My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for pointing out that I am actually here. I intervened on my noble friend Lady Stowell to make the point that we all support the introduction of AI, but AI is going to be tremendously consumptive of electricity. Electricity prices are actually very high in this country, and I attribute that to the targets we have set for reaching net zero, which I think we should be ignoring. We should not ignore net zero, but we should ignore the targets, which are too short and are damaging the British economy. That is the reason for my amendment.
The noble Lord, Lord McNally, suggested my intervention was motivated by some tradition in the other House of intervening very early on in the debate and then catching the next train to the country. So I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for pointing out that I am still here.
Things have changed tremendously since I first tabled this amendment. Initially, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, was rather hoping that I might withdraw my amendment. I think he hoped the Bill would go through without any debate and on the nod. That should not happen. The whole world of energy is now changing quite substantially, and we have got to be very wary of setting extremely arbitrary targets for reaching net zero, which have been damaging our economy and have led to extraordinarily high energy prices.
Since I tabled the amendment, we have had the report from the Tony Blair Institute, which is interesting because one the main things it pointed is that there is absolutely no way we are going to reach these global targets, for the simple reason that a very large number of developing countries are producing their own energy and want to produce it as cheaply as they possibly can. They are going to go on using fossil fuels for the indefinite future. Therefore, is it sensible for us, producing less than 1% of the world’s emissions, to set ourselves a net-zero target, when China, for instance, is producing 60% of its electricity from coal-fired power stations? Not only are the Chinese using probably the most efficient fossil fuel for producing electricity, they are also massively polluting the atmosphere in which their people have to live.
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Looking at the whole question of carbon capture and storage, which the Blair institute was very keen on, it is quite interesting that one of the effluents coming out of the north-east was going to be from the Drax power station. So there we are, spending an absolute fortune on carbon capture to take the effluent out of the Drax power station, which is supposed to be a green power station because it is using renewable sources.
We have to look very carefully at renewable sources. We know very well that when it comes to putting up wind turbines or solar panels, a lot of CO2 is used in manufacturing these things. But at the end of the day, once they are operating, the CO2 effluents seem to be much less at that point and therefore it is much more justifiable. But to use stuff just because we can grow it again—so that is a reason for burning it and contaminating the atmosphere—seems absolute madness, and I just do not see how we can go on doing that. I would like the Government to announce that they are going to close down the Drax power station in time and replace it with a much cleaner form of generating electricity, because we have to tackle CO2 at every conceivable level.
There are encouraging signs now—which, funnily enough, was not mentioned in the Blair report: the use of battery storage has grown significantly in the last few years. A friend of mine who I used to consort with in the other place, and who I saw at dinner the other day, said that he now has a number of containers occupying four and a half acres of his land in Wiltshire, and they are just taken up with buying in electricity when it is very cheap and then pressing a button when there is peak demand and the price is very high and letting it out again. This removes the peaks and troughs of electricity supply, which is always very useful and means that you need much less in terms of standby facilities.
Advances are being made, but the targets that we have set ourselves are damaging the economy of this country. Our chances of re-industrialising are absolutely minimal as long as we go on having the highest electricity prices in the G7. We have to look at all this and start taking a much more sensible approach to CO2 emissions. We need to continue to electrify wherever possible, but if we are paying the highest possible electricity prices in the developed world, we have a very serious problem ahead of us. I beg to move.
My Lords, first, I apologise that I was unable to be present for the Second Reading of this valuable Bill.
I am a bit confused by the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, because it seems that he leaves intact in the Bill the very targets that he is against. In fact, the amendment appears to focus on something equally important, however, which is that it would remove the requirement for the listed public bodies to contribute to the
“delivery of the programme for adaptation to climate change under section 58 of the Climate Change Act 2008”.
The Government have a statutory responsibility to deliver the adaptation programme, and the Adaptation Committee of the Climate Change Committee in its successive assessments has reviewed whether we as a nation are doing what is required to make sure that nationally, including with regard to infrastructure, we are more resilient to climate-related floods, droughts, intense weather events, heatwaves and increased storminess, and all the things that we are increasingly seeing.
We are seeing households go through horrors of floods and rocketing insurance costs. We are seeing the Government having to pay out £60 million in recovery payments to farmers for the excessive rainfall in summer 2024 having a huge impact on their livelihoods. Farmers, of course, also suffer from not having enough water on occasion, and that again hits their bottom line in irrigation costs or loss of crops.
There are more frequent and extreme heatwaves which cause excess deaths, particularly in elderly people. According to the Office for National Statistics, in the 2022 heatwave excess deaths associated with five heat episodes alone were up by 6.2%. Climate change-related insurance claims are steadily rising, and all the impacts that we have just heard about are serious for people and for the economy.
My Lords, I express my concern about this amendment. I completely understand where my noble friend Lord Hamilton is coming from with his wider concerns about some of these policies. I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, about adaptation for climate change in particular. Although it was criticised by the sub-committee of the Climate Change Committee—I was actually responsible for publishing it—and there may be disagreement about how far it would go and the connectivity, it was still important to make sure that we got it in place so that government departments knew what they should be doing. We had made that commitment to do so.
In particular, Clause 1(2) is a concern, as it says:
“The environmental recovery objective is a principal objective for the public bodies”.
I say to my noble friend that these bodies, which are by and large but not solely Defra bodies, are either Ministers or bodies that are accountable to Parliament, to Ministers or, indeed, to the electorate more widely when we get into local government. I realise I should have tabled an amendment here to consider mayoral authorities and mayors. It is vital that we recognise that there is already in law an enhanced biodiversity duty on all the public authorities.
I am also conscious that the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, pointed out to me, I think in a different meeting, that when the Environment Bill went through this House the Government at the time resisted directly linking the local nature recovery strategies into this. I was not a Minister in Defra at that time so I must admit I was not aware of that detail, but I genuinely believe that the local nature recovery strategies are critical to making sure we achieve these targets, which is why I broadly support this Bill.
I have tabled a fresh Question for Written Answer, bearing in mind what the Minister, Mary Creagh, said, I think last November in response to somebody in the House of Commons, that she expected all the local nature recovery strategies to be published by the end of the first half of June. Clearly, that has not happened, but incentives are supposed to be given towards that, so I have tabled a Question for Written Answer to see what the progress has been on that.
My Lords, I agree with what the noble Baronesses said about the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton. This Bill is incredibly important and it needs to stand in its entirety.
I will make two points. First, local authorities are critical if we are to get to net zero. Sectors that are either directly influenced or shaped by decisions from local authorities account for one-third of our emissions. We cannot get to net zero without them. This Bill rightly says that it is fine to have national targets to achieve net zero, but unless we actually will the means, it will not happen. Therefore, we need local authorities to use their planning, transport and housing functions to deliver net-zero policy on the ground.
Equally, following up from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, the natural environment is incredibly dependent on local authorities. As she rightly mentioned, local nature recovery strategies are a critical tool that local authorities can use to shape and support nature going forward, with their development processes and amenity space. We cannot get to nature recovery, for which we now have government targets, without them. Local authorities are critical. That is why the Bill needs to go ahead in its entirety.
I will pick up on a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. At every opportunity in this Chamber and in the other place, Members are finding legislative vehicles to give these duties to public bodies to take forward the responsibility for climate and nature. She mentioned some of them, but there are others, including the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which has just finished in the Commons. My honourable friend Gideon Amos MP attempted to insert into that Bill a new clause setting out that local authorities, in taking forward their planning and development functions, should take account of the climate and nature targets. As the noble Baroness rightly said, because this House and the other House know that local authorities and public bodies are the vehicles to deliver the nature and climate goals that we want, we will just end up with every Bill being bogged down with attempts to amend it accordingly, unless the Government take forward this incredibly well-measured and timely Bill—and I salute the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for introducing it.
My Lords, I was not planning to speak in this debate, but I have heard so much comment about local authorities that I felt I had to. I declare my interests as a councillor, an ex-leader of a council and chairman of the LGA. I find in those roles that local authorities are constantly emasculated by regulation, red tape, targets and being asked to do more than they could ever possibly achieve. We end up, therefore, always trying to compromise between various targets on which we could not deliver. We were being asked to do too much.
I do not know of a council that does not want better biodiversity and to address the issues of climate change, and that does not care about net zero. The problem is that the more targets, red tape and emasculation there is, the harder you make it for councils to do their jobs, whether that is caring for vulnerable children and adults, or hitting net-zero and climate change targets.
I ask noble Lords to consider whether this actually makes the job of councils and local authorities easier in delivering the things we all want, or whether it just adds another layer of bureaucracy. I cannot answer that for noble Lords, but I do know, having operated underneath all that red tape, that regulations, red tape and targets made my life more difficult in achieving stuff that every council I know wants to achieve anyway.
My Lords, I rise to speak in support of this Bill, as I did at Second Reading. I too will oppose the amendment put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, because it removes crucial provisions relating to climate adaptation and environmental recovery objectives.
The truth is that, despite having really good environmental legislation, the Government are largely off track to meet their legal obligations, particularly on nature recovery, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. The Office for Environmental Protection has concluded that the Government are largely off track to meet their nature goals; the Climate Change Committee has stated that the UK is not on track to meet its 2030 emissions targets; and in the recent report of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Climate Change Committee, not a single delivery plan for adaptation was rated as good. This is an alarming situation, and this Bill will help to resolve some of those problems.
The trouble is that nothing is joined up. I thought the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, put it really well at Second Reading when he said that the Government have all the levers, but they are not actually attached to anything. The Government are like a general in a military campaign who fails to tell the troops what the strategy is. Government needs to be interconnected, and these targets and ambitions need to go to the bodies, local authorities and people on the ground who are taking these decisions daily, to help make sure that government policy is joined up from top to bottom and united in its purpose and aims. That is what this Bill seeks to do.
As others have said, we sought to amend the Crown Estate Act, and we succeeded; we also succeeded in amending the Water (Special Measures) Act, but it wastes a lot of parliamentary time having to do this. I will be tabling an amendment to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to put such a duty on the Forestry Commission as well. The Government need to do these things.
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At the same time, we have stopped producing any form of electricity through coal. We have no more coal-burning power stations. When this started, the great theory was that somehow we were going to be leaders in the world; we would set an example and others would follow. Quite clearly, the Chinese are not following our example: they are merely taking massive advantage of the fact they can produce manufactures much more cheaply than we can here. The drain of manufacturing industry continues from this country, and that is driven, among other things, by the fact that our electricity prices are so much higher than those in the rest of the world. I admire the Government for having the ambition to reindustrialise this country, but it is not going to happen if our electricity prices are so much higher than everybody else’s in the world. This is one of the problems we are living with today: we are not competitive, and many other countries are taking advantage of us in this way.
I know the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has had association with the Drax power station. I have the most enormous reservations about a so-called green power station, which is supposed to be fulfilling all the requirements of net zero but is polluting the atmosphere through every conceivable stage of its process of feeding fuel into that power station.
It is supposed to be dealing with wooden pellets that come from North America. There is a suggestion that quite a lot of trees have been cut down in North America as well to produce these wooden pellets. When the wooden pellets are eventually burned, they must be almost as contaminating as a coal-fired power station, if not quite. At the end of the day, we should not be contributing to CO2 emissions through generating power, even if it is under the auspices that somehow this is a renewable source, because I do not think that it makes any sense at all.
If the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, feels we are moving too fast because our electricity prices are high, I say that we are rapidly approaching a point when the real downstream costs of not doing enough to combat climate change are going to start hitting the economy, if they have not already done so. The Adaptation Committee has been clear that we are not making enough progress. Its progress report on the third national adaptation programme was very blunt:
“The UK’s preparations for climate change are inadequate ... The Government has yet to change the UK’s inadequate approach to tackling climate risks … The Government must”—
among other actions—
“Improve coordination across government … Integrate adaptation into all relevant policies … strategies and plans. Implement monitoring, evaluation and learning across all sectors”.
Clause 1(1)(c) is fundamental to that to ensure that public assets and critical public services are resilient to climate impacts now, avoiding the costs of coping with emergency events and costly retrofitting. We must not lose this adaptation clause from the Bill. I cannot recall off the top of my head the exact figure calculated for the cost of taking action on the climate targets, but if my memory serves me well, it was less than 1% of GDP lost and certainly less than the impact of the term in office of Liz Truss.
I shall briefly take this opportunity to stress the importance of this Bill as whole. The Government have statutory climate change and environmental targets that they urgently need to meet. A range of public bodies needs to act in support of the Government if the Government are to have any hope of meeting the targets.
We have experience in this House of laying such requirements on public bodies. During the debates on the Great British Energy Bill and the Crown Estate Bill, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, attempted to get a similar obligation about environmental and climate change targets laid on those bodies to help achieve that government strategy commitment. That took up considerable time of the House, and of Ministers outside the Chamber, and although we did not get agreement at that point to amend the Bills, we got valuable assurances from the Dispatch Box that those bodies would be expected to meet sustainable development objectives and, by analogy, climate and environment objectives as outlined in the two pieces of legislation that laid those requirements on government.
We could theoretically carry on trying to insert those obligations into public bodies one by one as suitable legislation comes past that would provide opportunities. Indeed, during 2000s, I proposed a sustainable development duty for every relevant public body as an opportune Bill came through your Lordships’ House, and I won the day on several public bodies that still have their sustainable development duties, but I can tell the Committee one thing: Ministers came to hate me. It would be much more efficient to get the Government to recognise that they will need all the help they can get to deliver the targets and to adopt the approach suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, of a single Bill doing all relevant public bodies in a job lot. Can the Minister delight us by telling us that he is seriously considering this or, at the very least, could he tell us how much progress has been made since commitment made at Second Reading by the Minister, the other noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, that the imminent revision of the environment improvement plan provides the best vehicle to consider the principles that this Bill is promoting and their practical implementation?
We are due to get the environment improvement plan revision before the summer—late spring is the technical term, I think. Can the Minister confirm that it will include specific measures to align public bodies’ action with delivery of the statutory climate change and environment targets, including the adaptation programme, despite the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, to remove it?
I know that my noble friend adores our countryside, but our country will be very different if we do not protect our natural environment. On the targets referred to in Clauses 1(1)(a) and (b), for too long nature has been the Cinderella in thinking about climate change. The climate adaptation element is also key when it starts to come together in real action and not just saying, “We’re pleading with you to look after nature”. It can be difficult to explain why it matters to keep alive a species of bat in Colombia, but it starts to come together when we think about adaptation.
I am conscious that it is important that we continue to do whatever we can to honour our obligations. It was a Conservative Government who did the negotiations for the global biodiversity framework. I believe that it is vital that every sinew of government is working towards achieving that. It matters not just because we led the way in the negotiations and it took a lot of courage—I paid a lot of tribute at the time to our brilliant civil servants who were leading the day-to-day negotiations and working with Ministers to make them happen—but because we matter and nature matters. That is why I encourage my noble friend to consider whether he wants to press this again on Report, because, if he did, I am afraid that I would find myself in a different Lobby from him.
I hope the Minister will support the Bill, but like the noble Baroness, Lady Young, I will ask him one question. She mentioned that the Minister said at Second Reading that the EIP was the proper vehicle for taking this forward. However, that deals with the nature aspect; instead, I want to address the issue of the climate goals. Even if this Government do not take forward this timely Bill, they committed in December to introduce a public participation strategy this year. That would set out how businesses, civic groups and individuals would work on this; the Government would bring them together and show them how we can all, as a nation, move towards a just and fair transition to net zero. Critical to that is the role of local authorities—with their respective functions between housing, development and transport—in helping those businesses and individuals get there. Can the Minister assure the House today that, when the public participation strategy comes out—before the end of this year, I hope—it will make crystal clear the role of local authorities and public bodies in helping businesses and citizens help us get to net zero.
On Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, I too was a little bit confused by it; there was a disconnect between the wording of the amendment and the speech he gave. It would remove the requirement for public bodies to deliver the adaptation programme. Just yesterday evening, we had a debate in Grand Committee on the impact of wildfires, and the threat is ever-growing. If we do not adapt, people will suffer and we will face increased costs and damages. We need to prepare: the reality of climate change is here, and it is going to be disastrous for people and our economy. We need to do something about it.
Amendment 1 would also remove the nature recovery duty. However, we have to do this. Climate change and biodiversity losses are interconnected and interdependent. Government public bodies own 6% of the land in the UK, so why would we not seek to improve our biodiversity by making use of those bodies and the land under their control?
Councils, as we have heard, also have an important role. I will challenge some of the remarks made because, in Scotland, councils do have a duty to make climate-related improvements. In fact, where they do so, they are making real improvements. Lots of councils want a greater ability to do these things. I therefore reject the amendment because, if passed, it would rip the heart out of the Bill. I will however address some of the points the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, has made.
I do not think it appropriate to talk about our climate targets as being arbitrary. They are set by scientists and are reviewed by the Climate Change Committee; they are real targets with real purpose. I agree with the noble Lord about the cost of energy bills. More must absolutely be done to bring down the cost of energy, but we need to remember that it is the cost of gas that sets the electricity price in the UK 98% of the time. I know that the Government are looking at energy market reform, but more needs to be done on that. The green economy grew by 10.3% last year, according to the CBI. In fact, it is one of the very few parts of the UK economy that is showing real growth.
I therefore have to say that I do not think the amendment is useful. I am not able to support it, but we do support the Bill.