Brexit: Appointment of Joint Committee

Debate between Lord Robathan and Baroness Randerson

Wednesday 3rd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall try to concentrate on some factual points rather than opinions. In preparation for this debate, I looked back at previous Brexit debates. What struck me was how the situation and our expectations have deteriorated in the past year or so. I was also struck by the airy promises and assurances I received from a succession of Ministers which are now manifestly unachievable. We have been through the phase where no deal was unthinkable, through that of accepting that it was a possibility for which preparation was important, and are now in the phase where it is the preferred choice of the majority of Conservative Party members and is therefore being positively promoted by leadership candidates.

I start by talking about transport. Our whole economy rests on the shoulders of our transport industry. Looking at the industry, it is obvious how complex the process of addressing the costs of no deal would be. Let us start with the cost to government in preparation. There have been more than 60 transport-related SIs, which will have involved thousands of hours of preparation. There will be a whole new wave of them, because quite a few refer to the original 29 March date and will therefore now have to be revised. Many of our agreements with the EU on transport are limited to extending the current system for a small number of months. Those months were specified—sometimes it was September; occasionally the end of the year—so all that will have to be looked at again.

Then there is the money spent in preparation for no deal. The most commonly cited of those preparations, of course, are the ferry-less ferry services. Initially £100 million was allocated for assisting ferry companies—including the one with no ships—to provide additional ferry services. Because of fundamental errors in the way the contract was written, it has ended up with the Department for Transport having to pay many tens of millions of pounds of compensation to a fourth ferry company and to Eurotunnel. Because the other contracts specified 29 March, they too had to be scrapped and the ferry companies compensated for not getting the business, and it is now starting all over again.

There are ongoing preparations to avoid massive lorry queues into Dover. You can see the impact of Operation Brock on the M20. The initial costs were given as £7 million, but it must be a great deal more than that because it is a permanent separation of lanes to create a lorry park—with, of course, an impact on local businesses because of delays and accidents that have occurred there. In fact, the whole Kent economy is impacted by this. Think, too, about the cost to HMRC of 300 million additional customs declarations per year for our ports.

Then there are the costs to industry; many will admit that their preparations cost millions of pounds. The Government’s estimate is that there will be an 87% reduction in cross-channel trade for three to six months after a no-deal Brexit. Think about the impact of that on Eurotunnel and the freight and ferry operations. Some 16,000 lorries per day go through Dover to Calais. The impact of the queues for that number of lorries is considerable. At the moment you simply need an EU operator’s licence to transport goods to Europe. No deal could well lead to hauliers having to rely on a system of permits, of which our quota is 4,000. There are 38,000 freight operators and 4,000 permits; think about the impact on our industry. Clearly, many small operators will go out of business.

I turn briefly to aviation, which is worth £52 billion per year to our economy. Fifty-four per cent of scheduled flights go to the EU. Some operators are already moving a chunk of their business abroad, with costs to our economy, to qualify for cabotage rights in future. There have been agreements between the EU and the UK, but they are not written in a way that would prevent them being swept away in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Going through an airport at the moment, it takes 25 seconds for a British passport and 90 seconds for a third-country passport to be inspected by EU border forces. If you multiply that up, the impact of the queues on airports means vast costs to our economy.

The automotive industry is already suffering badly. The tide of Japanese investment is already flowing out; it came here only because we were in the EU. Job losses have been announced for Swindon, Sunderland and Bridgend, but remember that 160,000 people are employed in the supply chain as well—those are the hidden jobs. There are also costs to us as individuals. The noble Lord, Lord Robathan, once told me that he could not remember the international driving permit ever having existed, but people are buying those permits at the moment.

[Lord Robathan]

How can I ever forget? I still have my international driving permit from about 1970.

Air and Water Pollution: Impact

Debate between Lord Robathan and Baroness Randerson

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Miller for initiating this debate, which has been truly fascinating and comprehensive in the range of speeches undertaken.

I start by saying a few words about water pollution. Many noble Lords have referred to the big strides taken in improvement in recent decades, most of which is due to EU standards. But those standards, as has been said, must be maintained and improved if we leave the EU; that cannot be used as an opportunity to reduce what we require. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, that talking about Brexit is not a party-political point. His own party is totally split on the issue. However, there is a fundamental point in it about standards on pollution.

[Lord Robathan]

I agree entirely. I had hoped we are on the right side in this. If the noble Baroness were to read the Secretary of State for the Environment’s comments, she will see that Michael Gove is absolutely ahead of the EU on this. She also said, “If we leave the EU”. The people voted to leave the EU and we are going to do so. Legally, we are going to leave the EU.

[Baroness Randerson]

We are a long way off it and have not got very far in the last year or so.

We take it for granted, as my noble friend Lord Jones pointed out, that we have access to clean drinking water when we turn on the tap. But that is not the case the world over and it is not the case with air quality. As we meet one standard on water quality, it is evident that other challenges arise. The right reverend Prelate referred to microplastic contamination and its impact, not just in the sea but on our water supply through the ingestion of microplastic beads. That demonstrates to me that we have to work in concert across the world, with other nations.

Rivers present a constant challenge because four out of five of our rivers in England and Wales fail to meet good ecological standards, although my noble friend Lord Lee pointed out the importance of the improvements. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, for his comments on marine pollution and for mentioning several campaigns on it. I also mention the work done by Sky News, which has run a long-standing campaign on plastic pollution in the sea.

Many speakers have referred to the obvious importance of the impact of pollution on health, particularly air pollution as an insidious threat. Many organisations are working on this now: the BMA, the British Lung Foundation, the British Heart Foundation and the Royal College of Physicians. Friends of the Earth has also done a great deal of work on this. I want to concentrate on transport because that accounts for a third of our NOx emissions and a fifth of our particulate emissions. That is an average across Britain but if you look at the figures for urban areas, you see that in many of them it accounts for two-thirds of air pollution. We have the worst urban air quality in Europe.

There is a reasonable level of public awareness of the link between nitrogen dioxide emissions and asthma. However, as noble Lords, including my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Jolly, have said, many other problems can be ascribed to this including premature births, low birth weight, child mortality, the development of children’s lungs and the decline of lung function in older people. Diesel emissions also cause cancer. We accept the evidence and take action in our personal lives to deal with the link between smoking and cancer, but we are at a much earlier level of public awareness of the impact of poor air quality.

It is much more difficult for people—in particular, children—to avoid poor air quality than it is for them to avoid the impact of smoking, unless they have the misfortune to live in a family where people smoke indoors. Children cannot avoid the pollution because they hold their parents’ hands and are taken across the road at the level of exhaust pipes and there are so many cars idling outside schools. We have a great deal of work to do. Will the Minister says how the Government are going to address the public health emergency we face and raise public awareness of it? It is important that that is done because the measures that need to be taken will not be accepted unless there is public awareness. When people bought diesel cars—I was one of them—they did so with the best of intentions. Tackling climate change was a top priority, and people realised the impact of nitrogen dioxide and particulates from diesel vehicles only later. Since then, the EU has had a key role in upgrading standards. I take issue with the noble Earl, Lord Caithness: it was not the EU that let us down about diesel vehicles; it was Volkswagen, which tried to evade EU standards.

The Government’s response to this public health emergency has been totally inadequate. That is not just my view; it is the view of the courts. In February, the EU Commission gave the UK a final warning over its failure to meet targets on air pollution. Reference has already been made to the fact that the Government spent £370,000 trying to avoid publishing their plan, but they have now published a third version of it and it is still totally inadequate.

I shall now mention some of the things that the Government should be doing to achieve a comprehensive action plan to improve air quality. We have to change driving habits, and we have to empower local authorities to take action in communities. That is needed at local and national level as well as internationally. Some actions will take time and be expensive; other actions are inexpensive and can be done immediately, such as having far more monitoring sites and air pollution indication signage in pollution hotspots. That would alert the public and encourage people to apply a no-idling rule outside schools, for example. This sort of thing is already being trialled in London, and it is very easy, quick and efficient to do. In turn, this information should be used as the basis for ultra-low emission zones, another thing that London is introducing.

King’s College’s research has shown that London breached its air pollution limit just five days into 2017, so it certainly needs ultra-low emission zones. In the country as a whole, only six out of 43 monitoring zones in the UK were compliant with legal NOx limits. We welcome the Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill but we need a much broader Bill that includes a well-targeted diesel scrappage scheme.

There are schemes in the Bill to improve the number of charging points, but there is no reference, for example, to using lamp-posts as locations for them. Diesel buses, hydrogen buses and all these things need to be addressed by the Government in order to have a much more comprehensive approach to this problem.