Queen’s Speech

Lord Oates Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his opening speech, and I look forward to the maiden speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Morse. As the Minister’s speech highlighted, today’s debate covers a cornucopia of issues. But hanging over all of them is the climate and ecological emergency which threatens every area of our lives and requires a response with every policy lever at the disposal of our Government.

Last week, in another context, the Minister for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, reminded us of Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi’s wise words when he warned that the future is decided by what you do today. That is both instructive and alarming because, while the Government are happy to promise the world tomorrow, in this Queen’s Speech today they propose to do nothing, in effect, to tackle the climate crisis.

In the year that we host what may turn out to be the most critical conference in the struggle to contain global warming, the Government’s legislative programme is silent as the grave on the subject. That matters, because every year we delay taking the required action ensures that the measures we will have to adopt in the future will be that much more difficult. The Government need to wake up to the fact that the one thing we do not have is the luxury of time.

Carbon Tracker, an NGO expert in this field, has calculated that, at the current burn rate, the world will exceed its carbon budget within 15 years and that, if we burn all the fossil fuels in known reserves, the world will have no prospect of keeping within its Paris targets. Yet still our financial institutions continue to finance exploration for new oil and gas reserves which, if exploited, can bring us only to catastrophe. However, in this Queen’s Speech the only legislative proposal relating to any aspect of the energy sector is the draft downstream oil resilience Bill, which seeks to provide resilience for the oil sector rather than the planet.

It is astonishing. It would be easy—but, I suspect, unproductive—to spend the afternoon criticising the Government for their lack of action, so I will try to be a little more constructive instead and suggest some ideas for the Government to take up.

First, they could introduce the climate and ecological emergency Bill proposed by a civil society coalition with cross-party support, which asks the UK to take responsibility for its fair share of greenhouse gas emissions, actively restore biodiverse habitats in the UK and set and implement a strategy to tackle the climate and ecological emergency.

Secondly, the Government would be very welcome to take forward my green finance capital requirements Bill, which would properly price the macroprudential risk that further fossil fuel exploration and exploitation poses to the entire financial system, not to mention the planet as a whole.

Thirdly, they should bring forward a new energy Bill to set the framework for the smart and resilient generation and distribution systems that will be needed, as we place ever-increasing demand on the electricity sector. This framework will need to be capable of facilitating the expansion of decentralised and community power generation and providing the incentives to deliver the innovation to expand our energy storage capacity.

In 2013, when Ed Davey, as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, piloted the last Energy Act through Parliament, 40% of electricity was generated from coal and just 7% from wind. Last year, coal accounted for just 1.3% of power generation and renewables accounted for well over 40%. We need similar radical thinking today further to transform our energy sector and to allow zero-carbon fuels, such as green hydrogen, to play their full role in decarbonising industry and the heavy transport sector.

We also need significantly to reduce wasteful and unnecessary energy consumption in transport and buildings. On transport, we welcome plans to improve and decarbonise bus services, but we have concerns about how the money will be deployed, which my noble friend Lord Bradshaw will say more about. This Queen’s Speech should have gone much further and set out a clear route map for the wider decarbonisation of the transport system. It should have announced the restoration of differential vehicle excise duty, depending on vehicle emissions, and introduced steps to make electric vehicles affordable to those on middle and lower incomes, including measures to ensure that motorists are not fleeced by on-street charge point operators, where electricity costs can be up to six times higher than for those who can charge their vehicles from their domestic electricity supply. It should also have abandoned the consultation on reduced air passenger duty and instead introduced a ban on fossil-fuel-powered domestic flights between points where the train journey is less than two and a half hours. This would both reduce emissions from domestic flights and incentivise the development of non-fossil fuel aviation.

My noble friend Lord Stunell will speak in more detail about the Government’s failure to tackle emissions from buildings. I simply note that, despite all the hype about building back better and a manifesto commitment to invest £9.2 billion in the energy efficiency of homes, schools and hospitals, the Queen’s Speech and the Prime Minister’s accompanying letter had literally not one word to say on tackling greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, which represent 19% of total UK emissions.

We propose a green buildings Bill that would require all new buildings to be built to the zero-carbon standard, with the energy component rising to Passivhaus standard by 2025. All existing homes in the social sector would be required to reach at least energy performance certificate band B by 2025 and all other homes and non-domestic buildings to reach the same band by 2030.

An effective planning framework will also be critical in tackling climate change and biodiversity loss, but the proposals for the planning Bill have nothing to say on either issue, instead riding roughshod over local democratic decision-making. If the Government actually want to see more houses built, they need to recognise that it will not be achieved by stripping powers from local authorities. The facts are clear: we have never succeeded and will never succeed in delivering the 300,000 homes annually that the Government have set as a target without a significant municipal housing programme so, instead of curtailing local authority powers, as the Government propose, they should restore their ability to finance, build and maintain large-scale social housing programmes in their communities.

In line with the Government’s climate policy, the planning Bill should also have at its heart a requirement for all planning decisions to have regard to the 2050 net-zero objective. We will be happy to assist the Government with an amendment to this effect when the Bill comes before Parliament.

The Queen’s Speech should also have set out new commitments to protect and enhance biodiversity and improve land use to reduce climate impacts. While we look forward to the long-overdue Environment Bill coming to our House, there is no mention in the Queen’s Speech of biodiversity or the major shifts in land use that will be required to reduce the carbon footprint of agriculture, which is currently responsible for about 10% of our greenhouse gas emissions. There is no Bill to provide for the protection of peatland, and there is no clarity about whether the environmental land management scheme will be used to transform land-use practices to tackle climate change or whether they will simply sustain business largely as usual.

There is no doubt that the Government face many complex and challenging issues but, reading this Queen’s Speech, you would be hard put to believe that it represents the programme of a Government who have set themselves some of the most demanding climate objectives of any country on earth, so I have this nagging worry: do they really mean what they say? Do they really have the stomach for the difficult decisions that are required or are these climate commitments to be as fleeting as the 2019 manifesto pledge to

“proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development”?

Will these climate commitments evaporate as easily into the dark winter nights that follow COP 26, accompanied with the same sort of excuses: “The circumstances have changed” or “We are doing more, in any event, than others”? Will we squander our global leadership on this issue just as casually and with as little care for the consequences to others as we have done on overseas development aid? I hope that my cynicism is misplaced, but if the Government are to dispel such concerns, they will have to move rapidly from the realm of targets to the sphere of action.

This brings me back to Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi, who chose his words advisedly. He told us that the future is decided by what we do today, not by what we say today or the distant targets that we set today but by the actions that we take. By that standard, this Queen’s Speech falls tragically and woefully short.