Before I call Darren Jones, I must inform colleagues that there are clearly two well-subscribed debates this afternoon, so I will have to impose an immediate time limit of five minutes on Back-Bench speeches.
That this House welcomes the report of Climate Assembly UK; gives thanks to the citizens who gave up their time to inform the work of select committees, the development of policy and the wider public debate; and calls on the Government to take note of the recommendations of the Assembly as it develops the policies necessary to achieve the target of net zero emissions by 2050.
It is a pleasure to open today’s debate, for which I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee. The Climate Assembly UK’s final report runs to more than 500 pages, and, as I suggested in this place a couple of months ago, it provides an invaluable evidence base for Ministers in this and future Governments, and for colleagues across the House, as we chart our course to net zero.
I am grateful to my fellow Committee Chairs, the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) and the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), whose Committees, together with my own, set that work in motion. Most of all, I am grateful to all the participants, who gave up their time to make the Assembly a reality and so hasten the cause of ambitious action to combat climate change.
None of us doubts the urgency of that work and, with all the other challenges we currently face, we should not forget about the scale of the tasks ahead of us in reaching net zero and persuading other countries to do the same. Before I begin my substantive remarks, I should also declare my interests, as my wife is the head of external affairs at the Association for Decentralised Energy.
Today’s debate is especially timely for the House in the context of the Prime Minister’s so-called “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution”. Today, using the Climate Assembly conclusions, and noting its outcomes as representative of the British people, I will highlight what the British people think about the Prime Minister’s 10 points. At a headline level: barely a quarter of the £12 billion highlighted in the Prime Minister’s plan represented new announcements, and our total proposed spend still lags behind that of other developed European economies. It is right to point out that the Committee on Climate Change target of 2% of GDP in net-zero spending includes leveraging private sector spending alongside public sector spending, but, unfortunately, we did not get much further on this issue in the spending review yesterday. Like others, I welcome the Chancellor’s announcement on a national infrastructure bank. Such a bank will have the potential to accelerate financing and free up large-scale investment for decarbonisation, but net-zero obligations need to be enshrined in the bank’s founding mandates.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), who highlighted some very pertinent points. I welcome the Climate Assembly report and its recommendations, which form a valuable body of evidence about public preferences for how to get to net zero and show that there is public support to get this right. This path requires strong leadership from Government to forge long-term planning between people and businesses, and I therefore welcome the Government’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, which is aimed at eradicating the UK’s contribution to climate change by 2050. Two of the points in the 10-point plan that I will highlight today are to do with carbon capture and storage in nature, which tie in with the Climate Assembly recommendations.
To achieve net zero by 2025 necessitates reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible. However, reducing emissions alone will not be enough. Ways of removing and storing carbon were considered by the Climate Assembly. Assembly members heard about potential removal methods through tree planting and better forest management, restoring and managing peatlands and wetlands, and enhancing the storage of carbon in the soil. Better forest management was the members’ preferred option. They said that it was a brilliant thing to do but not enough on its own and a starting point.
Taking that into account, we must not forget about our coastal habitats and seas and blue carbon—carbon captured by our oceans and coastal ecosystems. Our oceans and coasts provide a natural way of reducing the impact of greenhouse gases on our atmosphere through sequestration of carbon. Protecting and restoring our coastal habitats is vital to tackling climate change. Our coastal habitats can play a vital role in tackling climate change and protecting us against rising sea levels, as well as being home to internationally important wildlife. They also bring much-needed tourism and green jobs to seaside communities such as mine in Hastings and Rye, especially as we recover from the coronavirus crisis.
Please do not worry, Madam Deputy Speaker; it is not my speech that I am holding. You and I have seen a lot of reports since we came into the House, and I have here the “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment”, the “UK National Ecosystem Assessment”, the “State of Nature” report, “Net Zero: The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming”, the “Clean Air Strategy 2019”, “Land use: Policies for a Net Zero UK”, “Reducing UK emissions: Progress Report to Parliament” and “How carbon pricing can help Britain achieve net zero by 2050”—just a small selection of what is on my shelf. Do we really need another report? Yes, we do.
All those reports are politicians telling the public what needs to be done. This Climate Assembly UK report, “The path to net zero”, is the public telling the politicians what needs to be done. About time too! Some fantastic principles have been used to get there. The report is 552 pages long—it is a big read—but it is underpinned by fundamental principles: education and information, fairness, freedom of choice, protecting nature and restoring our natural environment, strong joined-up leadership from Government and a joined-up approach. That is what makes it different.
I will to go straight to recommendation 1:
“We want the transition to net zero to be a cross-political party issue, and not a partisan issue”.
I take it that everyone in this Chamber is in agreement that we need to achieve that. If anything that I say to the Minister sounds like a criticism, it is not because I want to play party politics. I want to co-operate with the Minister, to work with him and to achieve what we have all set our face to towards achieving.
I want to focus on how the report looks at joined-up government. In that respect, I recommend to everyone yet another report, the National Audit Office report on “Achieving government’s long-term environmental goals”. It states that the 25-year environment plan
As Chairman of one of the six Select Committees that commissioned Climate Assembly UK to report on how the UK should meet the Government’s target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, I warmly welcome the report, thank all those who contributed, and look forward to the opportunity to debate the contents in the few minutes that I have. I also thank the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), who was Chair of the Transport Committee when the assembly was commissioned.
I want to touch on the transport matters that the report focused on, because, as was rightly hailed, the transport sector is the poster child in its failure to turn itself around. Its carbon footprint still stubbornly contributes 33% of all carbon dioxide emissions released in the UK. There is much for the transport sector to do, therefore. The report rightly focused on surface transport, where 70% of the transport carbon footprint is made. I want to touch on a few of the causes, and comment on what the Government are doing and perhaps on what more needs to be done.
First, the assembly called for a ban on the sale of new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars by between 2030 and 2035, and clearly someone has been listening, because the Government’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution has brought forward the date from 2040, set earlier in the year, to 2035 and now to 2030. That is an incredibly ambitious target from the Government, and it is going to be a big challenge for the motor manufacturing industry and the charging infrastructure industry to ensure that they can deliver.
I am pleased that the Government have pledged £500 million to kick-start that shift, but the key is consumer confidence. It is essential that electric vehicle owners are confident, no matter what their household circumstances or their travel plans, that the mode is the correct choice for them, although I understand that there needs to be a sea change and, indeed, ambitious targets must be set if we are ever to deliver a shift away from combustion to electric. I think that that will necessitate a look at pay-as-you-drive, and I am pleased that the Transport Committee will be looking at both the question of ending sales of vehicles with combustion engines by 2030 and new modes of paying for driving.
It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) and, indeed, to see hon. Members from different parties participating in today’s debate. Although it is timely, we are very much focused at the moment, of course, on the health crisis created by covid. Normally, I would have had a chance to write a speech, but today I am working from some very rough notes. While we are rightly focused on the health crisis that we face, not just in this country but internationally, the climate emergency has not gone away. Indeed, if anything, it bears on us even more.
The health crisis also gives us reason for hope and for learning. We have seen what amazing things can be achieved in a very short space of time when there is the will to do so. We have seen that people are up for almost unimaginable change when they really understand why it is needed. Parliament made a really important decision when it agreed that we would reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We cannot afford to wait. In fact, if possible, we need to go even faster, and that is a call that I would make. If we do not achieve that, our planet will be irreparably damaged. Having made that commitment, the Government, and all of us as parliamentarians, must set out how we will get there and how we will reach those decisions. In making those decisions and setting out the steps, public support will be essential, and that is why the role of the Climate Assembly is so vital.
I am proud that the Transport Committee, which I chaired at the time, was one of those Select Committees commissioning Climate Assembly UK, but we owe a huge debt of thanks to the 108 people who took part and actually made this process a reality. I saw for myself, on the first weekend they met back in January, what it involved. It was fantastic to be in the room as an observer and to see the energy and the interest that they showed in the expert information that was being presented to them, the questions that they asked and the participation. It was really excellent.
As a member of one of the six commissioning Select Committees, I have followed the work of the Climate Assembly with considerable interest, but I have to confess that my initial impression was not favourable. The concept of a relatively small number of members of the general public—just 108 people, I think—being imbued with any greater knowledge, understanding or wisdom than the ranks of experts that already advise Parliament and the Government on the one hand, and my own membership of a larger and infinitely more democratic citizens’ assembly—this place—on the other, made me doubt the value of the work being undertaken. Frankly, I was also concerned that the assembly would simply become a mouthpiece for some of the more extreme environmental pressure groups. But when the participants were surveyed about the quality of the information that they had received, 78% agreed that it had been fair and balanced between the different viewpoints. Although this was admittedly the lowest score for any of the evaluation questions asked, it still represents a substantial consensus of opinion.
Having now seen the assembly’s output, I recognise that my first impression was wholly wrong. Although the assembly’s work can in no way supplant the role of this House in formulating and then enacting public policy, its report has added valuable insights to the debate on the mix of policies required to achieve our common goal. The standard answer to the question of which technologies should be used to get to net zero is “all of them”, and that is still likely to be the case, but the Government should take note of the assembly’s views, and take note very seriously, given that public acceptance of the huge changes required will be critical to their success. If we do not bring the public with us, the best-laid plans will be doomed to failure.
It is for that reason that I was so glad to read the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan for the green industrial revolution. I do not believe that it is serendipity that this key policy announcement mirrors so closely the Climate Assembly’s conclusions: increasing our target for offshore wind capacity from 10 GW to 40 GW by 2030; promoting the hydrogen generation market; accelerating the transition to electric vehicles, which has already been referred to during this debate; pushing additional investment into public transport, walking and cycling; and researching zero-emission aviation and shipping. The list goes on. It shows that the Government have been listening, and listening hard, and that they are seeking to reflect many of the Climate Assembly’s key objectives. It is a testament to the value of this process, and all those who were involved should recognise the impact that their work has already had. But there are some interesting differences.
2:54 pm
Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) on securing this important debate. I also congratulate the members of the climate assembly who took part in producing this important report. As the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) indicated, the involvement of people from across the country in our democratic processes and in discussing important issues should be celebrated, and there is no issue that requires urgent focus and consideration more than the climate crisis.
The report sets out clear, holistic principles that will be central to achieving a liveable future. From how we travel, what we eat and how we use the land to what we buy, how we use heat and energy in the home, how we generate our electricity and how we will remove greenhouse gas, this it provides a mandate for decarbonisation that we in this House cannot ignore.
Climate breakdown is not a distant threat but is happening here and now. The World Meteorological Organisation found that the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years. Human-caused climate change has already been proved to increase the risk of floods, extreme rainfall, heatwaves and wildfires, with dire implications for humans, animals and the environment. Yet the Government’s recently announced green industrial revolution does not go nearly far enough towards addressing this existential crisis. Only £4 billion of the £12 billion scheme is newly announced funding, and that is four times less than the recently announced £16 billion increase in military spending. As Sir David King, founder and chair of the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge, said,
“it is nowhere near enough to manage the British Government commitment to net zero… by 2050 or to provide a safe future.”
Not only is the 2050 target perilously unambitious, but, according to the Committee on Climate Change, the Government are not even on track to meet it.
The Tory Government continued to give oil companies further tax breaks until as recently as December 2018. The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that, to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5° above pre-industrial levels—seen by scientists as a tipping point past which climate disasters will be locked in—oil and gas production must fall by 20% by 2030. I am gravely concerned that if fossil fuel companies are left to their own devices, such crucial targets will be missed. For example, ExxonMobil is projected to extract 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than in 2017. Oil companies such as Exxon and Shell knew that their extractive industries were causing climate change as far back as the 1980s, but instead of informing the public, they funded climate change denial and those lobbying against environmental policy.
I am a member of the Treasury Committee, one of the commissioning Select Committees for this report. I also speak as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the environment and, indeed, as a member of the Environment Bill Committee, which has today finished legislating on many of the measures that were included in this great report.
I see stopping environmental destruction as the defining mission of our generation. To those who have not yet seen the film “A Life on Our Planet” by David Attenborough, I highly recommend it. It shows what has changed on our planet throughout the lifetime of that remarkable individual, including the destruction of habitats, species extinction and climate change. We have a lot of work to do. Tough action needs to be taken, but we are a democracy and we need to take the people with us. Too often, those at the more radical end of the environment movement take a coercive approach: they want to turn back the clock, stop people doing things, dismantle capitalism and tell people what they can and cannot do. The trouble with that is that it risks a backlash. If we do not take the people with us, it might give rise to the anti-environmental populists that we see in other countries.
This is why the Climate Assembly is so important, and I thoroughly welcome its report. These are members of the public considering the issues carefully and coming up with their own recommendations. It really shows just how sensible the British public are. They accept the need to tackle climate change. They know it is a real problem. They are not trying to resist it, and they support practical measures to do it, but they want to do it without sacrificing quality of life, because we do not need to. They do not want to stop going on holidays or living the lives they lead, and it is that pragmatism that is so essential.
There are 50 proposals in the report overall, and I have little disagreement with any of them. I am delighted to say, as my hon. Friends did earlier, that the Government are already implementing many of them. This could be one of the most quickly implemented reports of all time. On electric vehicles, the report recommends certain other vehicles being banned by between 2030 and 2035, and the Government have said that that will happen by 2030. I thoroughly support that. I have just been legislating on the deposit return scheme, which is also one of the report’s recommendations. I thoroughly support that, too. The report recommends more offshore wind, and the Government are committed to quadrupling it in the next 10 years to 40 GW.
Order. I am sure colleagues understand that there is pressure on time, so after the next speaker I will have to reduce the time limit to four minutes, so that we can get everybody in for this debate and the next one.
3:03 pm
20 of 46 shown
On offshore wind, I am sure we all welcome the Government’s willingness to invest more in transmission and networks, and the restated commitments both to a quadrupling of our capacity and to significantly expanding the use of domestically manufactured components, but the public will expect action to bear out that optimism. The Government’s stated intention to bring these jobs home simply by incorporating requirements for UK content into contracts for difference just will not cut it without a seriousness about how, where and when these jobs will be created and trained for, underpinned by a detailed allocation of resources. Recent failures on this front, including the collapse of the BiFab—Burntisland Fabrications Ltd—contract in Scotland, bring into question our ability to reach our existing offshore sector deal targets, let alone future targets, and show the need for reform. The Climate Assembly report identifies support in excess of 95% for prioritising offshore wind within the UK’s energy mix, which should demonstrate to Ministers the appetite that exists for action at the pace and of the scale required.
Next, the Government’s plans to boost hydrogen production are also worth interrogating more closely. I know that a number of colleagues in the House have an interest in that and I look forward to their contributions later today. Although 83% of Climate Assembly participants took the view that hydrogen power should form some part of the UK’s eventual energy mix, they had substantive concerns about its scalability, value for money, and the risks and early-stage costs associated with producing and storing hydrogen as a usable fuel. Should Ministers agree with the Assembly’s conclusions in this report, they may wish to pause to reflect on those concerns and provide some answers on them. That is even truer, it has been argued, if the journey towards developing usable capacity for hydrogen is carbon-intensive, and truer still if the trade-off is forgone investment in cleaner and simpler routes to decarbonisation. However, as I say, I welcome the debate on this topic today.
Carbon capture technologies will also ultimately serve a purpose in complementing the transition to renewable energy, in enabling some less adaptive carbon-intensive processes to continue, and potentially in harnessing the potential of hydrogen, but the scale of that role is up for debate, and some people view the target of 10 million as inadequate without a much faster economy-wide transition to clean energy sources. In that context, the technology did not command a consensus among Assembly members, with just 22% support for carbon capture alongside fossil fuels as a long-term solution.
The eventual role of new nuclear power is also something on which the public are pretty sharply divided, with 34% of assembly members expressing support and 46% voicing opposition. The lines of disagreement will be familiar to Members, with supporters stressing nuclear’s reliability and potential to create jobs in the near term, but with sceptics worried about safety, non-carbon environmental degradation and high up-front costs.
The target for 600,000 annual heat pump installations by 2028 is welcome, in conjunction with both energy efficiency measures and obvious job creation. It enjoyed 80% support among Climate Assembly members, but the Government should consider whether these initiatives are best delivered through empowering and resourcing local authorities to drive investment in local communities, instead of a top-down approach that fails to take a technology-neutral position on policy making. Indeed, in the assembly report there was 80% support for heat pumps, 80% support for heat networks and 80% support for potential hydrogen, and the conclusion was that local people and local communities should get to decide which technology best suits their needs.
The extended deadline for the green homes grant is also welcome, but the early teething problems with the current scheme need to be fixed urgently and the remaining funding for those works, as allocated in the Conservative party manifesto, need to be forthcoming.
Moving briefly to transport, the Government’s hugely welcome headline announcement on phasing out conventionally powered cars commanded 86% support in the assembly. In order for the Government’s £1.3 billion to be spent efficiently, alongside the Chancellor’s welcome announcements yesterday in relation to money for rapid charging hubs and subsidies for home and street-side charge points, it is crucial that decisions are taken on the basis of credibly evaluating demand at the local level. One hopes that there will also be a greater willingness to come out of our cars and to use public and active transport more. Most assembly members support investment in lower-carbon buses and trains, as long as they run more frequently and less expensively, and some early announcements from Ministers, while welcome, must go further.
On jet zero, or lower-carbon intensive flight, the same questions of personal choice and collective responsibility are at the centre of the debate about how to reduce emissions from air travel. Assembly members accepted that growth in air passenger numbers has to be slowed, but many baulked at the suggestion of outright restrictions on people’s ability to fly. Instead, there was broad consensus around the principle that passengers should pay in proportion to the frequency and distance travelled, and that airlines themselves must pick up some of the tab for decarbonising aviation.
Lastly, the prospect of a renewed focus on tree planting and peatland restoration, if underpinned by a fair system of incentives and sensitivity to the needs of individual farmers, proved highly popular, albeit with some participants expressing scepticism about the limits of its potential ecological benefit. This is one example where the role of Government in broader educative or explanatory notes on net zero policy decisions is important.
The question of fairness was central to the deliberations of the Climate Assembly, and it should be clear that the broad support that exists for decarbonisation can only be sustained by guaranteeing that the new economy offers the possibility of skilled, dignified work to everyone who seeks it, and that those currently employed in carbon-intensive industries do not disproportionately lose out from the net zero transition. Building such an insistence on fairness into our strategy for achieving net zero is a critical test set for the Government by the assembly, and I would welcome an update from Ministers on how it will figure in the plethora of now very delayed but highly anticipated announcements on all of these issues from the Department.
The public expect the Government to build on the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan with concrete, strategic and serious action that is adequate to the scale of the task at hand. Ministers can best do that by learning the lessons of the Climate Assembly, ensuring that our response to the climate crisis is deliberative, democratic and fair, and moving forward with the justified confidence that the public are on board and on side. The report itself also contains additional valuable suggestions beyond the Prime Minister’s initial 10 points—there are more things that need to be done—which I hope will be considered carefully.
The valuable, credible and timely conclusions from the Climate Assembly should be taken as a guide to our actions. The report’s key recommendation was that the Government should forge cross-party consensus to sustain action beyond political cycles that commands the support of successive Governments. I am confident, and I hope it is now clear, that across the mainstream of this House such consensus exists. It is time now, therefore, to act.
Globally, we have lost more than half our coastal habitats due to a destructive combination of climate change, sea level rise, coastal erosion and development, and we are predicted to lose up to 3,000 hectares more per year by 2050. In beautiful Hastings and Rye, we are blessed with so much nature, including Rye Harbour nature reserve and a coastline of shingle beaches, reedbeds and saline lagoons. The banks of the River Rother, for example, are lined with salt marshes and wetlands that teem with wildlife. When properly functioning, salt marshes can suck up carbon up to three times faster than tropical rainforests, yet it is estimated that as much as 1 billion tonnes of carbon are being released annually from degraded coastal ecosystems worldwide.
In addition, when we lose this natural coastal buffer zone, coastal houses and businesses are put at much greater risk of flooding. Projects such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds nature reserve at Wallasea island in Essex now protect local villages from repeated flooding. If we were to scale this up, it has been estimated that in England alone we could create 26,500 hectares of new salt marsh, which could make use of innovative partnerships that connect local communities and NGOs with Government and private investors. These projects can also provide new outdoor landscapes for local people to enjoy, with physical and mental health benefits, as well as tourism, potential income and rejuvenated fishing stocks.
Although the ocean’s vegetated habitats cover less than 0.5% of the seabed, they are responsible for more than 50% and potentially up to 70% of all carbon storage in ocean sediments. Seagrasses and marshes along our coasts capture and hold carbon, acting as a carbon sink. One acre of seagrass can sequester 740 lbs of carbon per year or 83 grams of carbon per square metre, which is the same as the amount emitted by a car travelling 3,860 miles. In the UK, up to 92% of our wonder plant, seagrass, has disappeared over the last 100 years. Seagrasses provide one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. An area of seagrass the size of a football pitch can support over 50,000 fish and more than 700,000 invertebrates, which is great for our fishing industry.
The benefits of blue carbon projects are huge. With the UK Government’s plans to decarbonise the maritime industry, the industry can and should play a vital role, working in partnership with blue carbon projects around the UK’s coasts. It is time for us to unlock the potential of our coastlines to reach our 2050 goal of net zero emissions and to reverse our loss of wildlife, while simultaneously helping to provide our coastal communities with jobs and investment where it is needed most.
“brings together a number of government’s environmental commitments and aspirations in one place, but it does not provide a clear and coherent set of objectives…and…government has yet to set a clear course for the development of a coherent and complete set of environmental objectives, and for a full set of costed delivery plans”.
The report goes on to say that
“government has yet to set out whether or how it will clarify long-term ambitions for the five environmental goals that it has not designated as priority areas…and…that neither Defra nor HM Treasury yet has a good understanding of the long-term costs involved in delivering the Plan as a whole…Defra is developing governance arrangements to help manage the links between different environmental issues”,
and has set up the “two oversight groups”, but:
“In July 2020 the Implementation Board started work to assign responsibilities for managing the links between goal areas, although it has not yet agreed what the most important links are.”
Furthermore, the report recommends that DEFRA
“maps out the most significant interdependencies between the goals in the 25 Year Environment Plan and sets out how decisions about any significant trade-offs will be made, and by who”,
and states:
“Government’s arrangements for joint working between departments on environmental issues are”
simply not good enough. There are
“no clear indications of senior ownership outside Defra and its arms-length bodies for the Plan as a whole…and…no regular, formal arrangements at all for Defra to engage other departments”.
I now turn to page 539 of the Climate Assembly report, where it states that 78% of people engaged in the assembly agreed:
“There should be a Minister with exclusive responsibility and accountability for ensuring net zero targets are met and government departments are co-ordinated in their efforts and achievements to meet their targets”.
The Minister must act and do that.
I also want to touch on the call for Government investment in low-carbon buses and trains. The Government have introduced, or plan to introduce, at least 4,000 more British-built zero-emission buses, which I welcome. In addition, two towns will have electric-only buses. That is a great start.
There is already a plan to decarbonise the rail network by 2040, and the Transport Committee is currently in the midst of the “Trains fit for the future?” inquiry. We stand at a great crossroads: with 15,400 kilometres of track currently non-electrified, we can look at electrification, at battery power, or even further into the future towards hydrogen, but if we move solely to electrification, we should consider that 1% of the national grid is already used for electrification on trains and 60% of our energy that creates electricity is regarded as dirty, and thus non-renewable. Therefore, if we increase electrification there is a danger that we will increase our carbon footprint, and if in years to come hydrogen is more ready to be used, it would be a huge shame to have vested everything in electrification—and it is more expensive as well. That said, there is a big challenge in industry to ensure that we can get the speed, the range and indeed the freight capability for hydrogen, and I fully admit that at present electrification is the only game in town.
On the question of adding more bus routes and more frequent services, the Transport Committee called for a bus strategy. I am pleased the Government have done likewise.
I disagree with bringing public transport back under Government control, although some might say that that has already occurred by osmosis. Under privatisation over the past 20 years, rail passenger numbers have doubled, as private enterprise is more incentivised to get people on to rail services than the general taxpayer ever will be, so I disagree with that one part of the report.
There is much more in this fantastic report, but I have run out of time. I very much support everything the assembly has done.
It is important to recognise the value of assembling a group that is truly representative of the UK population in terms of age, gender, educational qualifications, ethnicity, where they lived, whether they were from an urban area or a rural one, and actually whether they were really concerned about climate change or slightly sceptical about the whole issue. Too often, we find ourselves in echo chambers. We just listen to those who hold opinions similar to our or hear from those who shout the loudest. The assembly’s work provided a rare opportunity to hear some of the quiet voices of people who had been given the information and had time to consider their recommendations. That is hugely valuable.
The assembly’s hard work has produced a comprehensive report, as has already been said, and a set of 50 policy recommendations, covering not only how we travel but how we generate electricity, how we heat our homes and what we eat. Those are clear and consistent, and if we follow them, they will help us to get to net zero. I think that they are an invaluable resource to support our work here in Parliament and our decision making. The recommendations are not binding, and I think that is right. We can make different choices, but we cannot avoid making choices and taking action. The Climate Assembly based its recommendations on a comprehensive and balanced set of evidence, and it heard a range of views.
I want to say a couple of things about the transport recommendations. I obviously welcome the assembly’s support for extra investment in low-carbon buses and trains and better public transport services, cheaper fares and investment in walking and cycling. I am delighted that the Government have already decided to act on that recommendation and brought forward the ban on new diesel and petrol cars to 2030, but I was disappointed that hidden away in yesterday’s spending review was a 15% cut in next year’s walking and cycling budget. I hope that when the delayed transport decarbonisation plan comes through, it does not disappoint us.
I would have liked to say more about road pricing. It is interesting that there was a wariness on the part of assembly members around that issue, so although I am glad that we are having a debate about it, we need to think about how we address the impacts on low-income households as we develop the policy.
Technologies that hold out the prospect of fixing carbon emissions without the need for behavioural change by us as consumers did not receive as much support from the Climate Assembly as I would have expected. Carbon capture and storage—either direct air or from bioenergy—were, relatively speaking, less popular than other proposed changes. In the responses in chapter 9 of the report, there was a strong desire not simply to fix carbon emissions but actually to address their root causes.
There is a desire to use our response to climate change as an opportunity to consider what kind of relationship we should have with our natural surroundings —less an industrial supremacy and more, perhaps, a collaborative symbiosis. Although it is my view that we will certainly need all our technological ingenuity in carbon capture and storage, and probably in nuclear, to achieve net zero carbon by 2050, as policymakers we should seek to understand and reflect this deeper and wider need. It is this more mature relationship between us and our environment that sets the current generation apart from its predecessors, and gives me such hope for the future.
A 2017 study in the scientific publication World Development found that worldwide fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $4.9 trillion in a single year. It is estimated that eliminating those subsidies would have cut global carbon emissions by 21% and air pollution deaths by over half. It is therefore vital that these subsidies are ended and that Government bail-outs are subject to stringent commitments to workers’ rights, tax justice and rapid decarbonisation.
Without immediate Government intervention, the urgent action required to preserve a habitable planet will be too slow. That will cause unimaginable disruption and could cost millions of lives, most immediately and sharply in the global south, whose countries have contributed least to climate change. The current crisis has demonstrated that we are only as secure as the most precarious among us and that rapid social and economic change really is possible. At this unprecedented moment, the Government must consider all possible interventions and regulation to phase out the extraction of fossil fuels and to transition to renewables as soon as scientifically possible. The climate crisis is a class crisis. It must be the big polluters and corporate giants who bear the costs, not ordinary people.
The report recommends nature-based solutions such as planting more trees and increasing carbon capture in soil. Again, the Government are now fully supporting that. It talks about hydrogen solutions for heating in domestic housing, and that is part of the 10-point plan. The Government are fully supporting that with £500 million to start with. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew) noted, the Climate Assembly was less enthusiastic about some things, particularly carbon capture and storage, which I am rather enthusiastic about. It is a new technology, but it is being done elsewhere and it could form an important part of the mix, as most mainstream climate scientists agree.
I am glad that the Climate Assembly did not want to move the date for becoming carbon neutral forward from 2050, which is what some of the more radical environmental groups want. The 2050 date was set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That UN body said that it was necessary to do that to meet the Paris target of 1.5° warming. That was adopted in the UK by the Committee on Climate Change, which set out a programme of work that the Government and we as a country need to do to reach that target. Obviously we have now adopted 2050 as a legal target, and we are the first major country to do so. This shows the leadership that the UK has taken, and we can be thoroughly proud of that, but there is absolutely no room for complacency. The public support the strong measures we are taking. We are going to need to take many more strong measures in the future, but at least we know that the public are behind this. That is why I welcome the Climate Assembly, and I welcome this report.