Hong Kong: Democracy Movement
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I note the suggestion of the noble Lord, but from what we have seen of the National People’s Congress about future legislative control within Hong Kong, and indeed the actions that have been taken recently, I wonder how much leverage we would gain from such an interaction. However, I have noted carefully what the noble Lord has said and I will certainly consider it with colleagues in the FCDO.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I declare my position as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong. The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, just referred to business leaders. My question notes the behaviour of a number of financial institutions that are either based in the UK or with very close links here that are essentially backing unconditionally the illegal behaviour of the Chinese Government, notably HSBC. What steps are the Government taking to consider the impact on our own financial stake in Hong Kong and the damage to their reputation?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, let me assure the noble Baroness that we are in close contact with a wide range of businesses in Hong Kong, but as I have said before, it is for businesses to make their own judgment calls. However, we are concerned that a number of recent decisions taken by the authorities in Hong Kong are further evidence of their determined campaign to stifle opposition and silence dissent. We will certainly continue to pursue an approach in Hong Kong that is rooted in our values and defends our rights, and we will continue to advise on and discuss with business the current serious situation in Hong Kong that we have been seeing in recent days.
Anti-slavery Projects: Commonwealth
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I go to the typically excellent House of Lords Library briefing for the estimate that 40% of the total number of victims of modern slavery live in the Commonwealth. Not being “political”, it did not make the obvious comparison: only 33% of the world’s population live in the Commonwealth. We have an outsized, disgraceful modern slavery problem in an institution for which we as a nation have a particular responsibility.
Where did the Commonwealth come from? It grew essentially out of the Empire, whose disastrous, genocidal, ecocidal impacts have been buried, hidden and all too often forgotten about. The thesis I put to the Minister is that colonialism and modern slavery are inextricably linked, and tackling the current scourge requires exposing the dark history to the light. Last year, I asked the Minister whether the Government would consider an inquiry into particularly the legacies of African enslavement. I got a one-sentence “no” answer. Will the Minister now reconsider?
Beijing Winter Olympic Games 2022
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, on my noble friend’s second point, that is, of course, not a matter for the British Government, but I know what he is saying. On his first point about G7 action, he will have seen increasing co-ordination between G7 members around a values-based system for international human rights and we will continue to co-ordinate with our G7 partners during our presidency.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I declare my position as the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong. Given the grave concerns about human rights abuses in China and its position as a source of much sporting equipment and specialist clothing, can the Minister tell me what support the Government are giving to UK sporting bodies to avoid products linked to slave labour and abusive labour practices, such as those widely reported in Xinjiang?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I understand that it is the noble Baroness’s birthday, so I will add my best wishes to her. Picking up on the seriousness and appropriateness of her question, we made announcements on 12 January specifically for companies in the public and private sectors to look at their supply chains. We will announce further details in this respect and we will talk through the usual channels on any further announcements that need to be made.
Alexei Navalny
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
While I note what the noble Lord has said, the steps we have taken within the context of the OPCW and with the G7 partners does, I believe, demonstrate to the Russians a strong international response. It is important we continue to strengthen our alliances in this respect so Russia does take notice and, more importantly, does so with regard to courageous individuals such as Alexei Navalny, who is being held without detention. Just to update your Lordships’ House: as I was coming in, I was informed that in his hearing, his appeal was not upheld, so he remains in detention. I will, of course, update the House as we get more details. We hope Russia will take note of these international actions, and I believe in certain quarters it is doing just that.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for updating the House with that news, disappointing though it is. In preparation for this Question, I checked the 2019 Conservative election manifesto, which speaks of the UK being a champion of the rule of law, human rights and anti-corruption efforts. Does the Minister agree that we need to work consistently to have clear, consistent rules dealing with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Thailand and, indeed, the UK Overseas Territories, with Magnitsky-style sanctions and other actions, setting up plans for reaction, if and when standards are breached? I should probably declare my position on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, the noble Baroness poses a wide-ranging question about different countries and jurisdictions—she also mentioned the British Overseas Territories. Without generalising, it is important that we look at the specifics of each case, but I understand what she puts forward. We need to have measures to hand, and the human rights sanctions regime is one with which we can act specifically and, importantly, with key partners and allies to ensure individuals or groups who abuse human rights are held to account for their actions. I hope that, in time, as we have discussed today, the broadening of any scope of those sanctions, on the issue of illicit finance, in particular, will also be to the satisfaction of Members of your Lordships’ House.
Hazardous Substances and Packaging (Legislative Functions and Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his very clear explanation. I will focus primarily on the first of these two instruments, although I express concern that, as he has just told us, there is not full devolved consent to the second one. I hope that can be resolved very quickly.
I begin with the department’s response to the submission from ClientEarth to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, specifically on the point about the transferring of the competent national authority position in England. The departmental response says that the Environment Agency will continue to act as the competent authority.
I note that in October this year, just a couple of months ago, the chair of the Environment Agency called for greater funding from the Government to help the enforcement body to better prevent pollution—the issue that this SI addresses. In response to an article published in the Times on 24 October which reported that there had been a sharp rise in serious breaches of pollution rules designed to protect people and wildlife, the chair of the Environment Agency said in a Defra blog:
“We constantly innovate to do more with less. But ultimately we will get the environment we pay for. A core part of that is funding the Environment Agency properly. The government has an opportunity to do that in this year’s spending review. We hope it will.”
I have checked the spending review documents and, so far as I can see, there is none of the extra funding that has been asked for—you might say begged for—but I would be delighted if the Minister could tell me I had missed something. It would have to be a very big offering in the spending review, given that in March a report on Greenpeace’s Unearthed blog revealed that a surge in pollution incidents driven by climate change was “overwhelming” the staff. That came on top of data showing that teams tasked with responding to pollution incidents have seen their numbers decline by 15% since 2015.
All the SIs that we are debating now seem to create extra responsibilities and extra work, so the question is where the resources are going to come from, given that we have a huge regulatory gap already. I note the invaluable report in 2019 by the Institute for Environmental Management and Assessment, in coalition with 19 other organisations. It revealed that funding for 10 environmental and social regulators fell by 50% on average between 2009 and 2017 in real terms, with the Environment Agency budget down by 62%. The total number of full-time staff working at these regulators was down by 30% over the period, with spending by local authorities and fire authorities down by 35%. Before these regulations and before the end of the transition period, we had, however limited it may have been, oversight through the EU and, as ClientEarth has successfully used, the legal mechanisms through that.
The departmental response said that once the office for environmental protection is established and functioning, it will take over these roles. That is a debate for another day, but it highlights the importance of the independence and funding of that body, as a crucial body in maintaining our environmental health in the UK. In the meantime, as ClientEarth put it, we will have the Government regulating themselves. We have a period of uncertainty—a hiatus, rather like we have in your Lordships’ House’s Forthcoming Business at the moment.
Since we have just had a report from the Environmental Audit Committee, I want to turn to the broader issue of electronic waste in general. In this very Committee last week I referred to a need for a right to repair, as the committee in the other place has done. The report notes that the UK creates the second highest level of electronic waste in the world after Norway—we are almost world-leading, but not, I hope, in a way that the Government would intend. A lot of the electronic waste that these regulations refer to currently goes to landfill or incineration, and some 40% of it is dumped overseas. The MPs on the committee noted that the Environment Agency was again not doing nearly enough to monitor where that waste was going and how often it was going abroad illegally.
The committee also noted the fact that we have online retailers making massive profits but not taking responsibility for the products they get those profits from. I have so many things to mention that I am going to run out of time.
Finally, if we are to be practical, let us bring this down to earth. Here in Sheffield, where I am talking to noble Lords from, there are no bins in local areas for electronic waste. There are no bins that you can walk to and put electronic waste in. There is no range of bins in supermarkets and hardware stores, as there is in many parts of the continent, where electronic waste, such as light bulbs, can be deposited. Here, we are dealing with the detail, but I ask the Minister to make sure that the Government consider the huge and wide-ranging problem—the tsunami, as the Commons committee described it—of electronic waste, which we must deal with and get a grip on very soon.
Hong Kong: Legislative Council
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I declare my position as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong. The noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, referred to people buying Chinese products. That is a large part of our retail sector but of course our financial sector, the City of London, is tightly enmeshed with banks that have expressed support for the Chinese government position and are heavily involved in the Hong Kong economy. What are the Government’s plans to tackle that issue?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, as I have already said, trade with China is important, but we must do so in a manner which reflects the importance that the Government attach to human rights. The noble Baroness raises the issue of financial services. It is for companies to make key decisions, but we remain very much committed that where there is a usurping of human rights we will raise those issues, whether that is happening in Hong Kong or mainland China.
Environment and Wildlife (Miscellaneous Amendments etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Greaves and Lord Loomba, who have set out the technical aspects of the SI that we are debating today. They have probably covered that ground well enough.
This is a real opportunity to consider global biodiversity issues, perhaps the first that your Lordships’ House has had since the final report on the Aichi biodiversity targets from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. This brings to an end the UN decade on biodiversity—although perhaps it should be named the UN decade of biodiversity loss and collapse, because, of the 20 objectives set out for improving and saving biodiversity in 2010, none of the targets were met and only six were partially met.
Here, we are talking particularly about CITES and wildlife trade, and the implementation and application of those rules. In his introduction, the Minister referred to 93 new species being added to CITES, including a species of viper. I want to take this opportunity to draw the Minister’s attention—if it has not already been drawn to this—to an excellent article in Nature Communications dated September 2020. It talks about the underregulated global trade in reptiles, which is of particular relevance given his introductory remarks. The figures in this article really are quite shocking: 35% of reptile species are traded online, three-quarters of the trade is not covered by international regulation, and 90% of the species and half the traded individuals are captured from the wild. This journal article covers the fact that CITES is currently focused on the most economically valuable species that are traded in large volumes.
I note, of course, that all of these issues have come under a renewed focus in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are not yet sure of the path of the virus between bats and humans, but pangolins have certainly been suggested, and pangolins were added to CITES only in 2016. What this article suggests, and what I have seen in subsequent debate, is that CITES should consider turning around the burden of proof and method of regulation. It suggests that CITES should recognise certain species for which trade is allowed and then have a presumption that other species are not allowed to be traded unless they are known. I draw attention to the facts in this article: the researchers found that within about a year of a new species being discovered, there is first evidence of it being traded.
I understand that the Minister might not be able to reply immediately, but I ask him to ask his department to look at this article and to consider the incredibly parlous state of our global wildlife, and what the UK might do as a partner in CITES to make it more effective and really tackle the global biodiversity crisis.
Pesticides (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I must begin by thanking the Minister for his generous response to my contribution in the previous debate. I look forward to future exchanges on the subject.
On the subject of this debate, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, who is a great champion of nature, and indeed the two previous noble Lords, who said many things with which I can agree. The noble Lords, Lord Randall and Lord Greaves, in particular reflected on the widespread disappointment that the amendments to the Agriculture Bill that would have protected people who live in close proximity to agricultural land ultimately did not make it through the system. As both noble Lords said, we can but try again in the Environment Bill.
I am going to pick up something that the Minister said in his introduction when he referred to continued high levels of protection. The practical reality, whether we are talking about pesticides or persistent organic pollutants, is that we have a poisoned country, a poisoned landscape and, indeed, a poisoned planet. To start any debate on this topic, it is important to acknowledge that we have utterly failed in the past and that, while today we are bringing forward regulations that are much better than those in the United States and other regimes, even the EU regulations that we are transferring across are not nearly strong enough.
I have a couple of specific detailed questions. Like others, I rely rather heavily on the work of ClientEarth. Regulation 3(8) removes the wording that would permit the appropriate authority to make regulations in respect of the official controls, first, relating to production, packaging, labelling, storage, transport, marketing, formulation, parallel trade and the use of plant protection products, and, secondly and particularly, regarding the collection of information on the reporting of suspected poisonings. This is a direct question for the Minister, either for now or in future: that apparent loss of collection reporting on suspected poisonings is obviously a deeply worrying one, and it would be interesting to hear why that has happened and how it might be fixed. I also refer to wording relating to health and the hazards and risk of pesticides in Article 24 of new EU regulation 625/2017 regarding protection from pesticides and the risk of poisoning.
I also want to refer to chronic poisoning. Often, we hope or expect that, where there is an acute case, there will be reporting; it is the kind of thing that we might expect our media to pick up on. But with chronic poisoning developing over a number of years, such as in operators, agricultural workers or people living close to pesticide application areas—the amendment to the Agriculture Bill tried to address this issue—we have seen reports going back to 1987 of inadequate monitoring in the UK, yet we have not seen any change in policy or any real move to deal with that chronic situation.
Finally, I want to move on to some broader points that build on what the noble Lord, Lord Randall, said. The sale of pesticides in the UK each year is worth £627 million and, around the world, it is nearly $60 billion. Obviously, this is a big, powerful vested interest. As the noble Lord said, that vested interest wants to protect its sales, but I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said earlier: we want and need to move toward a world that uses no pesticides.
My response to the noble Lord’s concerns about neonicotinoids and the impact of their withdrawal on growing rapeseed in the UK is that we must grow a diverse range of crops that are suited to our conditions. I have stood in a field in Lincolnshire with a star rapeseed grower and discussed the difficulties of growing rapeseed in the UK. It has always been clear that rapeseed is not particularly suited to UK conditions, so we need to move to a different approach. It is one that the Government have focused on, at least in terms of talking about it, including to some degree in the Agriculture Bill—agroecology. If we are going to move in the direction of working with nature to use the power, force and richness of healthy soils and the richness of the interactions of integrated pest management, that is the way we need to go. Indeed, I note that both the EU directives that we are transferring across here focus on the need to move to pest management systems that do not rely on pesticides. What are the Government doing to take further steps in that direction?
We have been through so many cycles, from DDT onwards, of a pesticide being discovered and promoted as the new wonder chemical—a perfectly safe, perfectly wonderful solution to all our problems. Usually, a couple of decades later, we ban it because it has been a disaster. That is a cycle that we desperately need to stop.
Guantanamo Bay Detainees
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Sugg (Con) [V]
My Lords, the UK Government’s long-standing position is that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay should close. We will continue to engage with the US Government on this issue, as we do on a range of national security issues in the context of our joint determination to tackle international terrorism and combat violent extremism.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I declare my position as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong. I begin by commending the Government, who have spoken out both unilaterally and through multilateral channels on a number of occasions about the imposition of the national security law by China on Hong Kong. However, does the Minister agree that human rights are universal and that Britain should be standing up for them around the world, particularly when people are threatened, as they clearly are in Hong Kong? If Britain is standing up in the case of Hong Kong, why is it not standing up in the case of these men, who were clearly in imminent danger of their lives and subject to long-term abuse?
Baroness Sugg (Con) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her words on Hong Kong and I welcome her commendation of our activity there. The UK takes great pride in standing up for universal human rights and freedoms. We will continue to do so with all our partners. We will continue to monitor this event and all cases closely and will continue to regularly raise human rights concerns with the Government of the UAE at senior levels, both in public and in private.
Burning of Peat Moorlands
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
We are currently engaging with stakeholders on the content of the England peat strategy and we expect it to be published later this year, but, as I said earlier, the Government are committed to phasing out rotational burning. We are considering all the evidence to ensure that any legislation actually works. It is undoubtedly a complex issue and it is important that we take the right steps to restore and protect this valuable habitat.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I refer the Minister to page 95 of the report, where the independent committee says:
“Burning … is highly damaging to the peat, and to the range of environmental benefits that well-functioning peat can deliver”.
It goes on to say:
“A voluntary cessation of this activity … has not produced the desired outcome so the practice should be banned across the UK with immediate effect.”
Does the Minister fully accept and endorse those words? If so, why in his initial Answer did he use the words “phase out” and refer to “real progress” from voluntary efforts, which contradicts what the report says?