Net-zero Carbon Emissions: Behaviour Change

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a genuine pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate. I commend him for reminding us how important it is to consider first those at the bottom of the pay scale; I thank him for that.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Blackstone and thank her for instituting and introducing this important debate on the role of behaviour change and the case for a public engagement strategy in helping us to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. She made an excellent and comprehensive speech, which has already been commended. I hope the Minister will respond positively to it, as she asked him to do.

I thank all the organisations that have circulated briefing papers to speakers and more broadly. They are all of value and, like the excellent Library and Peers for the Planet briefings, have increased my knowledge and contributed to our debate even before a word had been spoken in the Chamber. On that point, let me take just a few seconds to repeat a suggestion that I have made twice before in the context of debates in your Lordship’s House.

I cannot do justice to any of the briefings—I have no intention of going through the many proposals they suggest; we can all read them for ourselves—but they contain many good points and, as the focus of this debate is on public engagement, I ask again: can we not open a web-based portal for every debate, or at least some, which would allow people who wish to engage with us to post their briefings in real time and have them preserved with the official record of the debate, and would expand the debate out into society? It would create a much more inclusive context for our work and allow us a significant amount of outreach too, given that we are constantly seeking ways to make our deliberations more relevant to a wider audience.

According to the CCC report, three-fifths of the measures required to get to net-zero emissions will require at least some degree of behavioural and social change. However, as Lorraine Whitmarsh, professor of environmental psychology at the University of Bath, commented:

“But this only factors in changes in consumer behaviour, such as switching from petrol to electric cars, or gas boilers to heat pumps.”


The list is endless; it has already been covered substantially in contributions. She continued:

“This is a very narrow definition of behavioural and social change. People are not only consumers—they are citizens, parents, members of communities, employees, employers and political actors.”


I add to that that people are company directors, politicians and Ministers. One view is that the truth may be that all the measures required to get to net zero depend on behavioural change by people.

As I have already said, I cannot do justice to any or all of the briefings I received, but for the rest of what I am going to say I will concentrate on the issue of trust, because that is about our behaviour—not just that of Ministers but of parliamentarians. I was struck by the last bullet point in the Climate Outreach briefing I received, which says:

“The public takes strong cues from government action so policies and government spokespeople”—


I would add parliamentarians—

“need to be seen as being in tune with the action being asked of individuals.”

The heading that it gives is that the Government needs to be in step.

Regrettably, at a micro level the Government, and probably many of us, have recently had problems in this area. The sight of a Cabinet—at which there were at least 27 senior members of the Government sitting close together around a table without face masks—agreeing that a key message to deliver to the people is to wear a mask in crowded settings was not helpful, nor is the regular drumbeat we have of Ministers and others being embarrassed by being asked simple questions such as, “What sort of car do you drive?” This is really important, and all of it is very good fun at this level, but at the macro level there is an important issue. If people are to be persuaded to change their personal behaviours, Governments, leaders and we must inspire confidence that we are tackling the larger and more difficult challenges—and we are comprehensively failing to do that. We regularly say that the Government’s primary responsibility is their duty to protect citizens. We have to be really careful that asking individual citizens to bear the burden of a substantial share of global warming does not reverse that relationship, moving responsibility from the protectors to those who should be protected. Part of the public engagement strategy must be empowering citizens to hold their Governments to account for their responsibilities, first and foremost.

A relatively recent report from the Carbon Disclosure Project—now known as the CDP—found that just 100 companies were responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988 and that a mere 25 corporations and state-owned entities were responsible for more than half of global emissions. Mostly these are fossil fuel companies, and China is responsible for a disproportionately large share of global greenhouse gas emissions due to its coal production and consumption. A few countries and companies are responsible for so much of global greenhouse gas emissions that our first response should be, at business and government level, to ensure that people take responsibility for curbing industrial emissions. That should be our priority.

This is not to say that individuals cannot do things. They can, of course: we have heard about them and there are lists of them. Every contribution helps, but we must be careful not to get to the point where these failings are considered morally blameworthy. In particular, individuals living in poor countries who have contributed almost nothing to climate change deserve the most support and the least guilt.

I repeat that the most effective change in behaviour will be to empower citizens to hold those who are responsible for climate change accountable for their actions. That is why a successful COP 26 is so crucial. Unfortunately, I am not very confident that it will deliver.

Sovereign Defence Capability: Meggitt Takeover

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, 85% of defence R&D is government funded. In the integrated review, the Government promised a defence and security industrial strategy that will “prioritise UK industrial capability”. Announcing it, Defence Minister Jeremy Quin said the DSIS

“will help retain onshore critical industries for our national security and our future.”—[Official Report, Commons, 23/3/21; col. 797.]

First Cobham, then Ultra Electronics and now Meggitt—these are all critical industries for our national security and our future. At what point will the Government follow their own strategy and try to slow the current US equity fund-led spree of buying these businesses?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The current takeover is not by an equity fund but a defence contractor. As I said, we welcome investment into the UK but will not hesitate to take action if it threatens or compromises our national security.

Status of Workers Bill [HL]

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 10th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I too commend my noble friend Lord Hendy on bringing forward this Bill, on his excellent introductory speech, on the very accessible briefing that he provided to us all in advance, which I found really valuable, and consequently on providing the opportunity to debate this important issue. I am pleased to stand here able to say that every speaker before me, from all sides of the House, has supported this Bill. It urges me to remind the Minister that in 1998, when I came into Parliament, the Conservative Party was on the wrong side of history on the national minimum wage and kept me up all night on many occasions trying to defend the indefensible. I urge him not to get on the wrong side of history on this and have his Government tarred with that brush, because at some point in the relatively near future they will have to backtrack, as they have done already.

Perhaps my noble friend Lord Hendy would not have had to do this had Theresa May not lost office before she was able to fulfil her Government’s commitment of 2018 to legislate in this area, or if Boris Johnson had not broken his promise to bring forward an employment Bill, set out in the December 2019 Queen’s Speech, no less. Clearly, the Government understand this problem and the implications of it for millions of hard-working people. Why else would they have set out plans in the December 2019 Queen’s Speech to introduce an employment Bill, among other things, to tackle it? Instead, they chose to leave workers’ rights behind, not only by leaving this out of the most recent Queen’s Speech but by backtracking altogether, with the Minister outlining the Government’s new belief, as my noble friend Lady Donaghy said, that the current system

“provides the right balance for the UK labour market”.

The experience of the most important element of that market, the labourers, is that this is not true. If the Minister intends to deploy this argument in a response of resistance to my noble friend’s elegant solution, please will he not just reassert it but direct us to the evidence that supports it. It is directly contrary to the reasoned analysis, conclusions and recommendations of the Taylor review, published in 2017, and the consultation on employment status, run in 2018, which in turn led to the May Government’s commitments.

Like other noble Lords, I am grateful for the briefings that I received from the Library, the IER and the TUC, not to mention from my noble friend Lord Hendy. They are redolent with evidence of injustice and potential and actual abuse, which demands redress. In the current context, if the pandemic has taught us one lesson, it is the importance to well-being, to productivity and consequently to the economy of people feeling safe, secure, and valued in their work. My noble friend made this very point, but with respect, it was expressed better by Andy McDonald, who in July wrote:

“Millions of workers have had no access to statutory sick pay, both worsening the impact of the pandemic and exacerbating financial insecurity. In-work poverty is the highest it has been this century, with one in six working families on the poverty line. Approximately 3.6 million people are in insecure work, meaning they don’t know when they will work or how much they will earn … Throughout the pandemic, the devastating consequences of unsafe working conditions, financial insecurity and the lack of a strong worker voice have made the need for urgent change clear.”


However, the pandemic has also seen us adapting to new flexible ways of working. I accept that we need a system which allows this flexibility. None of us is arguing against that. As other noble Lords have made clear, the Labour Party supports the creation of a single status of worker, to ensure that all workers receive the rights and protections that Parliament has said that employees should have. My noble friend’s Bill offers a solution that is entirely consistent with that ambition. I fully support it. I have no doubt that in its later stages there will be debate about the finer details. I look forward to further education on those details. If we can get this Bill right, which we should be able to do, many fewer people will have an experience of work that is challenging to their well-being, mental health and productivity, and consequently, to our economy.

Net Zero Test

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

We have not had any discussions about implementing this proposal yet. We will respond to the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations in due course. But we are looking at the impact of climate change across all our policies. As I said, we have a couple of senior Cabinet-level committees, one chaired by the Prime Minister, which take all of these things into account.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Climate Change Committee sees local authorities as having a critical part to play in achieving net zero. On 16 July, the NAO revealed

“serious weaknesses in central government’s approach to working with local authorities on decarbonisation, stemming from a lack of clarity over local authorities’ overall roles, piecemeal funding, and diffuse accountabilities”.

Does the Minister agree with its assessment that there is

“great urgency to the development of a more coherent approach”

and can he explain how the MHCLG, BEIS and other departments are responding to this challenge?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I do not agree with the noble Lord. Of course, local authorities are critical in terms of delivering this agenda and I have many meetings with them to discuss a number of the grand schemes for which I am responsible. We have spent something like £1.2 billion in dedicated funds given to local authorities through the local authority delivery scheme and the public sector decarbonisation scheme to help them in this job.

Agricultural Exports from Australia: Tariffs

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

As noble Lords know, the Northern Ireland protocol is still subject to discussion and refinement between the parties. Clearly, Northern Ireland stands to gain in many ways from a trade agreement with Australia; for example, machinery and manufactured goods account for around 90% of all goods exported from Northern Ireland to Australia and are used extensively in Australia’s mining, quarrying and recycling sectors. These exports will certainly benefit from reduced tariffs in this deal.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, as MP for Kilmarnock, the home of Johnnie Walker, I lobbied for the lifting of all tariffs on Scotch whisky, so I welcome an FTA with Australia that removes that 5% tariff—but not at the price of unfettered access on beef and lamb, which NFU Scotland says will devastate family farms and is wholly unacceptable to farmers and crofters. Bearing in mind what Brexit has done to the Scottish seafood industry, despite repeated government assurances, is Ministers’ rejection of what they say are farmers’ invalid fears based on an objective impact assessment, or is it just an alternative opinion?

Post Office Update

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 24th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord refers to the ongoing Metropolitan Police investigation into two Fujitsu employees following a referral from the Director of Public Prosecutions in response to the findings of the Horizon issues judgment. I see no reason this should cause problems with Fujitsu co-operating with the inquiry, as the company—notwithstanding the announcement of the police investigation—has already fully indicated its willingness to co-operate with Sir Wyn and the inquiry. As I have said in previous answers, the matter of compensation from Fujitsu is a contractual one between the Post Office and Fujitsu.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, some of these wrongful convictions go back to 2003—a wait for some of nearly 20 years for justice. The delay can be explained in part by the Post Office cover-up and its contesting of cases for as long as possible. However, this is also an egregious, systemic failure of the criminal justice system. What is being done to stop it happening again, especially with regard to the digital evidence rule that made it easier for the Post Office to bamboozle courts, with regard to judicial capacity to test the reliability of computer evidence and with regard to the power of self-interested entities to bring private prosecutions? Where were the lawyers?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

There were lots of lawyers involved in this case; some might think that there were too many. However, the noble Lord makes some very good points about the operation of the justice system. As I have indicated in previous answers to this House, I have received personal assurances from the Post Office that it is no longer pursuing any private prosecutions and will not do so in future. This is indeed an egregious scandal; there are many lessons to be learned from the inquiry, and we will learn them.

Biomass Electricity Subsidies: Deforestation

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister has confirmed that the Government accept the principle that a scheme designed to reduce emissions needs to account fully for all emissions generated by it and must not cause environmental destruction, and therefore a loss of biodiversity. As there appears to be credible evidence to the contrary, and as he has assured your Lordships’ House that UK production of biomass meets that standard, will he publish the evidence, including the data that supports the assessment that he just made?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Many of these studies are published and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred to a previous study that supports the assertion that forest is actually increasing in the area. But yes, the noble Lord, Lord Browne, is quite right—we need to act on the basis of proper, validated scientific evidence and our forthcoming biomass strategy will explore that further.

Post Office Court of Appeal Judgment

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I totally agree with the noble Lord that, of course, words are never enough, and we are keen to see that those whose convictions were overturned are fairly compensated. I cannot make any commitments on funding at this stage; it is for the Post Office to engage with the appellants in the first instance as to how compensation can be paid as quickly as possible. The inquiry is doing its work, we will see the report in the summer when it is produced and we will learn all the appropriate lessons.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Metropolitan Police are conducting an ongoing investigation into Fujitsu workers after Mr Justice Fraser wrote to the DPP expressing grave concern about the evidence provided in earlier court hearings. Does what we already know about this appalling miscarriage of justice not justify a wider police investigation? Will the Government not call for one?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord will notice that I have avoided commenting on any potential police investigation, for very good reasons that he will understand. However, I hope the investigation will reach speedy conclusions and the police will take the appropriate action.

Offshore Gas Rigs

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My noble friend makes some very good points, and we are open to processes that can drive down emissions from offshore operations. As I know my noble friend is aware, sour gas contains significant amounts of hydrogen sulphide and would need, of course, to meet the Gas Safety (Management) Regulations before it could be used to supply industrial and domestic consumers.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, flaring produces 1% of total UK annual CO₂ emissions, and venting produces 1% of annual methane emissions. Worryingly, Oil & Gas UK reports that, in 2019, the number of oil and gas leaks in the North Sea rose to 130, including 48 significant and three major releases, one of which was 900% greater than the release that caused the Piper Alpha disaster. Why on earth do we allow flaring in such circumstances, when, for both climate change and safety reasons, a ban on flaring and venting must surely be a priority?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The Health and Safety Executive will continue to hold operators to account to investigate any gas leaks, given that this is, as the noble Lord says, a significant safety concern. The industry actively works to reduce any opportunity for a leak where possible, and there is an ongoing initiative between the industry and regulators to reduce the number of hydrocarbon releases in the offshore sector.

Climate Change

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the work of the Committee on Climate Change.

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

My Lords, the role of the climate change committee in providing independent expert advice to government is widely accepted as global best practice. Following the committee’s advice, in June 2019 the Government set a target to achieve net zero by 2050. We are very grateful for the committee’s recently published advice on the sixth carbon budget, which we will of course consider carefully ahead of setting it in legislation next year, as required by the Climate Change Act.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Prime Minister’s commitment to reduce carbon emissions from 57% of 1990 levels to 32% by 2030 is the same as the target set out in the committee’s Sixth Carbon Budget report. To deliver it requires a centrally led, comprehensive strategy and timetable for the current Parliament—preferably one that accepts that it can be delivered in 10 years only with decarbonisation technologies already at maturity. Do the Government have such a strategy? Will it be published? And will the Government find time to debate the reports of the Committee on Climate Change?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Whether time will be allowed is of course not a matter for me, but I will pass that on to the Chief Whip. Strategies, or elements of them, are being published today in the energy White Paper. A hydrogen strategy and a heat and building decarbonisation strategy are to come, so we are conscious of our responsibilities in this regard.