Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Boycott and Lord Teverson

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the Minister—he knows that I like to praise his work—particularly on the change in the Ofgem amendment, in that our major regulator will now have a net-zero objective. To me, that is absolutely stark staringly obvious, and the fact that there has been government resistance to it while the Bill has been in this House I find strange, so that is a real move forward. The other thing that is to me stark staringly stupid is that we are talking about opening a coal mine in 2023. That makes no sense at all, and I will go through the reasons why.

It is not just we on these Benches or the Opposition who have that view. Let me quote from the Commons at Report. The then Energy Minister, Chris Skidmore—highly respected in this area and highly respected by the Government, in that he wrote their independent net zero review—said:

“Legislating to prevent the opening of new coal mines simply maintains the commitment that the UK sought to make to the rest of the world at COP26”—[Official Report, Commons, 5/9/23; col. 303.]


That was Chris Skidmore, former Energy Minister, valued by the Government for his net zero review, and by all of us for that great piece of work.

At COP 26 in Glasgow a couple of years ago, which we chaired very successfully under Sir Alok Sharma, we nailed our colours to the mast and led a coalition of countries—I think the government press release says 190—and celebrated the fact that we would phase out coal. What motivates me most to put Amendment 272A forward again is that our international reputation is being shredded by the fact that we are moving ahead on this basis. Let us not pretend that it is not noticed internationally, because it is. Even the White House, under John Kerry, the climate envoy, has remarked on this piece of government policy planning and Michael Gove’s proposal to open the coal mine. So, our international reputation for climate leadership, which all of us on all sides of this House have been particularly proud of over the years, is being literally trashed by this decision.

That has other effects as well. During a Private Notice Question yesterday, we debated the fact that we had no investor take for offshore wind on the CfD pitch when it concluded last week. That shows that we need rock-solid commitment to net zero in order to attract investment into this country. To me, our saying internationally that we are starting to open coal mines absolutely goes against what we are saying to bring in investment. It questions UK government policy, which is competing with the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States and a green deal industrial plan in the EU. We are trying to get a slice of that global investment, yet our environmental and climate focus is wobbling. That is absolutely wrong.

This amendment would apply to any sort of coal mine, but the Minister mentioned the Cumbrian coal mine, which is what that decision is all about. Let us be clear about that proposition and the company West Cumbria Mining. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has said already, that industry is moving—indeed, must move—competitively towards a much greener stance; for the UK steel industry to remain competitive, it must do so as well. As I understand it, scientists have questions about West Cumbrian coal, including whether its sulphur content is even sufficient for the steel industry. However, the main facts are these: first, the steel industry generally is not that interested in that coal; and, secondly, the company itself says that some four-fifths of the coal will not be used by the UK steel industry, which means that it needs to be exported. Once coal is exported, we have no control over how that substance is used.

That brings me to transport. The argument is that it is better to provide our own coking coal than to import it. However, if we export 80% of this coal, that will put transport costs up because we will have the cost of transporting it to other, international markets.

The one argument that I do have sympathy with concerns jobs. We all know that the region of Cumbria is hugely challenged in terms of levelling up, jobs and income. However, it is completely obvious to me that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, just talked about with regard to Labour’s amendment, we have the ability to provide green jobs and proper energy efficiency. It is clear to me that this coal mine will not be there for a particularly long time, so those jobs will be transient.

I will leave it at that but let me come back to the United Kingdom’s international reputation and our important share in global investment in the green sector. I quote the Government’s own website, which said this after COP 26:

“The end of coal—the single biggest contributor to climate change—is in sight thanks to the UK securing a 190-strong coalition of countries and organisations at COP26”.


That was a proud moment for not just Alok Sharma but the Government. It is being trashed.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 274B in my name. I draw attention to my interests in the register.

I will speak briefly about community energy but let me just say that I absolutely support the amendments in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I also very much support the noble Lord’s words, especially about what this measure is going to do to Britain’s reputation, and his reminding us of where this country was just a couple of short years ago as the leaders of COP, playing a proud role on the world stage; that seems to be in tatters right now.

Community energy is wildly popular in the country—it is extremely popular with all sorts of people. I find it puzzling why the Government are not bending over backwards to make this easier and simpler for people. I do not want to get into the arguments about onshore wind, but surely one way to mitigate communities’ concerns about renewable energy is to give people a stake in it so that it is about not just a bit of money but owning something. My sister has lived on a small island in Denmark for 60 years. The people there are completely energy independent. It was the first place I knew of that had wind farms everywhere. Everyone knows how much electricity is coming in and what it is doing. They have ownership and share prices—that is just the way it has been done, and it is kind of brilliant. Why can we not say, “The local energy we produce off that hill heats my towel rail all year round”? They can report, “I co-own it”, “It has paid to put solar panels on the roof of the community hall”, or “It has paid for energy efficiency advice and deals for the other homes in our village”.

In fairness to the Government, they have acknowledged this, but we seem to have spent an incredible amount of time hand-wringing about the difficulties rather than finding the easy, appropriate ways of supporting it. All that the sector wants is a deal comparable with all the other renewable energy that we have in this country, via a guaranteed minimum price. This gives communities the certainty that they need to raise the funds to go ahead. This is true across so much of the alternative energy sector.

I supported the establishment of the £10 million community energy fund but, quite honestly, that is not very much. If you look in the Evening Standard, you find that you can buy a flat for £10 million within about 100 yards of here. It is not going to go far enough. We need real reform, so the commitment made by Andrew Bowie in the other place

“to consulting on the barriers the sector faces when developing projects”—[Official Report, Commons, 5/9/23; col. 281.]

was particularly welcome.

That is why I have come up with this compromise amendment, which I hope that the Minister feels able to accept. It would give the industry a boost to know that there was something coming down the tracks on an agreed timeframe. A problem that we have seen before is consultations which do not receive a response—or do but with serious delays. That is all that I am trying to avoid with this amendment in lieu, which sets a generous timescale of 18 months for a consultation and a further six months for bringing forward proposals to remove the barriers to community energy schemes. This times nicely with the end of the two-year community energy fund and would avoid a potential cliff edge.

I believe that the Minister will appreciate the need for clarity for the sector and the need to reassure over 300 MPs, including 147 Conservative MPs, who backed the original Local Electricity Bill, which recognised the barriers to community energy and proposed remedies. I therefore ask him to give this house more clarity on timescales, or I may be required to test the opinion of the House.

Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Boycott and Lord Teverson

Report stage
Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Randall, on his speech and his due diligence on this issue, which is crucial in terms of deforestation. We have the frustration whereby we want extraterritoriality, which we do not normally have in the UK, but we can influence some of these matters only through supply chains and our own British corporates. The United States seems to get away with extraterritoriality in relation to more or less everything. We do not have that privilege.

As regards this approach, I also like the reference to recognising indigenous people. It is clear and obvious that it is so much more effective to keep forests rather than start to regrow them. That is the other side of the coin, as it were, to the previous debate and perhaps is even more important. That is why these Benches are very much in favour of the system proposed—although one of the big challenges that we have faced regarding environmental regulation and the Bill is enforcement and making sure that the regulations that we make can operate and are policed. We have the FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council, which works okay but all of us know of instances of duplicity in the system—not in the work of the FSC itself but among those copying and wrongly branding products. That challenge remains, but that does not mean that we should not move ahead in these areas.

I want also to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Randall, on his pioneering work on the global footprint. We have mentioned a number of areas but the Dasgupta review, sponsored by the Treasury, again stressed that in terms of natural capital we are extracting far more than we are putting back into the planet. I suspect that the noble Lord is not expecting the Minister to accept the amendment but I hope that the Government will do further work in this area. I agree strongly with a point that the noble Lord made: if we can become the leader of standards in this area, it would be incredibly important.

Lastly, I come to the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, on urgency. That is the word I hear from her and she is absolutely right. We have so little time in so many of these areas and here, through these amendments—which I hope the Government and the Minister will accept—we have an opportunity to wind up that urgency and start to make right what we need to do soon and so urgently.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I have put my name, although only online, to my noble friend Lady Meacher’s amendments as well as to Amendment 121 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall.

We outsource so many things in this country that globalisation has destroyed any sense we have of how products get to us or what they are made of. Just look at the list of ingredients that go into a cheap ready meal. They will certainly contain stuff that one’s grand- mother would not recognise and probably include ingredients such as soy. Manufacturers are keen to keep us ignorant of those chains.

Much of what happens on Amazonian land, in the forests of Brazil and other parts of South America, is the growing of soy and feed crops for cattle, which then go to feed us. From an environmental and energy point of view, that is a travesty. I am not even counting the transport involved. We are colluding—for many people, I am sure, completely unwittingly—in pulling and cutting down ancient rainforests for the simple reason that the loggers and farmers can get away with it. We actually do not know about it. It is time to stop it and for us to stop buying those kinds of products, but we have to know and have transparency.

Amendment 108C also makes it clear that we must be aware not just of illegal deforestation, which varies between countries and often between jurisdictions, but of what might today be considered legal. Brazil’s forest laws have changed in the past decade but that does not mean that we should lay off the pressure. The good news is that 81% of the biggest UK companies in the forest risk supply chains have stated that they aim to remove all deforestation from their supply chains, and 22 major UK businesses recently called on the UK Government to develop a legal framework to halt it. Citizens also support such a move. In the Government’s own consultation, 99% of all residents supported the introduction of just this kind of legislation. However, in the meantime we continue to see ghastly pictures of the Amazon on fire. Scientists know that decades of human activity and a changing climate have pushed the jungle near to a tipping point; 17% of it is nearly destroyed and the tipping point will soon be reached.

That brings me neatly to Amendment 121 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and I congratulate him on his speech and for all his work. The day that the UK overshot our planetary boundaries was 29 July this year—the day that demand for ecological resources and services in any given year exceeded what the earth can generate. It hardly needs to be explained why that matters. I understand that all the measures in the Bill are effectively working to ensure that we live in harmony with the earth and that we do not use more than we can regenerate. However, it is also easy to see that it is not entirely working. We are a long way from that but we are not the first country to take measures. We therefore need to measure the progress, even though it is difficult to do so.

I have just finished reading a chapter from a new edition of Jared Diamond’s extraordinary book, Collapse, about Easter Island, which was the home of a once-thriving community who drove themselves almost into extinction over a period of about 250 years. They had amazing trees called Chilean pines, from which big canoes could be produced that were capable of going out far into the Pacific Ocean. One can tell from dietary remains that at that point the people ate big fish such as tuna, and porpoises, dolphins and so on, and were very healthy. Indeed, the society was so wealthy and healthy that they could spend their time making the extraordinary heads found on Easter Island. At one point, the people cut down the last Chilean pine. No one thought that it mattered because they then made smaller canoes. Unfortunately, their diet worsened, as did the soil because there were no trees. When travellers visited that society in the middle of the 1850s—not really that long ago—they found a bunch of people in rags who were impoverished and soil that was incapable of producing many crops.

That is a metaphor for our time, because the point is that it happened not with a bang but a whimper. Right now, one could say that the earth was beginning to scream. When we saw Covid coming, that was a bang and we were able to respond, but what we are doing now is slowly grinding down the planet to a point at which one day, we might end up like the people of Easter Island.

Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Boycott and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I have just been camping at Knepp for three nights—Friday, Saturday and Sunday—so I walked the land extensively, went on guided tours and saw the work being done. He is not correct when he says that a housing estate next door will in fact be of some kind of educational benefit. The whole point of Knepp is that a wildlife corridor was going to be created where this new housing development is that would take the birds, as well as some other animals, to the sea.

I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, because we need a rethink of how we look at land and what we do. We need to start using things imaginatively such as the middles of towns for people to live in. I live outside Taunton, the town centre of which has completely fallen apart in the last couple of decades. There are empty shops and closed-up buildings; there is no life in that town. Instead, you have miles and miles of small boxes outside the town that are extremely environmentally non-sustainable. They are miles from the schools and the town centre and the place has become a doughnut—it has that sort of hollowed-out feeling.

Unless we start to reimagine how we want to live, of course we will go on having the problems that we have all talked about, and 3,500 houses will continue to be put on the Knepp site. Storks have just been brought back and there are now about 120 storks flying around. We had lunch on Sunday under three trees where there were storks’ nests. It is completely magical. Those creatures will go if they suddenly find that they are under houses. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, is right: the Burrells decided to rewild Knepp because their land was not productive. They were losing £150,000 a year in 2000 and felt that they could not go on drowning the site in chemicals and trying to make weak soil support high-yield crops, so it was logical to rewild that site. However, they have no ambition to rewild the whole of England. They know that Knepp is a site of special interest and should be seen in that way—as an educational tool. It is buzzing with researchers from all over the world who are studying everything, including how a pig’s trotter makes a little pool that enables a particular flower to feed, which in turn has brought back the turtle dove. They have found all those connections that had been completely lost.

Of course we need good food, good farming and grade 1 land, so I hugely support the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, when he says that agro-ecology and agro-friendly farming have to be the way forward. I have recently been to the Groundswell conference, which is about min-till or no-till, whereby one makes just slices through the earth and does not disrupt the magic of our soil. Just as many crops are being grown without the inputs. We can do it.

I come back to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, to which I have put my name. What really matters in this is that if we do not give local authorities the ability to stand on their own two feet and enforce rules on people, we take away their agency. If one looks at causes such as the transition towns or Incredible Edible Todmorden, these are absolutely miraculous and wonderful community initiatives that have brought life, health, friendship and masses of plants in all sorts of forms back into the middle of towns. It destroys one’s belief in the system if one constantly fails, if the housing development goes up against all local opposition and if, over and again, one’s voice is turned down. We are going to need all those local people with vested interests in their local community if we are really going to make a difference. It is therefore blindingly obvious that local authorities need the teeth of this amendment to fight off any imposed housing quotas. We have to put nature first in the planning system. It is not tangential and we do not have an option.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, once again, I declare my interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership, which is rather relevant to a couple of my amendments.

I want to go back to the basic argument of what the Bill is about. There is a real issue—an emergency, as I and many others would describe it, in biodiversity and the quantum of nature in England. Because of that we have this Bill. It is about doing something—and we have to do something. However, while we all welcome nature recovery networks as a great initiative in the Bill for which I congratulate the Government, when we have that emergency and we have seen how the Aichi targets over the past 10 years mean that we have gone backwards in this area, we need those nature recovery networks actually to work. Exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, if we do not do that, what is the point?

This group is about the rubber hitting the road, if you like. This is “make your mind up” time. Are Nature Recovery Networks and biodiversity targets going to be something we can all feel good about because they are in legislation, or will they make sure there is change over the next decade? That is the choice that the Government have in these amendments. I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s response.

There is a great deal going on, as we have heard from noble Lords. If the biodiversity targets that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, described so well, are not implemented and joined up with the fundamental area of planning, we are throwing away this opportunity. We must tie it up with land use and farming, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and the noble Lord, Earl Caithness, have mentioned. Roughly 75% of England is agricultural, and if we get that right we can move forward in terms of biodiversity.

Farming is crucial to making nature recovery networks and biodiversity work. We have to tie that up with the organisations that have these responsibilities already, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said: drainage boards and the Environment Agency. That is true as well. I believe that it is essential, and I think the Committee does, that there should not just be “regard” for these nature recovery networks. They have to be embedded, planted, and statutorily mandated to comply with them. Otherwise, they will not have strength.

Down in Cornwall, as the Minister is probably well aware, we have a lot of beaver introductions—we were talking about those earlier on—and have gone through one of five nature recovery pilots. I have been very much involved, as chair of the local nature partnership. It is a great exercise to go through. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, talked about consultation with local communities. We have to get that buy-in, and I am pleased to say that some 700 people were involved in consultation with our pilot in Cornwall. We have a really good scheme there, but, coming back to one of my amendments, how the heck are these going to be resourced?

There are two necessities here: one is tying and mandating their use with other machinery, whether it is the Planning Act or agriculture—we will come onto ELMS in the next group—but there also have to be the resources. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said local authorities do not have ecologists at the moment. We have to have them so they can work on nature recovery networks as well as net gain. If we do not have the resources to develop nature recovery networks and get them to work, how will it happen?

The Government might say that we have the environmental land management scheme, with £2.5 billion worth of state aid to buy public goods, but I do not see that necessarily fulfilling the needs of nature recovery networks entirely. We have net gain; I hope most of that net gain will be done onsite, and there are potentially ways of having resources there, but those two together are not enough to make nature recovery networks work. How are we going to resource the implementation of these strategies? Those are the fundamental points.

In terms of my other two amendments, local nature partnerships were, I was sad to see, not even mentioned in the Bill. They came about through The Natural Choice: Securing the Value of Nature, the natural environment White Paper of June 2011. They were never put on a statutory basis, but they exist throughout England, full of people from all walks of life. In Cornwall and Scilly, we have local authorities, the Environment Agency, Natural England, farmers, ecologists and ordinary independent directors to make nature work in our region.