Cost of Living

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I shall try not to turn this into the Oxford Union but the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, put some direct questions to me and, in responding to the debate, I will also provide some answers to those. His comments about lifestyle change are really quite insulting to the people who are struggling so hard that food banks are having to make up parcels of no-cook food because they simply cannot afford to cook. The noble Lord said that some people around him were investing in their homes. We are talking about the cost-of-living crisis. There are very large communities where very few people have any money at all to maintain their homes, let alone invest in them.

However, I will agree with the noble Lord that we cannot do it all with renewables. Indeed, the powerful and informative speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, covered that very well. The cleanest, greenest energy is the energy we do not have to use. The quality of our housing stock is disastrous, and saving energy is the other side of using renewables.

I will go back to where I was planning to start, which is by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for securing this debate and, as many others have, congratulating him on his extremely good timing. What we are seeing today is pretty well the rest of the country following where the Green Party has led. Back in the autumn of 2021, we called for a payment of £320 to every household—a winter fuel payment to help people through the winter. Voilà: today we have a payment to most households of £350.

As the noble Lord said, a lot of this, effectively, is expected to be paid back. It is a debt. Households enormously laden with debt already are using debt to pay their grocery bills because they simply do not have the money, and the Government are effectively putting more debt on them. There is a very large question to be asked about the process.

I referred to what we were saying in autumn 2021, when we called for a temporary cut in VAT on domestic energy bills. It may have been a Boris Johnson promise in 2018, and Her Majesty’s Opposition, I believe, are now calling for that. Also in autumn 2021, we called for a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, which I understand is also now Labour policy. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, made very clear, it is obviously the time for that windfall tax on oil and gas companies.

Yesterday’s Financial Times had the headline: “Big Oil groups regain swagger with largest profits in years”. In the climate emergency the last thing we need is fossil fuel companies swaggering around the world, using their windfall profits to seek out even more oil and gas fields, building the carbon bubble even further. It is a huge threat to our financial security as well as our fragile, overheated planet. Returning to what the noble Lord, Lord Young, said about fracking, creating a new industry that you are going to have to immediately shut down makes no sense at all—and no, we should not be shipping LNG, but we are doing that because we did not invest in home energy efficiency or renewables.

The Motion refers to the role of the consumer protection regulatory regime in energy markets. For my final period I want to focus on that and in particular on what that regime cannot do. The fact is that, while we rely on gas, we will be at the mercy of world markets, even without the other environmental considerations about using that gas. I will cut down what I say on this, because the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, has already covered it so well, but we are now building homes—people are picking up their keys for them today—that immediately need to be retrofitted, not only for environmental reasons but also so that people can afford to live in them. That is an absolute disgrace and a huge government failure.

There are also renewables. I was talking about oil and gas profits. How much better if people in the more prosperous communities that the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to were able to invest in community energy schemes, putting solar panels and local wind turbines up and fuelling schools, doctors’ surgeries, factories and homes through that? Yet I keep asking the Minister: where is the funding for that and the plan for it that was promised last June? I got a Written Answer, which pointed to a bit of money going to farms. That is the only thing that the noble Lord could point me to.

I also want to look at the structural issue of privatisation. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, said that competition is not working and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, spoke in his introduction about the absolute mess of the privatised utilities. The last figure that I have been able to find is from November—I would be interested if the Minister could update me on this—when the cost of the collapse of those privatised energy companies was £3.2 billion, or £120 for each household. That is the cost of ideology going on to those heavily indebted, struggling households. If we could just run these essential services, such as our energy and water companies, for public good, not private profit, we would take some of the pressure off our heavily indebted households.

Economic Crime: Planned Government Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The issues are not necessarily related. We are continuing to pursue many of the frauds that the noble Lord referred to. I can give the House some examples. The Insolvency Service has already achieved 86 director disqualifications, 39 bankruptcy restrictions have been imposed, and 13 live companies have been wound up in the public interest. It has also identified 947 further director disqualification and 46 criminal cases for investigation, all of which contain an element of bounce-back loans scheme abuses. That scheme was put in place in response to a global pandemic at a very rapid pace, and I think all noble Lords can agree that it succeeded in saving many businesses and many hundreds of thousands of jobs in this country. However, we will not tolerate any abuses of the scheme, and we will continue to pursue people who are fraudulently benefiting from it.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, there is clearly a problem of international confidence in the UK’s financial governance system. Without targeting any particular party, are the Government considering controls on financial donations to all political parties and candidates, as a way of restoring international confidence?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I thought that I had come to answer questions on an economic crime Bill, but I see that we are getting into party-political donations again. That is not a matter for which I am, or my department is, responsible, so I am unable to furnish the noble Baroness with a response to her question.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

5: At end insert—
“(d) meeting Sustainable Development Goals 1 (no poverty), 2 (zero hunger) and 3 (good health and wellbeing).”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

In moving Amendment 5 in my name, I will briefly comment on Amendments 4 and 19. Had there been space in our procedures, I would have attached my name to Amendment 4; I note that it has broad cross-party support. It addresses the Climate Change Act and imposes a legal requirement to comply with the duty of Section 1 of that Act, which concerns net-zero emissions. That is an important and good way of expressing it, and I hope that we will see that eventual outcome.

Amendment 19 talks about ARIA having an ESG strategy. This would not be my preferred way forward. In a way, it is better than nothing, and I see the point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, about lining up with other vaguely similar institutions. However, we have seen a great deal of criticism of ESG as not always being a very strong or effective tool.

My Amendment 5 calls for ARIA to include sustainable development goals 1, on poverty, 2, on zero hunger, and 3, on health and well-being. These are internationally recognised and accepted goals, with targets within them to which the UK, like every country on this earth, is signed up. Surely these should be the goals of every element of the Government, both direct and arm’s-length parts.

I thank the Minister and his staff for engaging with me in discussions on this, but before I get to that I want to address why it is so important to talk about poverty, health and hunger in this ARIA Bill. When people talk about what ARIA will achieve, very often it sounds as if we are talking about Silicon Fen, often known as the “Cambridge cluster”—the region around Cambridge which has so many high-tech business, including software, electronics and biotechnology. But if you look at the reality of life in Cambridge, the top 6% of earners take home 19% of the wealth generated in the city, and the bottom 20% of earners get 2% of the wealth generated in the city.

I encourage noble Lords, if they have not yet seen it, to have a look at an article in the Guardian by Aditya Chakrabarti, who visited a foodbank in Cambridge recently. In his reflections there, he noted that this is a tiny city with a population half the size of a single London borough, yet in one postcode in Cambridge you can expect to live until 87. In a postcode just down the road, it is 78. This is the kind of development that has delivered a miserable life for many, many people. This is why I tabled this amendment.

In the discussions that I mentioned with the Minister and his staff, which raised some very interesting issues, they pointed me to Clause 2(6) of the Bill, which states that, in exercising its functions,

“ARIA must have regard to the desirability”

of various things. Clause 2(6)(c) states that one of those is

“improving the quality of life in the United Kingdom”.

I would be very interested to hear from any noble and learned Lords who might be able to assist me. I am not a lawyer and I am not quite sure what the legal definition is of “quality of life”. I suggest that it is open to political contention and discussion. More than that, in the context of what I was saying about Cambridge, whose quality of life are we talking about? That is a very important question to ask. In your Lordships’ House, I often comment on the Government’s pursuit of GDP as a goal in itself, but here we are talking about quality of life, which surely has to include a distributional element.

That was my purpose in tabling this amendment. I was asked whether I intended to put it to a vote. Given that I called a Division yesterday, and given that I have not had as much time as I would have liked to devote to thinking it through and finding a form of words that really works, it is not my intention to put it to a vote. However, I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what the Government mean by “quality of life” in Clause 2(6)(c). Do the Government acknowledge that that has to address distribution as well as GDP growth? I cannot see any way that it could not. If the Minister is looking for a way of measuring this, I point him to the Living Standards Framework used in New Zealand, which directs the New Zealand Treasury and the actions of the New Zealand Government. That is a good measure of the quality of life. I beg to move.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 4 and 19 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Browne of Ladyton, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, and myself. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, in particular for his tireless work on this issue. I too join in the tributes to the noble Lord, Lord Broers, and wish him well in his retirement. I also have some sympathy with the intention behind the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which raises very important and wider questions, but I am going to focus on Amendment 4.

As the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has said, a number of Acts of Parliament that have gone through this House have had “have regard” amendments relating to climate change made to them. I was pleased to be a signatory to the cross-party amendment to the Financial Services Bill, which the Government substantially accepted in this regard. This point of consistency is extremely important. However, I would have preferred it if the Government had been willing to accept a stronger amendment on the purpose of the organisation, but I recognise that political pragmatism is wise on occasion.

In Committee, we had a very useful discussion about whether the agency would benefit from the sort of mission and focus that helped the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States—mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale—achieve its success. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, told us that DARPA’s mission had been to not be taken by surprise by new technology and, perhaps by implication, to surprise others with the advanced technology of the United States. That may well have been the mission, but the purpose of the mission was surely what drove DARPA’s success: to maintain the national security of the United States against the threat of Soviet communism. It is that purpose which provided DARPA with its edge, its sense of urgency and an understanding of the stakes of the mission on which it was engaged.

While Soviet communism posed an existential threat to our freedom then, today the threat we face from climate change and ecological destruction is even more acute: an existential threat to life itself. Surely, there can be no more profound purpose to drive our new advanced research agency, no greater focus to inspire research, innovation and the practical application of science, than that of tackling a threat to humanity itself.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I apologise; the procedure is a little different and more complicated because I put down an amendment to an amendment. It is not my intention to respond substantively to the Minister’s response to Amendment 4. The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has consistently championed Amendment 4 and variations of it, so it is most appropriate that he responds on that one. I should just say that I failed to declare earlier that I am a member of the committee for Peers for the Planet. On Amendment 5 and my side of this, I do not think the Minister responded to my question about defining quality of life. I realise this may be a legally complicated matter, so will he commit to write to me about this and lay a copy of the correspondence in the Library?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Regarding the noble Baroness’s question on the definition of the quality of life—we are getting into a very esoteric debate for this time of night—I do not think there is a technical definition specific to her suggestions that I can point towards. It is not in such common usage but, if I can find an appropriate definition, I will of course send it to her.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the Minister for his answer. I want to make one other point very quickly. He talked a lot about the hard sciences. It is interesting that, when we had a private discussion with a number of his colleagues, there was also a lot of focus on what might be described as the softer biological sciences and issues such as plant health and the human microbiome. I hope those will be considered within ARIA’s remit. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 5 (to Amendment 4) withdrawn.

Power Outages: North of England

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I do not have that figure to hand. The noble Lord, with his work on infrastructure, will know that the cost of putting power lines underground is much greater than that of overhead lines, and these are difficult balances that have to be struck in any particular circumstance, particularly in rural communities or if the lines are going long-distance across the countryside. To put them all underground would be immensely expensive. If my officials have access to any figures, I will certainly let him have them.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in responding to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, the Minister said that “we” need to ensure more resilience, but of course we are talking here about private companies, whose entire focus is on private profits. Will the Government ensure that regulators force those companies to build more resilience into the system?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

They are indeed private companies, but resilience is in their interests as well as ours, and they are very tightly regulated through Ofgem. They will be seeking to learn all the lessons they can so that the system is suitably resilient in future.

Onshore Wind Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, this debate has been unanimous in both backing the Bill put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and thanking her for her work and the very clear, unarguable argument she presented for it. Like others, I declare my involvement in Peers for the Planet. I am pleased to follow all of the speakers in this debate who have already made the very clear environmental and economic arguments for this Bill.

I will not repeat those but will take a look at why we are here today and why we need this Bill. The Bill gets the Government out of a political tangle of their own making. It also ensures that they deliver what they have promised to do. If we think about why we are here today, we go back to the time when David Cameron shifted from hugging huskies to talking about not liking “green crap”. This was at a time when the then Government were wooing UKIP-leaning voters before the Brexit referendum and a UKIP candidate was on the record for complaining about what would happen when the renewables ran out. We know what happens when the far right gets a hold on politics. Many nasty, disastrous things happened and our current policy on onshore wind is one more disastrous effect of the politics of that time.

We are seeing some reversal of this. Boris Johnson has disavowed his former claim that wind power could not

“pull the skin off a rice pudding”.

As others have said, we know that onshore wind enjoys broad support from the public—70% of the public in one recent survey. It also has support from conservation charities such as the RSPB, which points out that the greatest threat to birds and other wildlife is of course climate change. One survey, a UK-wide poll carried out in July 2021 by Survation on behalf of RenewableUK, found that, if there are public concerns, these are about efficiency and harmony with nature.

Efficiency concerns can be addressed by technical arguments and the concern about the impact for nature can be addressed by the careful, appropriate siting and design of wind farms. Indeed, the US Department of Energy’s 2015 report, Wind Vision: A New Era for Wind Power, found that, in the United States, the rate of avian collisions with wind turbines was 1,500 to 5,000 times lower than for buildings in general. I have never heard anyone using bird strike as an argument to stop any other sort of building, yet we know that is often waved as an unjustified argument against wind farms.

Whenever we talk about energy, I make the point that the cleanest, greenest energy you can possibly have is the energy you do not need to use. Energy conservation remains the awfully poor Cinderella of government energy policy; we have seen very little government money going to that over the past decade. However, we do need energy, and onshore wind and solar power are now the cheapest options, as well as offering big environmental benefits.

We have a lot of hot air in Westminster—who can avoid that one?—but we cannot fuel Britain’s energy transition by talking; we can do it only by practical action. Even if the Government will not take action on this Bill now, will they not consider, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, outlined, Clause 1(2)(c), which allows existing wind farms to re-purpose?

I started by saying that we are here because of politics, not because of engineers, the environment or the economy, but it is of course a non-party-political Cross-Bencher who has proposed the Bill, offering a common-sense solution to the situation the Government now find themselves in. I must conclude by reminding everyone that we are now speaking from a Chamber of the Government of the nation that remains the chair of the COP climate process—until Egypt takes over in a year’s time—and the world is watching what is happening here. I was at COP 26. People ask why the UK’s policies are so failing to deliver on its promises and targets, and it is things such as this that people talk about. So, the world is watching the Minister as he answers today, and I hope he will be thinking about that when he gives us his answer.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

I would like briefly to intervene on this important group of amendments and should declare an interest as a member of the board of UKRI, which is very relevant to the issues we are currently considering. I am not acting as a spokesman on behalf of UKRI, but drawing on the experience that we have had there.

I welcome any attempt to bring greater diversity and innovation to our funding landscape. We do not want a monolith; we want lots of different ways of getting funding and lots of different requirements. Anything that adds to the diversity of the funding landscape I welcome as a good thing. However, I have two or three questions on which I hope that the Minister will be able to give some assurance.

First, the task of ARIA is often described as high-risk, high-reward research. In a way, Clause 3, to which my noble friend Lord Lansley, has referred, is an attempt at setting out in legal prose “high risk, high return”. It is great that ARIA will have that as its objective, but my one concern when I hear this language is the implication that all other public funding for R&D could not be high risk and high return and that it is in some sort of boring bureaucratic pot where everything is safety first and low return. I would be grateful for the Minister’s assurance that it is also perfectly possible for the agencies of UKRI and indeed other sources of public funding for R&D also to engage in high-risk, high-return research. It would place too much weight on ARIA’s shoulders and eliminate diversity if we said that it is the only agency that can act in that way. Having that authoritative assurance from the Government would be of great value in ensuring that our whole research ecosystem carries on performing in an innovative way.

Secondly, I want to reflect on the lessons that can be learned from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, to which my noble friend has also referred, and seek another assurance from the Minister. When Theresa May’s Government put substantial funding—over £2 billion—into the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, Innovate UK, the main agency for delivering that programme, travelled to America to look at what ARPA did. It said, “These programme directors at ARPA are fantastic—we should have the ARPA model of programme directors in order to deliver the Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund”.

I can remember the debate that took place. The Treasury said “Hang on, how much are these programme directors going to be paid? They can’t possibly be paid more than is set by our pay rules”—the pay limit was, I think, £100,000. The Treasury then also said, “We need a committee to scrutinise that the money is being well spent and, to ensure it is making progress, a monthly report would be about right”. Then BEIS, which I do not think completely trusted the Treasury and saw this as a BEIS operation, said, “BEIS also needs to have a committee that meets to scrutinise the success of this programme director; we have slightly different criteria from the Treasury, so our committee should meet once a month”. It averaged out—at the start; it may have got better—that every fortnight there was some supervisory committee or other checking that this programme director was delivering the objectives.

That is the slow, painful process of bureaucratic accretion. It is marvellous that ARIA is, we are assured, going to be free of all that. It would be quite good, however, if other parts of research funding could also be free of those constraints. Indeed, the Government have several reviews on at the moment that are relevant to this, including the Tickell review of bureaucracy and a new grant review of UKRI.

I also hope that the Minister can assure us that, wherever possible, especially if these proposals emerge from two reviews set up by the Government, freedoms being extended to ARIA will also be enjoyed by agencies working under UKRI or other departmental bodies. The problem of bureaucracy must be solved across the whole swathe of R&D funding, not just by creating one institution outside the constraints that everyone else has to work under. I would like an assurance that lessons are being learned, both for the functioning of ARIA and from these two reviews now under way.

Thirdly and finally, we can already sense—not least from the opening presentation from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on the purpose of ARIA—a fascinating debate about missions versus technologies. I have frequently had that debate with my friend Professor Mariana Mazzucato, who has brought the language of missions into public policy, which is excellent. However, I always say to her that the Kennedy moonshot did not arise because a bunch of PPE-ists—speaking as one myself—sat around saying, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we sent someone to the moon? That would really get the media’s attention; let’s do that, Mr President”, but because of prior investment in general-purpose technologies, including rockets. It was a deep understanding of what the technologies might be capable of that led to the formulation of the mission.

One can resolve this by wordplay, by making “backing technologies” one of the missions, but the point made earlier about preventing and creating technological surprise tells us that, really, DARPA was always envisaged as driving American leadership in technology. We have the opportunity to choose missions only because of prior investment in underlying science and technology, which turns those missions from empty fantasies into deliverable objectives.

I very much hope we will have an assurance from the Minister during the course of our scrutiny today that ARIA will strike a happy balance. It should be able to fund general-purpose technologies without knowing exactly how they will prove useful, while suspecting that something of that power and significance will have use. It may also wish to fund specific missions or challenges, but it would be a strategic mistake to put all its eggs in one basket. It is the interaction of technological investment capabilities with missions and challenges that really drives innovation. I very much hope that ARIA will pursue both approaches.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I apologise for not taking part at Second Reading; I was at the COP 26 climate talks, which are of obvious relevance to this group in particular.

I begin by reflecting on the model for ARIA—DARPA, which was of course military. We have talked a lot about risk-taking, which is usually interpreted as the risk of failure to achieve your objectives. When we think about the origins of this—the child very often showing some characteristics of its parent—we can also think about the risks attached to achieving your outcomes but causing unintended effects. With DARPA, there was Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the drone warfare of the Gulf War, and it is now working on killer drones and robot warriors.

Looking at the model of DARPA, researcher Annie Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, talked about how it very much became embedded in what has been described, including by US Presidents, as the military-industrial complex. Giving a mission is very important, in order to avoid institutional capture. That is one of the reasons why I speak in favour of Amendments 1, 21 and 26. We have not yet had the chance to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, but I think her Amendment 21 is in a sense similar to Amendments 1 and 26, except that it provides a more regular review mechanism.

If we think about what ARIA is for and look at some of the proposals put forward, we see that the CBI described it as

“an international lynchpin for business investment”

that is to “ultimately deliver new products”. McKernan said that it was

“a public sector, new technology seed fund”

whereas, by contrast, the Russell Group described it as

“multidisciplinary research teams with the capacity to take a holistic approach”.

That brings us to the debate that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was just addressing, which was also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—and why I would express opposition to his Amendment 25. There is a danger in focusing on technology rather than on mission. We want to focus on mission and on the problems that we need to solve—and Amendment 1 very much focuses on the great problem that we need to solve. Discussion thus far has focused very much on the climate emergency, but it also talks about a “sustainable … society”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for the intention of all these amendments, although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that “representative” is not quite the right approach. Ideally, we would see the devolved Administrations and Westminster getting together to ensure that there was representation from the nations that fitted together in terms of making a cohesive board with the right set and range of skills, and it would be a co-operative process that ensured that we had those nations involved.

I was very taken with the comment by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about the “magic inner circle”. That is something that we absolutely have to break up when it comes to innovation and new thinking in the UK. Just because it seems to fit here, we need to make sure that we are drawing on not just a handful of the most well-funded and well-resourced higher education institutions but on all our higher education institutions. We also need to think about what further education institutions, of which there are many around the country, may be able to offer.

On that issue, I want to reinforce the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, about where this will be based. I do not know whether the Minister will be able to do this now or possibly at some point in future, but I think the Committee would be greatly reassured if she could tell us that it will not be in the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle but somewhere else.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to express the hope that the Minister is going to tell the Committee that consultations have taken place with the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and whoever the appropriate people are presently to represent the people of Northern Ireland about the issues raised by Amendment 4, and that she can satisfy the Committee that this has all been agreed. If not, I can tell her that it has the potential to be quite a serious issue in Scotland.

Cotton Imports

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, probably the easiest place to find a definition is in the schedules to the National Security and Investment Act, which became law at the end of last year. It contains details of 17 subsectors with very strict mandatory controls for matters which clearly would otherwise cause harm. On the first part of the question, I will write to the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in responding to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, the Minister talked about working with businesses regarding the supply chain. Later, he talked about rules associated with the Modern Slavery Act. Is he confident that there are adequate resources to enforce these rules and future rules, given that the businesses following them may be put at a competitive disadvantage compared with cowboys who fail to do so?

Net Zero Strategy and Heat and Buildings Strategy

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, reports suggest that a companion document to the net-zero strategy entitled Net Zero: Principles for Successful Behaviour Change Initiatives was published and then withdrawn a few hours later. The report suggests that this government document raised concerns over the expansion of airports contained in government policy and tax exemptions for the aviation sector. It said that the Government needed to do more to make behavioural changes easy and affordable, and align commercial interests with net-zero outcomes. It proposed carbon taxes, a financial levy on food with a high-emission footprint, and forcing the markets to be more transparent to enable consumers to choose more sustainable options. Will the Minister confirm if these reports are true? Will he tell me why this report was withdrawn and what its status is now?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I believe there were some documents that were published in error, but they have been withdrawn. Fundamentally, we do not believe in telling people what to eat or how to live their lives. Our focus is on helping people, incentivising them to make green choices, and to make those choices easier and cheaper. As we transition to net zero, we will be tech- led using British technology and innovation, just as we did in the last innovation revolution. I appreciate that the Greens want to lecture people and instruct them; I believe that carrots are much better than sticks.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I believe that it has been implemented. As I said earlier, we have allocated £620 million for vehicle grants and for further funding for local EV infrastructure. This is being rolled out across the whole country. Many local authorities are installing EV charging points in lamp posts, in publicly accessible areas. Grants are available for the installation of electric charge points in the home. Many are being rolled out in service stations and petrol stations. The infrastructure is being rolled out. I understand that the noble Baroness is impatient for it to be done faster, but it is happening.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, given that I cannot see anyone else rising, perhaps I may return to a point raised by both Front-Bench spokespeople about the ending of the sale of gas boilers by 2035. The Government’s document seems to say that this is a confirmed ambition. Can the Minister explain what a “confirmed ambition” means? Given that the Climate Change Committee recommends that these should be ended for residential properties by 2033 and for commercial properties as early as 2030, and given that the International Energy Agency says that there should be a global international ban by 2025, why is this so late?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I understood that I had explained that earlier in my answer to the noble Lords, Lord Grantchester and Lord Oates, but I am happy to do it again for the benefit of the noble Baroness. It is an aim—an ambition—that by 2035 we will be able to move away from the installation of gas boilers, but we want to make sure that cheap, easily available and affordable alternatives which cost no more to buy or run than a gas boiler are in place. We are fairly certain that the technology will be available. That is why we are supporting so many of our insulation schemes and the heat pumps that we spoke about earlier, but we want to make sure that the technology is available. This also chimes in with the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—hydrogen will play a role, but we do not know to what extent at this stage. I understand the impatience of noble Lords, but this is a strategy to be rolled out over many years.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, given that there are 19 million homes in the country marked on the bottom rung for energy efficiency—D or below—and that the Heat and Buildings Strategy stresses in its introduction the need for a fabric-first approach, can the Minister tell me why there are no firm proposals to replace the scrapped green homes grant or funding for improving the fabric of our homes?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness has obviously not been paying attention to what I have said, but let me repeat the figures yet again. She might want to go and look at some of the fantastically successful delivery we were doing for low-income families under the local authority delivery scheme. We spent hundreds of millions of pounds on that; we have already rolled out the first phase of the social housing decarbonisation fund, and we are investing £950 million and £800 million respectively over the next two years. I referred earlier to the home upgrade grants. All these are paying for home insulation measures for the most vulnerable in society and for people on low incomes. I am sorry if the Greens are not aware of that or do not support it, but we are investing these very large sums of money to upgrade the fabric of people’s homes and install low-carbon heating systems in them. I have been out and viewed many of these schemes.

UK Property Ownership: Overseas Jurisdictions

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Again, the noble Baroness is confusing different issues. Having hereditary beneficial ownership—which we are greatly committed to and would be, I think, a great step forward—provides transparency. It does not, of course, itself increase the tax take. But she can be convinced that HMRC is very seized of this issue and is intending to increase the taxation take where it can possibly do so. Since 2010, the UK Government have secured and protected over £250 billion in tax revenue that would otherwise have gone unpaid, including an additional £3 billion from those trying to hide money abroad.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the Minister has said “when parliamentary time allows” a number of times. But, of course, your Lordships recently passed the Financial Services Act. Transparency International recently analysed 400 corruption and money laundering cases and identified 600 UK businesses, institutions and individuals that have helped those corrupt cases. Does the Minister acknowledge that the Financial Services Act, so recently passed, is inadequate in regulating the actions of our businesses and needs to be strengthened?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am not familiar with the details of that Act, but, as I said and will repeat again: the register of beneficial ownership remains a priority; the role of Companies House remains a priority; and we will come to this when parliamentary time allows.

Status of Workers Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 10th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, and to offer the Green group’s support for the excellent Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, which he so clearly and powerfully outlined. I was standing in this very spot yesterday, speaking in the debate on the £20 cut to universal credit. As many speakers highlighted then, the majority of people affected by that are in work. The fact is that we have created a legal framework in the UK in which work very often does not pay.

The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in offering his very welcome and perhaps slightly surprising support for this Bill, gave some anecdotes about where he has seen wages rise in response to a shortage of labour supply. That is true in some parts of the country, for some kinds of jobs, but there are still many parts of the country where that is not the case and where we see a situation in which people are forced into any job they can find, at any wage rate.

In his introduction, the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, said a simple definition of a worker is a person who works for a living. Of course, we have a society at the moment where people are forced to do that or starve, and we do not regulate that work to ensure that it gives people decent conditions. If we had a universal basic income society, which gave people a genuine choice about whether to engage in employment and on what terms, we would be changing the balance of power in that relationship on an individual basis. But that is not where we are: we have benefits that apply high levels of conditionality, so people are forced into exploitative jobs. That is where we are now, and the Bill would go some way towards addressing that situation.

One of the other things that workers can do, sometimes under extreme difficulty, is organise and get together. In contemplating this Bill, I thought back to various picket lines I have been on, particularly with the Independent Workers’ Union, the IWGB, with cycle couriers, who are the kinds of people who have worked for the same company, sometimes for decades, under extremely insecure conditions. Back in 2015, I was on a picket line with some who had not seen their pay rise in 15 years. I am not talking here about rises in real levels; I am talking about pounds and pence—people paid the same money over 15 years, unable to raise it. That is the situation we have now.

I will focus particularly on the construction industry because, both in your Lordships’ House and in society in general, there is very little awareness of the extreme precarity and forced fake self-employment circumstances in which 60% of manual construction workers find themselves. Now, my father was a builder; I know something about what life is like in the building trade. It is hard and still terribly dangerous, and I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, about our utter failure to regulate so many aspects of employment, not just wages and conditions. The comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans highlighted the way in which we have put so much pressure on workers to negotiate with their employers in conditions of extremely unequal power, knowledge and resources, and so are forced into unfavourable situations.

Finally, I will pick up on the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, who, as other Peers have said, stressed how exploitative, unscrupulous companies are then advantaged against those that might want to be or are doing the right thing. We are talking here about some of the largest multinational companies in this land, which behave differently in other nations but exploit the workers of the UK.