Private Sector: Environment and COP 26
Lord Bird Excerpts(2 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)
My Lords, we are calling on companies to commit to cut emissions via the UN’s Race To Zero campaign, to join in submitting near-term plans plus, by 2050, a net-zero goal for independent verification. The UK will also be the first G20 country to require mandatory TCFD-aligned discourses, and we have secured similar commitments from the G7. These initiatives show, among other things, how global businesses are going green and leading the way to a low-carbon future.
Lord Bird (CB)
The private sector was very useful when it came to the AstraZeneca vaccine, and the Government were incredibly thoughtful and rushed forward to support that company; it was a good example. However, the four objectives are a bit aspirational at the moment, so we need to push forward the way in which the Government can get the private sector on their side. May I suggest that they look again at some examples such as contracts for difference, which was about giving guarantees to start-ups and new businesses in the private sector in order to push forward? In that way, we can have the same response in the private sector for the environment as we got with AstraZeneca.
Lord Callanan (Con)
The noble Lord will I am sure be delighted to hear that we are launching a new contracts for difference round in December.
COP 26
Lord Bird Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
I thank my noble friend for his question; I know he takes a close interest in these matters. The important thing to do is to convince people across the country that there are an awful lot of jobs riding on this as well, and that pursuing green initiatives, as we are doing with the 10-point plan that was announced today, will enable thousands of jobs to be created in many of the communities that he is talking about.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I am really pleased to hear that we are tying the green issue into the problems of today, with possibly 1.5 million people unemployed. I would like to see the Government grasp this moment and expand completely the green job market. That is the most practical thing we can do. The other practical thing we should do is convince most people that plastic and rubbish and the general environment that we live in need to be bought into by everybody, so we need much more vigorous education. We need schools to teach our children from the very beginning that we are in this perilous world, and it is all to do with nature. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that there are too many tick-boxing, simple things that do not really change people’s consciousness.
Lord Callanan (Con)
The noble Lord, then, will have welcomed our announcement today that will generate the tens of thousands of jobs to which he refers. The idea of the campaign, of course, is to try to educate and change behaviour.
Covid-19: Small Businesses
Lord Bird Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
My noble friend makes an important point, and I hope that councils, in particular, being part of the public sector, will be sympathetic to the plight of many small businesses at this time. I am sure that my noble friend will understand, however, that I cannot predict what the Chancellor might have to say, on VAT or any other matters, in his future Budgets.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I am the recipient of a very generous bounce-back loan: thank you very much indeed. It is very useful for a social business in difficult times, and I would like to see more of that coming down the line. But what concerns me is that the only way to help small businessmen is to get control of Covid—and what alarms me, and a lot of people in the country, is that there does not seem to be unity in Parliament. Is it too early or too late—or too wrong—to call for some kind of national Government to bring us together, so that we can dismantle the biggest crisis we have ever faced in the history of our country?
Lord Callanan (Con)
I am pleased that the noble Lord has been able to take advantage of one of our loan schemes. He made an interesting suggestion about a national Government—but I hope he will accept that that is way above my pay grade.
Climate Emergency
Lord Bird Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Bird
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the climate emergency declarations by the First Minister of Scotland on 28 April, the Welsh Government Minister for the Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs on 29 April, and the House of Commons on 1 May, what plans they have to formally announce a climate emergency in the United Kingdom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)
My Lords, our approach will continue to be defined by the action we take, not the words we use. The Government fully recognise the urgency of tackling the challenge of climate change. We were the first country to introduce long-term, legally binding carbon reduction targets and have decarbonised our economy faster than any other G20 country.
Lord Bird (CB)
I am very pleased to hear that we have nothing to worry about and that all we need to do is just more of the same. I worry because 80 years ago, when we were facing the arguments of what to do about Nazi Germany, people used the word “appeasers”. In 30 or 50 years’ time, are this Government, the Government after them and the one before them going to be seen as appeasers around the environment? That is what really concerns me. May I suggest that the noble Lord considers the possibility of looking at the future generations legislation in Wales, which brings together the environment, poverty, health and all these questions, so that we can offer a future to our children?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I did not say that we have nothing to worry about. I and my right honourable friend the Secretary of State have made it clear, including in the debate we had last week in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that there is something to worry about. We are certainly worried about climate change, but we are also of the view that we have taken considerable action in this country; we will take further action, both in this country and internationally, for the benefit of the whole planet. We will also offer leadership, internationally, as a result of actions both international and national.
Brexit: Consumer Rights
Lord Bird Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Henley
I thank my noble friend for that question. As she will be aware, we have been dealing with consumer affairs quite a lot this week and debated this matter in relation to the Select Committee’s report only last night. In that debate, I made it clear that, in the event of a no-deal exit, the Government have committed to fund the UK European Consumer Centre for at least one more year until March 2020. That will obviously be kept under review during this year.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, what will the Government do about Amazon, which pays its taxes outside the UK? Will we able to claim those taxes back to the UK after Brexit?
Lord Henley
My Lords, the noble Lord will appreciate that that question is completely wide of that on the Order Paper and I do not intend to answer it.
Industrial Strategy
Lord Bird Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I am very happy to be talking about industrial strategy, which is kind of strange. I am known as Mr Homeless or the Poverty Man—the “Buddy, can you spare me a dime?” sort of chap—so your Lordships may not think I would be interested in industrial strategy. However, I am interested in it because I am interested in productivity and in all the things that make possible a generosity of spirit and give us the opportunity to intervene in the lives of people in need and to help prevent those people who may fall into need from doing so.
I am not in any way looking on this as a slight, but it is interesting that there is nobody from the Church of England here. There are no right reverend Prelates in today. Is it the Bishops’ day off?
Noble Lords
Lord Bird
There is nobody from the Church on the speakers list. I make that point because the Church, or religion, is the backbone where generosity comes from. Most of us learn about generosity through school, religion or the message of Christ. But if there was no industrial strategy, if there were no people going to work and earning money, then we would have no opportunity at all to be generous to each other. We would have absolutely nothing in the kitty.
I want to make a plea for social enterprise, which is not mentioned at all in this industrial strategy. I have to declare an interest in that I started one 26 years ago called the Big Issue, which was all based on the principle of getting people to work and giving them a hand up, not a handout. When I was asked about the nature of the work I was doing, I said it was a business response to a social crisis and was not simply extending another handout. We built the business among the most troubled, harmed and self-harming members of the community. We built a relatively tidy business out of that: we do not make a lot of money, and what comes in goes out, but it is a social business. It has spread all over the world: you cannot go to many cities that have not taken up the model that the Big Issue created. Wherever there is the problem of people who are hard up, we give them the opportunity of trading and of earning some honest money so that they do not have to do anything dishonest.
Social enterprise is the area that I started in and have worked in over the last 26 years. About 11 years ago we invented something called Big Issue Invest, which is a prevention mechanism that tries to work with people to stop them falling into crime and wrongdoing. We have created a number of social enterprises by investing. For example, when a local hospital in Salford wanted to privatise a sector, and the managers took over the business, we put money in and bought nurseries for them. They made all sorts of clever innovations, such as putting very young people with very old people. Big Issue Invest has invested in 300 social businesses. I want people to buy into the idea that, even though we are only about 2% of the activity, if the Government were to get behind social enterprises, put an enormous amount of effort in and take us from a niche into the mainstream, that would do all sorts of wonderful things. For instance, we work largely in areas of deprivation and need, and it would help to transform these areas, because it involves the people themselves in their problems. It is not something that simply comes down from the top but something that grows up from the community.
However, the real problem for me when we talk about industrial strategy is that I am working in the areas where the laws of unintended consequences apply. For instance, the Thatcher Government removed all the subsidies for all of these industries, most of which, with the exception of the car industry and parts of the steel industry, had never made a profit in the 20th century and had been subsidised since the First World War. When they went, those jobs were not replaced with the kind of skilled work that would take a lot of people and move them forward, skilling them up instead of having them rely on social security. Many ended up doing that for generations, with the sluice gates opening for social security so that you could take in 11,000 people in Sunderland’s job exchange on the Monday, when on the previous Friday there had been only about 55. You get those kind of weird distortions.
Social enterprise—the work we do—is about going into those areas and trying to make up for the deficit of thinking, of strategy and of government involvement. I know that there have been some really top-notch, Rolls-Royce innovations. We are very good in Britain at producing pilots and wonderful little inventions in particular parts of the country, but we are not very good at making a whole strategy. We have to grow up a bit. Every time we mention industrial strategy, we talk about Germany, which is brilliant, but we have to be truthful and ask what the Germans do, in a big way, that we have never done. The Government lead in social and business innovation. All the big companies that made it possible for Germany to run the First World War survived, and carried on even after the Second World War. All the big innovations were made by government under Bismarck at the end of the 19th century and they lived on.
Why do we not accept that government should be one of the most brilliant means of investing in and creating new industries? That is what they do. Go to California, talk to the people in Silicon Valley and ask them where they were 20 or 30 years ago when the innovations that created their businesses were being invented by the military and in our universities with public money. When are we going to start getting real and accept the fact that most of the big changes that have taken place in the world and have created new industries have been led by the use of public money?