Paul Blomfield
Main Page: Paul Blomfield (Labour - Sheffield Central)
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
I shall speak briefly in support of new clause 11, to which I am delighted to have added my name, and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) for the amendment, the consensual way in which he has built the discourse around it, and the work that he did as the country’s first Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.
Climate change is an issue on which all of us have been lobbied by many groups. Most strikingly for me, I was lobbied last year by a group of students from Notre Dame school, a secondary school on the edge of my constituency, who came to Westminster to make the point that their generation was conscious of the consequences they would face if our generation failed to act. It is an incredibly powerful point, but our responsibility goes beyond the immediate generation.
A report published only last month in the journal Nature Climate Change pointed out that much of the discourse has been focused on the consequences of failing to act by the end of this century. Looking beyond that, the problems are even more serious. According to one of authors,
“We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond.”
He continued:
“We need to think carefully about the long timescales of what we are unleashing.”
That was Professor Daniel Schrag from Harvard University.
The need to act, and to act more ambitiously, has never been clearer. The agreement of the Paris summit is a step forward, but as last month’s report highlighted, even if global warming is capped at Governments’ target of 2 oC, which is already seen as difficult, 20% of the world’s population will eventually have to migrate away from coasts swamped by rising oceans. Cities including New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Calcutta, Jakarta and Shanghai would all be submerged. We have seen the struggle to grapple with the refugee crisis that has grown over the last couple of years, a crisis driven by war in one country and a number of other related conflicts. Imagine for a moment what we will face if 20% of the world’s population is forced to do what people have always done when their homes become uninhabitable—to move to somewhere better.
So we need greater ambition and a greater sense of urgency. That is provided by new clause 11. In the words of Professor Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern, one of the other authors of the report:
“The actions of the next 30 years are absolutely crucial for putting us on a path that avoids”
the worst outcomes
“and ensuring, at least in the next 200 years, the impacts are limited and give us time to adapt.”
The reservations that the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Callum McCaig) expressed in his comments on the new clause are taken into account in the careful and thoughtful way that the clause has been drafted and the role that it provides for the Committee on Climate Change. What we need is the ambition embodied in the clause. As my right hon. Friend said, we did it with the Climate Change Act 2008, passed with all-party support, which sent a signal to the world. We can do that again; we cannot afford not to. The future is bleak if we do not cut our emissions further than Paris suggested.
The role that the new clause proposes for the Committee on Climate Change is important for the robustness of that ambition and its workability. I am pleased to hear the constructive engagement that there has been between my right hon. Friend and the Secretary of State. I hope that in her comments later we will hear that together we can move forward on the issue.
Andrea Leadsom
Government amendments 48 and 49 add the relevant provisions of the Oil Taxation Act 1975 and the Corporation Tax Act 2010 to the legislation listed at clause 2(6), which contains the Secretary of State’s relevant oil and gas functions. This ensures that the functions provided for by these Acts fall within the definition of “relevant functions” and can be transferred from the Secretary of State to the Oil and Gas Authority by regulations made under clause 2(2).
Schedule 1 to the Oil Taxation Act 1975 and chapter 9 of part 8 of the Corporation Tax Act 2010 contain the important oil and gas functions of determining oil fields and cluster areas, respectively. These functions form the basis of oil taxation. Petroleum revenue tax is applied by determined field, and allowances are given by cluster area to reduce the amount of profits to which the supplementary charge is applied. Both of these are functions currently undertaken by the Oil and Gas Authority in its capacity as an Executive agency, and are fundamental to our tax regime and to incentivising investment. These amendments are technical in nature and simply seek to put it beyond doubt that these key functions can be transferred to the OGA once it becomes a Government company, as we have always intended.
Let me briefly explain Government amendment 51, to the long title. The amendment is consequential on the removal from the Bill in Committee of the clause on carbon accounting under the Climate Change Act 2008, which was introduced in the other place. It ensures that the Bill is compliant with the parliamentary convention that Bills should move between the Houses in a proper state.
New clause 3 was tabled by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Callum McCaig), and new clause 7 was tabled by the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and others. I should add that the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) has been a long-standing advocate of CCS, which he and I have discussed on a number of occasions, so I hope he will acknowledge that I have studied the subject.