Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I would like to add that I am very keen to get out of the pram with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—I think it is a very good idea. I want to make a few remarks about food. The regulations that we have about food, most of which have happened in Europe, are about protection. In fact, we do not get enough of it. So I am completely dismayed that everything in this Bill says that there can be no further strengthening of regulations.

At the moment, the food companies are allowed to kill us slowly. They cannot kill us quickly. In other words, if you walk into a high-street fast-food restaurant, you are not going to drop dead. But, if you lived on food from that high-street fast-food restaurant, you would probably drop dead, or at least have diabetes, or be in ill health by the time you were 50 or 60 and living a bad life because of bad food. So we need more regulation.

I agree with so much of what has been said tonight, but in my few minutes, I want to give your Lordships an idea of how much relates to food, farming and public health that we are possibly going to throw out of the window. This is about antibiotic use on farms; it is about harmonised testing; it is about the banning of the use of hormone growth promoters; it is about the import of meat from animals which have been treated with hormone growth promoters. People are now beginning to understand what this does to the human body—it ain’t pretty.

All food safety laws, including the maximum containment for BSE monitoring; setting maximum residue levels for pesticides; lists of countries allowed to import meat; health marks on meat; labelling of beef; country of origin labelling on food—remember the horse meat scandal—preventing river pollution from agricultural activity; training staff to perform these checks at borders; increasing border controls and emergency measures for the entry of certain goods; as well as the huge one about the transportation of animals, which has been something we have worked on with the EU and we have done well here. Any suggestion that we would lower our animal welfare standards in the pursuit of capitalism and a quick buck is, quite frankly, disgusting. Rules on the production and labelling of organic produce are also possibly going to be sunsetted. And, by the way, who came up with the idea that sunset was a verb?

I will quote the Food Standards Agency, because it has an extremely brilliant new chair, Susan Jebb. She said:

“In the FSA, we are clear that we cannot simply sunset”—


she used it—

“the laws on food safety and authenticity without a decline in UK food standards and a significant risk to public health”.

The task ahead of us to go through these rules is very challenging and it inevitably means that we will have to deprioritise other important work. Is this what we want? We do not have a great food system at the moment; I have banged on about it long enough. We now stand looking at an even worse one and making good people, such as Susan Jebb, go through basic laws. Please, let us find a way, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, to get out of the pram and stand up to this outrageous business.

Business: Greenwashing

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

There are a lot of questions in what the noble Baroness said, and there are a number of different aspects to this problem. The Advertising Standards Authority and the CMA are taking action, our net-zero strategy contained several commitments around eco-labelling, and we are working with the Financial Conduct Authority to introduce a sustainable investment label. Those are all proceeding at the moment.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is well known that food, agriculture and deforestation account for a very large amount of greenhouse gases and biodiversity loss, yet it is impossible for a consumer to tell when buying a product exactly what its biodiversity impact or carbon content is. All big food companies rail against putting this on labels, on the grounds that it would take up too much space. That is fair enough; they can put it online, where nerds such as me can look it up to see whether it is okay. What are the Government doing to make labelling correct in terms of those two factors? Have they at least started a consultation and is there any news on when they might implement it?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness referred to looking at information online. I am sure she will be pleased to know that the CMA has launched a website to help consumers to identify and understand genuine environmental claims about the products and services that they are purchasing. It is designed to encourage them to ask themselves simple questions about whether they can believe the claims that manufacturers are making or not.

Energy Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th December 2022 Grand Committee

Finally, it is worth stressing what a core centre of a community these schemes can be. I have seen that time and again when visiting so many of them, whether the Ashton Hayes zero-carbon village in Cheshire, the micro-hydro community schemes I visited in Stroud and mid-Wales, or indeed Lawrence Weston in Bristol, which, even under the current difficulties, is going to put up its own large wind turbine. Such schemes are a real way for a community to come together and for money to be circulated within a local community. I believe that levelling up is still on the Government’s agenda—surely the delivery of local community energy schemes would be a key measure for levelling up.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to support Amendments 237 and 238, along with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, set out so many of the reasons why we should support this. As she said, the rollout of community energy has ground to a near halt in recent years for reasons related to the withdrawal of the feed-in tariffs and the surely well-intentioned but hopelessly ineffective smart export guarantee, which has given community energy generators either prices which are inadequate or, where they are adequate, no confidence that they will remain so. This has been distressing for volunteers and community energy generators who have put down roots in the community and are supplying valuable services for their community, including energy efficiency—a significant omission from the Bill, which we will hear more about—and skills.

The Government effectively banned onshore wind in 2015 and are now, after seven lost years, belatedly unbanning it in rather curious circumstances. Some communities are up in arms about solar farms, and the Government have recently wobbled somewhat awkwardly between permitting and restricting them, only to now be talking about the need for a balance between farmland and solar PV. This is odd, given that meeting the Government’s own energy security strategy, published in April this year, of reaching 20 gigawatts of installed solar by 2030 would occupy only 0.5% of UK land, which is half of that occupied by golf courses. As noble Lords know, I am very passionate about food production, but I know that we can also produce a level of energy. As I said, I am not so sure that there really is a great tension when the land needs of solar are so limited.

These bannings and unbannings and restrictions and relaxations are really just the policy manifestations of community concerns about energy installations being done to them, rather than with them. The point about the vast majority of large-scale generation in people’s areas is that there is actually very little community benefit. If the Government were willing not just to see the benefits of community energy—as I am sure the Minister does—but to put in place the policy measures to support it, it would make things so much easier for all of us.

I sit on the Environment and Climate Change Committee, which has been taking evidence about boiler upgrade schemes and the like lately. One of the things about community energy is that one or two people within a community are capable of finding their way through the quite complicated government documents to obtain the subsidies, and they in turn can empower a load of residents who otherwise might not be so minded to install insulation and take up new means of energy. There are multiple benefits to this, and I find it hard to see any drawbacks. I am sure the Minister agrees.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I also support Amendments 237 and 238, to which I have added my name, and Amendments 242F and 242G in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, which, with some variations, aim to achieve the same outcome. Previous speakers talked about the role of community energy generation, which is an important one in future energy supply. It was a small but growing effort in this country and a contribution to the development of renewable energy on a local scale.

However, when the feed-in tariff disappeared for new applications that really put the nail through the head of that growth, and nothing that the Government have done in the last few years to try to reignite it seems to have worked. People have talked about Licence Lite and the smart export guarantee, but neither of these has really produced an uptick in that trend of community energy generation. We need to find a way to get around that. This depends quite substantially on reducing the barriers of upfront capital and the regulatory effort of getting a connection to the system, on making sure that there is a key partnership between the big boys and the small community energy generators, and on some sort of guarantee of purchase price and length of contract. If we do not have those, we will not get any security into the community energy generation sector through investment.

These amendments put forward simple solutions. I shall not go into any detail, because the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has gone through them, suffice it to say that the whole issue is about how local energy generators can sell the power they generate locally through a community scheme to local communities. That is the magic bit in this area of community generation. Local schemes are developed and owned by local people, and they have local benefits in the form of cheaper and cleaner energy. They also provide other benefits for local communities.

When I was thinking about a way of describing this, it came to mind that the Labour Party used to talk about Arthur Scargill in a particular way: “He may be a bastard but at least he’s our bastard”. There is a difference between “damn windmills” and “our damn windmills”, so there is a real attraction in local support. I thought that the Government were keen on improving the popularity of locally determined schemes—I am sure that they are—which gives me huge confidence that the Minister will take these four amendments and do the job that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, suggested some of the rest of us do: draw out the best cherries from among them.

However, I do not intend to do that. I would rather like the Minister to do it and come forward on Report with a government amendment that meets the key needs of obligating the big boys to buy from the small-scale generators; setting a predictable, fair price; and setting a minimum contract period.

COP 27: Outcome

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

As I said in response to the previous question, we have one of the fastest rollouts of renewables in the developed world. We have the second largest share of offshore wind after China, but there is undoubtedly still a need for gas as a transition fuel. It makes sense therefore to use that transition fuel from our own North Sea resources, rather than importing it, in a very carbon-heavy manner, in LNG.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, when we were in Egypt, the UK Government signed up to the global methane pledge, which commits to a cut in global methane emissions by 30% by 2030, though we have not yet set any domestic targets. Bearing in mind that 80% of methane stems from agriculture and waste, will the Government consider bringing forward the UK’s ban on landfilling biodegradable waste, better biogas capture from landfill and better slurry management?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness raises an important point. I am happy to tell her that, through our green gas levy and support scheme, we are continuing to support the rollout of biomethane—an understated industry in the UK but one doing extremely well—and we need to align our food waste policies to produce even more biomethane.

Energy Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Haworth. I think everyone will agree this is a very substantial Bill indeed. Like most noble Lords, I welcome it; anything that will make the energy sector make provisions towards net zero and a stable future has to be welcomed. There are areas, as I say, where we can agree, but there are some conspicuous absences and some need for massive improvement.

There have been, as many noble Lords have pointed out, a lot of mentions of hydrogen. While everyone agrees that it will have a key role to play in decarbonising certain hard-to-abate sectors, the thought of having hydrogen pumped into people’s homes seems at best really inefficient and at worse plainly dangerous. Would noble Lords want hydrogen pumped into their homes? This Bill will allow for a hydrogen village trial to be built, and the fact sheet states that:

“Low carbon hydrogen could be a key option for decarbonising heat in buildings”.


However, 18 independent studies—and that includes the IPCC’s and IEA’s—have ruled out hydrogen as playing a major role in the heating of buildings. It is expensive, inefficient and it is high carbon. Research by the Hydrogen Science Coalition shows that delivering one unit of heat with green hydrogen requires six times more renewable electricity, which will also be hard to practically deliver, as we have heard from many noble Lords this afternoon, and is significantly less energy efficient compared to heat pumps. There is also a risk that, due to insufficient green hydrogen, blue hydrogen—that comes from natural gas with carbon capture and storage, emits methane and will lead to increased gas sales—could be used instead. This would maintain the use of the fossil fuel network into the future.

Just before I go on, I would like to make a point, as a journalist, about the use of green hydrogen, blue hydrogen and “natural” gas—there is no such thing. Natural gas might be natural, but we are not talking here about a safe, organic product. The fossil fuel industry has done a brilliant job with all these labels. We all, quite niftily, say “natural gas” as if, in some way, that is a perfectly okay thing to have around us.

As others have said, most notably the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, carbon capture is not working at scale, may never work at scale and we cannot plan an energy system on the basis that it will come to our rescue like a knight in shining armour. It sounds slightly as if the Government’s policy on hydrogen is actually the oil and gas sector’s future wish list for how it will stay relevant in our decarbonising world. The main reason, however, that noble Lords should be against this is the sheer cost. It is a cost that this Bill will put on consumers’ bills via a levy. This is so not the time to add any additional costs to any household bills.

On the subject of unproven carbon capture and vast subsidies, I want to turn to electricity generation from biomass, which I have talked about before, which weirdly gets no mention in the Bill. I welcome that as it is a very controversial means of extracting energy. I understand that the Government are shortly going to publish their biomass strategy which will set out beyond 2027, when the current contracts lapse, and will say what kind of investment is going to go into the future. BECCS, which stands for “bio-energy carbon capture and storage” is entirely dependent on a technology that does not yet work at scale. Even if it did work perfectly, and all the trees that were planted to make the bioenergy carbon neutral did grow tall and were not encumbered by rising temperatures, like today, or disease, it would, according to briefings that we all had last week, take 140 years to become carbon neutral. We need to take into account the life cycle of emissions from biomass when we consider deploying it, as we do not have 140 years to play with. We barely have 30 years. There are many measures which seem to me to kick the can down the road, which we have been doing for ever anyway, and we must stop.

I shall focus on a couple of areas that I think are missing. The most glaring omission is taxing demand. There is a technology we have in abundance and know how to work: insulation. The Minister admitted last week during a debate on the energy company obligation that if the Government had spent the money that they will spend this winter to help households cope with the extra cost of gas, it might have been much more efficient in the long run. That makes the omission of something along the lines of a national retrofit strategy all the more puzzling, and it begs the question of whether the Government are able to learn from their mistakes. We are having this debate on what has already turned out to be the hottest day we have ever experienced, so it would be amiss not to remind noble Lords that, beyond this Bill, on the adaptation and mitigation measures we need to carry out to address climate change, if we do not pay for them now it will be far more expensive later. Noble Lords do not need to take my word for it; they can take the word of the ONS, the OBR or the CPC—they have all said it. If we do not act now, we will be in the position we are in with energy in the future, only it would be our entire economy.

On the specifics of the Bill, can the Minister enlighten me about why Clause 163, which will allow energy companies to buy out their ECO payments, is part of the Bill? We know that the ECO scheme has been a success. Energy UK told us that it has saved households £17.5 billion on their energy bills since 2013 and that, due to the high price of gas this autumn, an EPC C grade home will save £900 compared to an EPC D grade home. Can the Minister provide an assurance that this buy-out will not be set at a level that would have been lower than the money that the companies would have had to spend on upgrades? The Secretary of State can set the buy-out price, and I understand that we do not want to put a figure on it in the Bill, as it would become out of date, but is there something more that we could do to index-link it so that it cannot fall below the level it would otherwise be?

Finally, I reiterate the points made by my noble friends Lady Hayman and Lord Ravensdale on the need for local energy. I think that at the next stage of the Bill I will back amendments that allow local communities to generate their own electricity as people know this goes way beyond energy security, builds community cohesion and is good for all of us.

India: Cereals Export Ban

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

The right reverend Prelate makes good points. The cause of the Indian action is the current heatwave in India curtailing wheat production, which is expected to fall for the first time in some years. However, we have had dialogue with them and we are putting pressure on them, because it does no one any good if people shut down their borders in relation to food supply. As for the dire situation in Ukraine, if things return to normal—which we must all pray they do—food exports from there will of course then start again.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I completely agree with the Minister that the supplies from India do not make that much of an impact, but the right reverend Prelate’s question about Ukraine is incredibly important. It is not just the amount of grain stuck in silos around Mariupol and Odessa, but the new harvest which will be coming through on land that Ukrainian farmers can still get to. The World Health Organization and the UN World Food Programme say that the world’s coffers are already empty in terms of feeding struggling countries and that large-scale famines, the likes of which we have never seen, are expected. Is there any way the Government can start talking about an equivalent of humanitarian corridors to try to get out of Ukraine this food, which will otherwise end up being completely wasted?

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, we are indeed working with our G7 partners to bolster the global market and to secure the export of wheat and other grains from Ukraine through grain corridors. I am proud that over 50 WTO members have now supported us in committing to keeping food markets open, predictable and transparent.

Energy Security Strategy

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 7th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord is right: we will have an ongoing requirement for oil and gas in the transition period. We will seek to obtain as much of that as possible from our own domestic sources and will roll out an additional licensing round for North Sea oil and gas projects this autumn—they will of course all be done in co-operation with our climate compatibility tests—because it is much better to get those resources locally than source from unstable parts of the world. I cannot comment on discussions that have taken place with various regimes in the Middle East.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, the IPCC report this week was explicit that emissions need to peak by 2025: that is only three birthdays away if we are to have any hope of holding to below 1.5 degrees, yet this press release says that there are new licensing rounds for oil and gas this year. Does the Minister not agree that drilling for oil will not lower the bills and that the surest and cheapest way to do this is to ramp up all forms of renewables and insulate homes?

Behaviour Change for Net Zero

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Boycott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government why they disbanded the Behaviour Change for Net Zero working group; and what they have replaced it with.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

The group was created to discuss potential policies and proposals to be included in the Net Zero Strategy. Given that the strategy was published last year, we are now focused on delivering its commitments and have well-established net-zero structures across government to do so.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply, but in evidence given to the Environment and Climate Change Committee, on which I serve, Simon Baugh, the director of government communication, said that the Government considered that their Together for our Planet campaign launched in 2020 was a “success” and were now

“developing and testing a strategy for climate change communications”.

I had barely heard of the Together for our Planet campaign, even though I work in this area, and I guess that many noble Lords have not heard of it either. On what basis do the Government consider it a success? What are the new strategies and when will they be launched? Will it be this year?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes an important point. I think that the campaign was a success, but it is important that we take the public with us on this journey. We think that the better approach is to support people in making the green choices that we all want to see them make. We have a range of support measures across government to help them to do this.

COP 26

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Clearly, we are working with other like-minded countries to try to deliver the maximum resources possible for developing countries to help them to adapt to the effects. I am very proud of our contribution of £11.6 billion of international climate finance over this five-year period.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, methane, which the Minister mentioned, is 80 times as potent as CO₂ in the near term and cutting it fast is crucial. Since the Industrial Revolution it has been responsible for 40% of heating, and a staggering 47% of it comes from agriculture. The good news—if there is good news—is that it dissipates quickly, in 12 years, so if we can have rapid reduction of methane, we can make a really big difference to the CO₂ in the atmosphere. There are two stumbling blocks. First, what are the Government doing, and is it enough? Secondly, public information is very low about the effect of methane. For instance, one-third of farmers say they do not understand it or know how to deal with it, so I ask the Government what they are doing about that.

Global Warming

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

No, I was not present, but we have regular meetings with all the advisers who inform government policy on this matter. I know the noble Baroness has a strong view about “leaving fossil fuels in the ground”, but we require gas as a transition fuel. In the context of the recent crisis in Ukraine, surely even the noble Baroness can see the logic of obtaining that transitional fuel from UK sources.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, in 2020 BEIS set up a committee to look at and collaborate on policy development to ensure that individual policies were joined up across government—surely a good move. That committee was disbanded in May 2021. May I ask the Minister two questions? What has replaced that committee as a cross-government body to oversee climate considerations in all departments? If that committee is the one chaired by the Prime Minister, when did it last meet and are we allowed to know what it discussed?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

There is a Cabinet committee on climate change chaired by the Prime Minister dealing with cross-government issues. The noble Baroness will be aware individual Cabinet committee meetings are confidential, but she can be assured that there is regular collaborative cross-government working between departments on all these issues.