Climate Change and Biodiversity: Food Security

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in sending our best wishes and prayers to Her Majesty the Queen and the Royal Family.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on securing this debate and on her very powerful introduction. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, for her maiden speech, and what an excellent maiden speech it was. I am not sure it was only the Lord Convener who needed her previous title to be explained, but thank you for that. The noble Baroness’s expertise will be hugely appreciated in this House.

I want to focus on the impact on developing countries, and I declare my interest as co-chair of APPGs on Africa, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Some 38 years ago, aged 14, I sat down and watched the famous broadcast by Michael Buerk from northern Ethiopia which brought the world’s attention to the catastrophe that was going on in that region. As many noble Lords know, that inspired many people; it created Band Aid and Live Aid, and a whole movement to try to change things.

As a precocious 14 year-old, at the time of EU intervention in stocks and the grain mountains, butter mountains and wine lakes, I felt, along with many others, the outrage that people were starving in parts of Africa when we were awash with plenty. Perhaps unlike most other 14 year-olds, I decided that I was the only person who could solve this, and for complicated reasons—I will not go into them now; I do not have the time—I ran away from home to Ethiopia. I arrived in Addis Ababa, and I quickly discovered, as your Lordships may not be surprised to hear, that the demand for totally unskilled 14-year-old English kids was zero, and that Ethiopia at that time, under a Marxist military dictatorship, was a pretty scary place to be.

Thankfully, I was rescued from that situation by an Anglican clergyman. He gave me some very good advice: first, to go home, although he was kind enough to let me stay there for a little while. He also told me, “Do not lose interest in these issues, because they will be ongoing, but go and get yourself some skills”. I took his advice and subsequently worked as a teacher in Zimbabwe, and in the first democratic Parliament in South Africa.

One of the tragedies is that, today, we are again facing a perilous situation in Ethiopia and the Horn, which is driven by climate factors but exacerbated by conflict. Large parts of the world are facing acute food insecurity. The World Food Programme tells us that it is delivering more food aid at present than it has in the whole of its 60-year history. A study published earlier this year in the Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism on tackling protein-calorie malnutrition during world crises highlights the fact that 54% of children are malnourished, while 1.9 billion people are overweight or obese. The statistics around malnutrition show that 462 million people are underweight. In the most vulnerable population, that of children under five, 45 million are wasted and 149 million stunted. We know that that point in life, between ages one and five in particular, is crucial to the future life chances of those children and the all impacts this has on future economic development in those societies.

The acute crisis in food security, driven by climate and biodiversity loss but exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and Russian aggression against Ukraine, is creating a terrifying situation in the world. I was in Sudan a couple of months ago, and the fear of what is coming is palpable. I spoke to the new South African high commissioner in London yesterday, and the impact that the situation is having on household budgets here is of course terrifying, but in places with much more vulnerable populations and economies, it is absolutely terrifying. We have sadly chosen this time to cut our aid budget massively, slashing the nutrition budget by 80%. That is a tragedy to me, because one thing I learned when I was in Ethiopia is that however precocious or determined you are, you cannot change the world on your own. But you can change it if you stand with other people and campaign with them.

One of the things I did when I came back from Ethiopia was to get involved with many other people—across all parties and none, from the faith communities, et cetera—in arguing for us to play our part in sharing some of our wealth with other parts of the world. I was delighted that, during the coalition Government, we reached that 0.7% target. We did much good, not just with the money but with the expertise that DfID developed in issues such as nutrition and food security. Sadly, we are losing that, and that is a tragedy.

It sometimes seems like we have just noticed climate change, because we had temperatures of 43 degrees and there were wildfires in California, and realised that something is happening to the climate. Something has been happening to the climate for a long time. Talk to people in the climate-vulnerable countries—Zimbabwe is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries on earth—which have suffered over many years some devastating impacts, such as waters drying up. Rivers in the rural area where I used to teach were no longer functioning. There was also a terrible cyclone in east of the country driven by climate change. This is not something new; it is something that has been happening for a while and we have to get a grip on it.

We have had much focus on climate, rightly, but it is very important that we also focus on biodiversity. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and others have said, they are intrinsically linked and we cannot tackle one without the other. Indeed, all three issues are intrinsically linked.

The noble Baroness, Lady Willis, made an important point, which I hope I have got right: nine out of 400 vascular plants are responsible for the majority of the staple foods that we rely on and, in the face of climate change and the need to build resilience, we have to develop the genetic diversity of crops. It is critical.

The noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, made a very powerful point about the situation in Pakistan, where flooding has been going on since August, if not before, and noted its impacts on people and food security.

We face many challenges. What can we do? The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, gave us some hope about approaches to farming which can help deliver food security and restore biodiversity. There are many initiatives. The Food and Land Use Coalition has put out a 10-point transition plan about how we need to deal with these things holistically. The most important thing we have to do is act on the things we know how to do. The Climate Change Committee has told us many of the things we need to do in the UK and we know many of the things we have to do in the world.

We also all know that story about the frog which, if put in a pan of cold water that is heated up to boiling point, allegedly will not jump out. We probably also know that frogs are not that stupid and they will jump out. However, that story still appears to be true; it is just that it is about humans. We have been watching what has been going on with the climate and biodiversity and we have just sat in the pan and let it get hotter and hotter. We have to jump out now and start to act seriously, in line with the crisis that we face.

Sewage Pollution

Lord Oates Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

I understand that my right honourable friend, the new Secretary of State, Ranil Jayawardena, has met representatives of water companies today, on his first day in office. If it was not today, it will be tomorrow. It is an absolute priority.

The noble Baroness talks about monitoring as though it is part of the solution. She is absolutely right—it is—but, as a Water Minister more than a decade ago, I was stunned to realise that we knew about only 5% of storm overflow. That is now 90% and, by the end of this year, we will know about every one and they will be able to be monitored in real-time by individuals, NGOs, politicians and local residents, which will make a huge difference.

We have published our storm overflows plan, which has ambitions to radically reduce storm overflows. She asked when that will be ended. It cannot be ended. Our sewage system has been created around storm overflows since Victorian times, but it can be dramatically reduced and its impact nullified in many areas.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

Does the Minister recognise that huge amounts of these sewage discharges are not storm overflows but discharges made in the course of general practice and not as a result of storms, which is what the overflows are supposed to be there for? Does he think it right that, at the time of these scandalous discharges into our rivers, lakes and coastal waters, water companies have made £2.8 billion in profits, provided £1 billion in dividends and given top executives 20% pay rises and 60% in bonuses? When are the Government going to get a grip on this and act against this filthy greed?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Government are acting resolutely on this matter. The noble Lord will know that we recently passed the Environment Act, when those who supported the then Bill voted to bring in the most dramatic and determined measures ever seen in this country to tackle this problem. Some have decided to use this in a political campaign that is 180 degrees from the truth, saying that MPs voted to allow wastewater to be dumped in our rivers. That has been happening since Victorian times.

What is happening is unacceptable. We now have the toughest regulations; they are much tougher than when we were in the EU. We will make sure not only that we reduce and, where possible, end the release of sewage into our bathing waters, rivers and oceans but that we make water companies responsible. We now have measures that this Government have brought in through the regulator to allow it to link the performance of those water companies, and how they remunerate their senior executives, with their performance in relation to what we as a Government and a society expect of them.

Water Companies: Environmental Pollution

Lord Oates Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend will be pleased to know that we are undertaking a review of the case for implementing Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act. We will report on this in September, and I hope that will bring my noble friend to the realisation that the Government are determined to act on it.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that over the past two years water company bosses have paid themselves a staggering £27 million in bonuses, during which time they have been responsible for 772,009 spills of raw sewage over a period of 5,751,524 hours? Is it not time to outlaw these outrageous bonuses and make water company bosses pay the price of polluting our rivers and beaches?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The fines, which have amounted to record sums in recent years, can be paid out of water companies’ income only and cannot be downloaded on to the customer. The Government have taken unprecedented measures to bring into balance the remuneration of water company executives. Ofwat has made it clear that water companies must be transparent about how executive pay and dividends align to the delivery of services to customers, including environmental performance.

Sewage Disposal in Rivers and Coastal Waters

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Oates]

To move that this House takes note of the impact of the current sewage disposal rates in rivers and coastal waters and the responsibility of water companies to alleviate these impacts.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, in opening this debate I pay tribute to those who have done so much to highlight the scandal of raw sewage discharges into our lakes and rivers and on to our beaches, particularly Feargal Sharkey, whose tireless campaigning, alongside thousands of people up and down our country, has kept the issue in the headlines and the pressure on the water companies and the Government.

I also acknowledge the role of the national and local media in bringing these issues to public attention, the efforts of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and Peers from across the House, and their leadership on this issue during the debates on the Environment Act and subsequently. Most of all, I pay heartfelt tribute to my late and greatly missed noble friend Lord Chidgey, whose passionate advocacy for the protection of our precious chalk streams was an inspiration to me and to so many others.

I suppose that we cannot blame colleagues if they are somewhat distracted from today’s debate by the farcical Conservative psychodrama playing out up the road in Downing Street. Some may feel that it could not be more appropriate that we are discussing the subject of sewage disposal today. Certainly, it is instructive to note that in the scandal of our polluted waterways also lies the story of a failure of leadership of both government and corporations—a story in which private interests have been put ahead of the public interest, and institutional failure has led to a collapse in public confidence.

The scale of the sewage crisis afflicting our rivers and coastal waterways is staggering to comprehend. In 2021, the water companies were responsible for 368,966 spills, during which raw sewage and untreated wastewater was dumped into aquatic environments for a total of 2,650,290 hours. Even those staggering figures are an underestimate, because over a quarter of storm overflows had no monitors or monitors that were faulty or non-functioning.

This is having a devastating impact on nature. England is home to 85% of the earth’s chalk streams—rare and precious habitats that the Government and water companies should surely recognise they have a particular duty to protect. Instead, they are allowing them to be devastated by raw sewage outflows. My late noble friend Lord Chidgey raised this issue during our scrutiny of the Environment Act, highlighting

“the deterioration of our chalk streams through appalling neglect, to the extent that many see streams’ diverse ecosystems under severe threat to their very survival.”—[Official Report, 13/9/21; col. 1193.]

He talked about his work with organisations across the south-east of England, and from Hertfordshire to the north to Kent in the east and Dorset in the west. These organisations represent thousands of people who are all deeply concerned about the threats to our unique chalk streams.

I am lucky enough to live about a mile away from the Hogsmill river, one of those rare and precious chalk streams in south-west London. On 26 May last year, Judge Francis Sheridan fined Thames Water £4 million for what he described as the “utterly disgusting” pollution caused by Thames Water when untreated sewage was discharged into the Hogsmill river and a local park. The discharge occurred because of a night-time power failure at the local sewage works. Over a period of five hours almost 50 alarms went off, which should have immediately led to an engineer being sent to the treatment works to fix the problem—but every one of those alarms went unchecked and ignored. As a result, 79 million litres of sludge escaped, which took 30 people over a month to clean up and caused huge damage to local wildlife and much distress to the local community,

Although the power failure may not have been the water company’s fault, the lack of investment in back-up generation and the company’s failure to respond to the alarms most certainly was. The judge in this case was no stranger to Thames Water’s record of polluting waterways. Earlier in 2021, he fined it £2.3 million for equipment failures at a sewage treatment plant in Oxfordshire in 2016, which killed thousands of fish and other water life. Four years earlier, Thames Water was prosecuted for illegally allowing huge amounts of untreated sewage to enter the Thames in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in 2013 and 2014. Judge Sheridan found that Thames Water had demonstrated

“a continual failure to report incidents”,

which he described as

“a shocking and disgraceful state of affairs”.

Although the judge imposed a record-breaking £20 million fine, this represented just two weeks of Thames Water’s profits at the time.

Of course, Thames Water is not alone in discharging raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters. Every water company does it, and indeed much of the huge volume of untreated wastewater and raw sewage that they discharge is done so perfectly legally, despite its devastating impact on the environment. As the summer holidays approach and people head to the beach, parents will be horrified to learn of the level of discharges into our coastal waters. Last year, the water companies were collectively responsible for 24,822 spills into the sea over a period of 161,623 hours, including one spill on to Ilfracombe Wildersmouth beach by South West Water that lasted 1,883 hours, and a spill by United Utilities at Morecambe that lasted a breathtaking 5,352 hours.

Of course, many contributing factors and actors have led to this appalling state of affairs in both coastal and inland waters, but the water companies cannot escape their central share of the blame. Their failure to invest sufficiently in reducing these outflows comes at the same time as having paid eye-watering sums in pay and bonuses to their senior executives. Anglian Water, responsible for 21,351 spills lasting a total of 194,594 hours in 2021, provided a total remuneration package to its chief executive of more than £2 million—nearly 100 times the pay of one of its meter technicians. Northumbrian Water, responsible for 220,560 hours of discharges, provided more modest remuneration—a mere £628,000—but this was still more than 20 times the starting salary of one of its wastewater production operators. Severn Trent, responsible for 461,135 hours of discharges, provided remuneration of more than £2.8 million to its CEO—again, more than 100 times the starting salary of one of its water treatment operatives. Southern Water: 160,984 hours of discharges; remuneration to CEO, more than £1 million. South West Water: 351,875 hours of discharges; remuneration to CEO, £863,000. Thames Water: 163,000 hours of discharges; remuneration to CEO, £1.2 million. United Utilities, responsible for 540,000 hours of discharges, including that 5,000-hour spill at Morecambe: remuneration to CEO, £2.9 million—112 times the pay of one of its process operators. Wessex Water: 151,258 hours of discharges; CEO remuneration, £520,000. Finally, Yorkshire Water: 406,000 hours of discharges; total remuneration for the CEO, more than £1.3 million.

In total, water company executives have paid themselves nearly £27 million in bonuses over the past two years, while pumping sewage into waterways 1,000 times a day. The greed is gobsmacking, the multiples of their salary over that of crucial employees shocking, and the disparity between their renumeration and performance regarding our natural environment utterly staggering. By way of comparison, the chief executive of NHS England is paid somewhere in the region of £260,000 to run an organisation with a turnover in excess of £130 billion. The largest of these water companies, by contrast, has a total annual revenue of around £2 billion. This is of course part of a much wider scandal of excessive corporate pay and ever-increasing pay differentials between top executives and the staff they employ. It is particularly jarring that such rewards are being provided at companies that daily pollute our rivers and marine environment.

At the heart of this scandal is not only a failure of leadership in the private sector, but a failure of government. The institutions charged with enforcing environmental protection go underresourced and targets for improvements are unambitious—and all the while developers continue to have a legal right to connect wastewater to the system, regardless of its constraints, instead of the Government imposing tough requirements on sustainable urban drainage. The Government need to get a grip and they should start by showing a red card to water company bosses and adopting Liberal Democrat plans for a sewage bonus ban, which would stop water company executives being paid a penny in bonuses until our waterways are protected from sewage dumps.

The public have had enough of their rivers, lakes and coastal waters being despoiled by a mixture of government inaction, regulatory failure and corporate irresponsibility and greed. It is well past time for the Government and their agencies to act decisively and bring an end to this sewage scandal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this very informative debate, and I thank the Minister for his response and his evident passion for this issue. Personally, I think this debate came at a good time, but for those who disagree, such as the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, I unreservedly lay the blame for the timing at the feet of my Chief Whip.

I also want to pay tribute to the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I was very pleased, to be one of the signatories to his amendment to the Environment Bill. I fully recognise that there are many factors beyond the responsibilities of the water companies, but they are central to this.

As a liberal, I have a firm belief in markets and competition driving innovation and public benefit, and I come at these issues from a different point of view from that of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. But in the water industry there is no market and no competition, there is monopoly, and as a liberal I am totally against those who exploit monopolies to gouge the public and enrich themselves, particularly when they are doing so at the expense of our precious natural environment.

Ownership is a bit of a distraction. The issue is appropriate and tough regulation, a sewage bonus ban on the water companies, and, if necessary, a cap on excessive CEO pay until their statutory duties are met. I ask the Minister to revisit this issue of bonuses and remuneration and to get all the water companies to start taking their responsibilities seriously so that we can end this sewage scandal.

Motion agreed.

Water Companies: Sewage Discharge Monitoring

Lord Oates Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

From memory, I think that Schedule 3 refers to water companies being statutory consultees. I am very happy to follow that up with my noble friend in the near future.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that last year South West Water discharged raw sewage into rivers and beachfronts 43,000 times over a period of 350,000 hours, including for 3,709 hours into the River Otter in Honiton, for 1,872 hours into the River Exe in Tiverton, and for 1,482 hours into the River Axe in Axminster? Will the Government end this scandal by imposing a sewage tax on water company profits to fund necessary upgrades, and will they ban water company bosses claiming bonuses until that is done?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I think that was a very good choice of geography. The noble Lord will accept that this is an absolute priority for this Government. People who live in that part of the world, in places such as Tiverton and Honiton, are right to want a Government who will clean this up, but who have a plan to do it without raising their bills to unaffordable levels. That Government are this one.

Climate Change

Lord Oates Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord is very experienced in this whole area of adaptation. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has introduced a new requirement on overheating into the building regulations to ensure that new residential buildings are built for a warming climate. The new requirement prioritises addressing overheating through passive measures, including reducing solar gains and sufficient removal of heat.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware of the warning in yesterday’s report that increasing severe impacts to humans, nature and the climate can be expected as global temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees centigrade. Will he agree to meet me and other supporters of the climate and ecology emergency Bill to discuss how the UK can use its COP 26 presidency to lead by example and deliver a joined-up strategy to restore nature and limit warming to 1.5 degrees?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My colleagues at Defra—my noble friend Lord Goldsmith, who led on this at COP, and my colleague Jo Churchill, who leads on climate change adaptation—and I would certainly be happy to meet the noble Lord to explain how we hope we are still on track for 1.5 degrees, while ensuring that we adapt to all the risks in the report we are responding to that we could face in the coming decades.

National Food Strategy Report

Lord Oates Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend is very knowledgeable on these matters, and she is absolutely right. Soya grown where rainforests used to exist and which may have also been the subject of many processes to make it palatable will be, by contrast, worse for the environment and the individual than locally produced meat from grass-fed animals that may be not only part of a healthy, balanced diet but good for the environment.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as set out in the register. Given the Climate Change Committee’s advice that we will need to reduce meat consumption as part of efforts to tackle climate change, will Defra’s response to the national food strategy include a commitment to sustainable alternative proteins, including cultivated meat, and will it commit to streamlining the novel foods regulatory approval process to reflect the urgency of our need to find alternatives?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Government can encourage people to eat sensibly and promote good, balanced and healthy diets. The Government are not going to tell people what they should eat but will give them the information they need to have a healthy, balanced diet and provide the means by which vulnerable groups can have this. This will be in the food strategy, which will be published next year.