Climate Change Committee: Carbon Budget Report

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 16th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I agree with the noble Lord that we need to engage not only experts or early movers in this technology but the public as a whole. He makes some good points, and we will engage the full resources of Government to make sure that this message gets across.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I chair Pendle council’s climate emergency working group. An additional 100 pages, as part of this huge document, are about local authorities:

“For local authorities, this does not entail focused emissions cuts”—


this is government policy—

“in separate sectors, but means transforming whole places towards Net Zero, working with residents, communities and businesses to deliver the right changes and investments for the area.”

That seems fairly obvious to some of us, but the report says that

“there is no overall plan for how local authorities fit into delivering Net Zero.”

Will the Government devote more attention to the need to bring local authorities together in this vital work?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord makes some good points. Local government is indeed a key partner in delivering net zero, and this Government are supporting it with a range of funding streams covering key decarbonisation areas such as transport and building. Local government bodies are, of course, key to leading transition in their areas, leading by example on their own estates, and supporting and enabling others to follow their campaigns.

Retail Sector: Unemployment

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Like the noble Baroness, I have seen the media reports. One hopes that they will have shamed many of those companies into action, doing what they can to make sure that their supply chains are robust and sustainable and that they do not indulge in the terrible practices that she has outlined.

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am speaking from Colne, a smaller town in Lancashire, where most of the high street consists of small, independently owned shops, many of which are in a disastrous situation. We do not want to close down our high street; we want to keep it going and expand it. What are the Government doing to make sure that these small shops, independently owned, will be able to survive and thrive after Covid?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am delighted to hear that the noble Lord is speaking up for Colne and for many other high streets, because they play a critical role in our smaller towns. We have brought forward £81.5 million from the £3.6 billion towns fund to kick-start local investment projects of the exact kind that he refers to. Of course, we have to accept that we cannot protect every job during this crisis, but we will help people to get through it and help them get back into work at the end of it.

Energy White Paper

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I know the noble Lord is a sceptic as regards large-scale nuclear power; we have said that we will enter negotiations with EDF on the Sizewell C project but it will be subject to full government regulatory and other approval. Of course, value for money will be crucial. In addition, as I said earlier, we will be advancing support for SMRs at the same time.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

Like my noble friend, and like the previous speaker, I am mystified by the Government’s obsession with large nuclear, which is going to be neither clean, safe, secure nor value for money. However, I want to ask about small modular reactors, which are the latest flavour of the month. How many does the Minister expect to be operating throughout the world within the next five years? What is the timescale for actual, practical design of a British version, and when would he expect manufacturing to start?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Of course, AMRs have not yet been commercially deployed anywhere in the world and we are at the earliest stages of research and development, but we recognise their potential for decarbonisation. The Government have ambitions to deploy an AMR demonstrator, a prototype reactor, by the early 2030s. Additionally, we will be allocating £385 million to support the development of both SMRs and AMRs.

Rolls-Royce

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they (1) have had, and (2) propose to have, with Rolls-Royce about that company’s plans to transfer the manufacture of wide-chord fan blades to Singapore; and what steps they are taking to ensure that that company maintains advanced manufacturing jobs in the United Kingdom.

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

My Lords, the Government are in regular dialogue with Rolls-Royce and will continue to engage to understand what more can be done to save jobs and capabilities across the United Kingdom. The Government are supporting the aviation and aerospace sectors with around £9.5 billion in grants, loans and export guarantees over the next three years, which will help to create new, well-paid jobs for decades to come.

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

Do the Government understand that this is a catastrophe for high-tech manufacturing in the UK; for the retention of a skilled workforce—some of whom went to Singapore to help set up there on the promise that it would not affect their own jobs; for the critical mass of the aerospace industry of east Lancashire, with some 22,000-plus workers and four to five times as many ancillary workers; and for the future of the small north-of-England town of Barnoldswick, which locals call Barlick, which was the birthplace of the jet engine and is a genuine centre of engineering excellence? Is it not time for the Government to take more action and to take back control?

Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Obligations of Hospitality Undertakings) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Friday 9th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, as we have come to expect, this has been a two-level debate, talking about the hospitality regulations we have in front of us, but with a number of noble Lords taking advantage of it, not unreasonably, to make general points about where we are now with the plethora of confused and confusing regulations that we must deal with, and our being told that the whole system will be thrown up in the air next week when we get a new, three-tier system. We do not know quite how it will work or when we might get what will presumably be a new, all-encompassing regulation to bring it in. As far as hospitality is concerned, I support the comments made by my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Benjamin, and many other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie. They are all very important points, to which I hope the Minister will apply his attention.

I want to pick up on one or two other matters, moving away from hospitality except to quote what the Minister said at the beginning. He said that we can keep our hospitality venues open and that no one wants to return to lockdown. As the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, replied, we are already under considerable lockdown in many places, and what is being proposed for next week is a very substantial lockdown for hospitality in many areas. We have gone past “we can keep our hospitality venues open”. What will be done to support those forced to close, and how will that be decided? Which criteria will be used in different parts of the country under this new three-tier system?

I will briefly revert to two questions that I have asked in two recent debates on regulations, relating to enforcement in places that have two tiers of local authority, the county tier and the district tier. Many of the regulations specifically state that enforcement is a power at county, not district, level, but on the ground—in the communities, the towns—it is the district officers or environmental health officers, who a long time ago were called public health inspectors, who do the legwork and have the information and skills to do it. Yet they do not have the powers to make the fines and do the enforcement, so it must go back to county level, causing delays and difficulties. It is not clear to me in the regulations before us exactly who has these powers. I have asked different Ministers twice and now have a third Minister on the Government Front Bench. Can he take this away and look at whether, when the new three-tier regulations come in, it can be made clear that enforcement powers rest at both levels in two-tier local authority areas, so that the districts doing the work can get on and do the job?

We are to have a debate about the new north of England regulations on Monday. What prior parliamentary consultation will take place on what we understand will be a new, all-encompassing system, which presumably will come in an all-encompassing new regulation? What parliamentary approval will be required before this new nationwide, countrywide, England-wide system is brought in? Also, when the new system is brought in and we have three tiers—if that is what we get—what systems will there be for proper consultation with local authorities and people on the ground before they are allocated to one tier or another? Time and time again, as we have heard from noble Lords during this debate, consultation on what happens on the ground in different places has been and continues to be utterly inadequate. I continue to get complaints from authorities in Lancashire that they are being treated as agents of central government, not as proper partners.

A lot has been said in relation to hospitality about the statistics and where infection is coming from. Clearly, there are very different interpretations of this. It would help very much if the Government could issue a comprehensive and sensible explanation of the evidence of where they think infections are now being spread. Having said that, I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

Climate

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd April 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for introducing this short debate. I was thinking of talking about melting ice and the serious problems facing us and, after the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, which I do not agree with—I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb—I wish I had decided to do so. However, given the three-minute speech limit, I have decided to talk about something different: why the battle for public opinion on this matter has not yet been won. We have just heard an example of how it has not been won.

People have been conditioned to think of the natural environment, including climate, as a relatively benign thing which can be solved by technical fixes but this is not right. There are two reasons for this. One is that the climate of this planet has been relatively stable for some 6,000 or 8,000 years—perhaps a bit more. This has been absolutely crucial for the development of human existence as we know it. Farming settlements in the fertile crescent, the establishment of towns, trade—particularly in coastal towns and ports— learning, recreation and complex systems of government have led to relatively stable and complex societies, economics, geographies, networks and cultures. There is a general assumption that the environment is there and that it will be okay.

I also think that some people in academic circles and those who did A-levels and so on have an understanding of the natural world which is not quite as alarmist as it might be. Based on academic concepts from the 19th century onwards, natural change is an evolutionary and gradual, incremental thing. In biology, there was Darwinism and theories of evolution; there are geological concepts dating from pioneers such as Hutton, Playfair and Lyell, who were right at the time; there were geomorphological models based on the cycle of erosion developed by William Morris Davis; there were similar theories on climate and oceans and the structure of the continents; there are theories based on uniformitarianism—“The present is the key to the past”—associated with gradualism: that small incremental changes in climate and ecosystems, and all these other things, are the basis of change.

In the longer term, there is much truth in this, and it was a rational scientific alternative to ideas such as creationism, the great flood and other catastrophic ideas, but we all know of catastrophic changes. After all, the dinosaurs no longer rule the earth. At every physical scale—and scale is vital here—what pans out over time as gradual change often consists in practice of a vast number of catastrophic events, some small and some large, like landslides and the melting of ice. These can be global, continental and oceanic, regional, local and small. As human beings, we are at the bottom of the pyramid. Our civilisation and societies exist at small, local scales, and we are ourselves short-term people because we have not been here very long. Frankly, cata- strophic events, if we are not careful, will wipe us out.