did I just mention the Treasury? I think for social resilience we have a problem with the Treasury. Resilience is the process of being able to return to the original state after being deformed, but we know that the Chancellor wants a smaller state. He wants to cut the public sector by making what he calls hard choices. His hard choices are the ones he finds easy to make, and are only hard on those affected who, in the main, are the weak and disadvantaged. His hard choices are to diminish local authorities, set the old against the young and not even talk about doing it in a fairer way. The young do not vote. Their turnout is two-thirds the rate of the rest, so if they do not vote and threaten him at the ballot box, why should he bother? I do not like this approach, to be honest. One reason is the seeming total lack of compassion and comprehension. It is not nice.

I looked around to try to explain the Chancellor’s approach to creating intergenerational conflict and a breakdown in general of the resilience of society, and I chose Donald Rumsfeld. We are all familiar with Rumsfeld’s quote from 2002 about the three categories of the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. He did not invent them—they had been around for a while—but there is a fourth category highlighted by a psychoanalytical philosopher who I am greatly familiar with, Slavoj Žižek: the unknown known, or that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know. That is a perfect fit for the Chancellor. He knows what he is doing but refuses to acknowledge it and its consequences.

I was looking around, thinking about what would be a good example of this to finish on, and I found it on the front page of today’s Telegraph, which quotes the police:

“Documents disclosed by the Association of Chief Police Officers show plans have been drawn up for the cannon to be used …Police warn they expect water cannon will be required because ‘the ongoing and potential future of austerity measures are likely to lead to continued protest’”.

If the Government are in discussions with the Home Office preparing for problems on the streets because of austerity and they are preparing to be resilient against those who protest, why can they not prepare for all the other issues I have raised today?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rooker]

My Lords, I thank everybody who participated in the debate. I will make two points incredibly briefly. First, when the Minister read out the list of things that he looked at when he came into office, I was reminded of the 1931 essay by Churchill that I quoted from, “Fifty Years Hence”. It is almost a modern-day version of that essay. Secondly, I will give him a new risk that I did not raise before, one that comes out of something said by the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley. I was at the launch last week by the Crop Protection Association—which he mentioned—of a new campaign against illegal pesticides. The association estimates that currently between 7% and 10% of pesticides entering Europe are illegal and that most of them start off in China. We could be more damaged by those because they could poison our land if misused. That is another risk to be going on with that needs to be added to the list. I thank everyone for participating in the debate. It has been exactly as intended—wide-ranging, in the sense that my noble friend Lord Touhig said.

Motion agreed.