Battery and Hydrogen-powered Aircraft

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

The DfT has published a jet zero strategy setting out the Government’s approach to delivering net-zero UK aviation by 2050. The strategy anticipates that a range of measures, including sustainable aviation fuels, zero-emission flights, carbon market measures and greater efficiencies in aircraft, airports and airspace will be require in tandem to achieve net zero by 2050.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister believe that the principle of the polluter pays should apply to aviation, as it does across much of government policy, so that the cost of the emissions trading scheme, as well as the guaranteed prices for producers of sustainable fuels and the cost of an SAF mandate, should be paid by the airlines and, in turn, by the consumers who take the flights? This will not make flights exorbitantly expensive; it will ensure that the people who benefit from such transport bear the costs of it.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that question. In fairness to the airlines, a number of industry projects within the UK seek to bring hydrogen-propelled aircraft, for example, into commercial service. Airbus has its ZEROe project, through which it intends to bring into commercial service the world’s first zero-emission commercial aircraft by 2035. Launched in 2022, its ZEROe demonstrator project will explore how hydrogen propulsion technology can be configured, and there are many other projects within the industry.

Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

As I mentioned in the previous answer, it will be published later this year. The low-carbon fuel strategy is incredibly important. We have been working very closely with the freight and logistics sectors to understand their needs in terms of decarbonisation. For example, we have invested £200 million in the zero-emission road freight demonstration programme. An enormous amount of work is going on in this area. The low-carbon fuel strategy is but one of those things.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I refer back to the original Question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. We import 90% of the fuel we use for transport. It is coming from land that could be used to grow food. Last year we imported crops from Ukraine that were then used in biofuels in this country. It is a question of due diligence. Can the Minister reassure the House that we are genuinely using stuff that would otherwise be wasted?

Jet Zero Strategy

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

As I alluded to in my earlier answer, the Government believe that limits on air travel are not appropriate at this time and indeed would be counterproductive for one of the most significant sectors in our country that is also important for the wider economy. I am aware of various proposals for frequent-flyer levies, and there are many disadvantages to those sorts of interventions. The Government are not considering that at this time.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the fact that the Minister is talking about sustainable aviation fuels, but they are going to have to come from somewhere. I understand from the jet zero strategy that the Government are aiming for 5 million tonnes by 2050. Is that enough to cover the number of flights we need? Secondly, have the Government assessed the impact that growing that amount of biofuel—I assume most of the sustainable fuel will be biofuel—will have on food prices? It seems we possibly have a policy here which risks indirectly subsidising flights with higher food prices, because at the end of the day we have a limited amount of land.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

Our sustainable aviation fuel policy is very clear that we will not be looking for any feedstocks to come from economically viable land that would otherwise be used for food. The sorts of feedstocks we will be using for sustainable aviation fuels will be black-bag waste—biomass—and we will also look at alcohols. There may be another way that we can do power to fuel by harnessing hydrogen and carbon dioxide from the air. There are many production pathways that sustainable aviation fuels can follow. None of them involves the use of biological outputs from farmland.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and I am very inspired by the image of his whizzing around London on his scooter. I will certainly join in.

I congratulate the Government on having a levelling-up Bill but, as others have said, this feels a little hollow at the moment. I would like to touch on the environment and women, but, first, I will touch on food. The term “food insecurity” gets bandied around at the moment—I think the confusion is whether we will get wheat from Ukraine or whether it is about people in an individual household. In fact, what food insecurity means when you are a human being in this country is not being able to afford breakfast for your kids, having to skip dinner, or having to go to the supermarket and buy a pizza that is full of not good calories for £1 because that is part of your daily budget. It means being hungry.

As we have all seen from the reports from the Food Foundation this week, food insecurity rates are now double the pre-pandemic levels. Particularly shocking is the level among those on universal credit: 47.7% of households on universal credit have experienced some kind of hunger, have needed to miss a meal or have had to choose to buy cheap and unhealthy food. That £20 that we took off universal credit might not mean a great deal to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—it is like a tip at a London restaurant—but for someone on a budget it means absolutely everything.

I have been working in food policy—what I really mean is food poverty; I am now the chair of Feeding Britain, among other things—for almost 15 years now. Quite frankly, from what I know, it has never been so bad. In 2008, when I first started working for the now Prime Minster as chair of the London Food Board, I asked him to come to a food bank with me. I asked several times; he never came. I think there is a sense that if you keep these things out of mind, you can sort of keep them out of your policy. What the levelling-up strategy comes up with is all fine and dandy, but it does not actually address the here and now, which is a massive discrepancy.

If people were desperate back in 2008, today is a whole new ballgame. Of the many facts that I have learned in the past few weeks, the fact that people will now not take vegetables from food banks because they cannot afford to cook them is probably the saddest thing. As my noble friend Lord Kakkar said in his excellent speech about health disparities, we now have an enormous gap not just in relation to the age that you live to but in relation to the years in which you live a healthy life. That unhealthy life is not just a nightmare for the person; it is actually a nightmare for us. It is short-sighted and just plain stupid. It costs the NHS, it costs the taxpayer, and it costs the lot of us to have a generation of people—small fat kids, quite frankly, at the moment—who will be a burden on society and a misery to themselves. We can change this.

Poor diet, as I have said, is now associated with more illnesses than any other factor. If there is to be a serious levelling-up attempt, it must start by levelling up the food system. I had four questions for the Minister, but now I have a fifth. Will she accept the invitation to come with Feeding Britain to see some of our foodbanks, the invitation that the Prime Minister turned down all those years ago?

First, will the Government agree to increase the amount of money in people’s pockets by keeping working-age benefits genuinely in line with inflation? Will the Government provide a safety net for kids by expanding free school meals, breakfast provision and Healthy Start, so that children can be protected from both hunger and lousy food? Will the Government explore tax and subsidy regimes to balance the price of healthy food, which at the moment is much more expensive? Will the Government commit to a new good food Bill? As someone who worked with Henry Dimbleby on the food plan, I am very disappointed that there is no mention at all of this in the whole of the Queen’s Speech. It makes me think that when we get the White Paper in the next few months, it will be weak rather than robust.

I turn now to the environment. This Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill must address net-zero policies. The levelling-up paper does, I admit, recognise that the transition to net zero will have lasting effects on virtually every aspect of the economy, including jobs and skills, but the Government are not prioritising net zero as an integral part of their levelling-up agenda. Indeed, there is actually no mention of net zero in the 12 levelling-up missions, despite the fact that it could be easily woven into most of them. We can put it in skills, transport, pride in community, and education. I could go on. All those actions would be in line with our goals.

One key area where levelling up and net zero can align is in relation to fuel poverty. Making our notoriously draughty and very poorly built homes much more energy efficient—we have some of leakiest homes in Europe—would help to reduce bills and reduce emissions. The levelling-up paper does address the quality of homes, but what about the retrofitting of the ones we are already in? We know that this is costly—it costs a fortune—but the cost of inaction is way more than the cost of action.

It is worth saying and repeating, because it has not been said so far today, that we are in a climate emergency, and the signals are coming from all sides. Just on Monday, the Met Office said that there was a strong likelihood that at least one of the next five years would exceed the 1.5-degree level that the world is struggling to achieve. There are crop failures. We will face proper food insecurity. We have to get our head out of the sand and into the solution. Lots of Bills have been announced that could be levers to address these problems, but they are piecemeal. Why can we not have a proper overarching strategy?

I am very disappointed to see that there are an increasing number of Conservative MPs—okay, a minority—who are questioning the Government’s continued commitment to net zero, a commitment which I truly honour and value. I am also disappointed by the Government’s recent decision to agree to a new licensing round for oil and gas projects. We will not level up if we go backwards. Polls show that voters, including a huge number of Conservatives, do not want to see this. History will judge all of us by how we respond to this challenge. We are meant to be at 50% carbon emissions by 2030, so everything that is done now and in this Session that is set out in this Queen’s Speech will add to this. It is crucial.

To spend parliamentary time arguing about how we can criminalise people for protesting is, I suggest, not a good use of that time. I want to hark back to just over 100 years ago. The suffragettes broke every single window within half a mile of Trafalgar Square to get their point across. Marjorie Hume locked herself on to one of the statues in St Stephen’s Hall. We do not look back on them as criminals; we look back on them as heroines. Indeed, they are the reason that all these women are here today.

It makes me very sad to see that one of the Government’s ideas to save money is that we should water down the quality of nurseries. Fifty years ago next month, I co-founded Spare Rib. I cannot believe that we are still in a society where women cannot get childcare. Again, it is a lousy use of taxpayers’ money not to do it; we could have a more productive and more equal society.

Those are my three contributions to levelling up. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Covid-19: Aviation Sector

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 5th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

Turning to my noble friend’s second point first, there will inevitably be redundancies within the aviation sector. That is of course hugely regrettable and, while public health remains our top priority, we are committed to enabling a sustainable and responsible return to international travel as soon as we possibly can. In terms of our work with other countries and the international aviation community, our conversations with others have fed into the guidance that we have issued for aviation for journey planning, social distancing, cleaning, face coverings, PPE—all those sorts of requirements. The UK is also playing a leading role at ICAO in the ICAO Aviation Recovery Taskforce.

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

My Lords, given that the pandemic is not going away and airlines will therefore be in trouble, they will probably require bailouts. Will the Government agree with the recommendation by the Committee on Climate Change and commit to a net zero goal for UK aviation as part of the forthcoming aviation consultation and strategy, as well as the principle that the aviation sector should not receive bailouts without setting individual net zero targets and careful plans as to how they are to achieve that?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are doing an enormous amount of work with the aviation sector. We have set up the Jet Zero Council, which is working towards making sure that aviation is able to play its part to ensure that we get to net zero by 2050. As the noble Baroness pointed out, some companies may in future approach the Government for specific help. As I noted earlier, there is the Birch process to go through, but that can be used only if all other sources have been exhausted and there may well indeed be certain conditions attached.

Highway Layouts

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for reminding all noble Lords of government policy. She is absolutely right that this Government are committed to the environment and want to see improvements within it. The scheme she mentioned is a live planning application. It is with the Planning Inspectorate at the moment so I cannot comment on the detail, but I reassure her that the DCO process is designed to make sure that any proposal is subject to the highest level of scrutiny to ensure that it complies with planning law. It may interest the noble Baroness to know that this scheme had four rounds of public consultation.

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

Following on from the Question of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, Wisley is part of the Thames Basin Heaths Special Protection Area, which is a key site for safeguarding very important fauna and flora in England and which we really cannot afford to lose. What action will HM Government take to ensure that the Secretary of State for Transport has all the evidence available to conclude with certainty, as the law requires, that the proposed new junction 10 of the M25 will not harm the integrity of the Thames Basin Heaths Special Protection Area?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

It is up to the Planning Inspectorate to make sure that it feels comfortable that it has all the information it requires. If not, it will ensure that it goes out and gets it. I reassure the noble Baroness that under RIS2, the new road investment scheme strategy which came out in April 2020, Highways England has various KPIs which relate to biodiversity. HE’s KPI is that there will be no net loss of biodiversity, using Natural England’s assessment approach.

Stonehenge

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton [V]]

The Government have ambitious plans for the whole of the link road, the A358-A303, which links the M3 and the M5. My noble friend is right that there are various projects that have to be done not altogether, otherwise the disruption would be enormous. If my noble friend is referring to the Sparkford to Ilchester section, that DCO has also been extended recently and will be decided by 20 November.

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, that this has been an extremely frustrating 20 years. I, too, drive past Stonehenge a lot. I find it shameful that one of our greatest monuments is regularly passed by a rumble of trucks day and night and that the area for visitors is so cramped. Given the recent findings about how big, extensive and important the whole site is, would it not be worth putting a big ring road right round the site—at least something that we could get on with much quicker? The stones may fall down at this rate, because we have wasted so much time and money.

Covid-19: Walking and Cycling

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I too welcome the Government’s initiative to encourage us to cycle—it is so important for health and for the environment—but a lot of cycling accidents happen because of speed. Will the Government consider making it mandatory for all urban areas to have a 20 mph speed limit, as many parts of England and some London boroughs already do?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton [V]]

My Lords, local authorities already have the power to set 20 mph speed limits on their roads. The department has published guidance designed to make sure that speed limits are appropriately and consistently set. We do not support a blanket introduction of 20 mph speed limits, because they may not be appropriate in certain circumstances or for all roads and in all cities.