Oil Spill: Poole Harbour

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Wednesday 29th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point, and I am not entirely sure what the precedent is in such circumstances. Undoubtedly, an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money is being spent with all the agencies I listed. I will have to reflect on that and talk to colleagues not only in my department but in those responsible for such facilities to see what the precedent is in the circumstances.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I chair the Bayelsa State Oil & Environmental Commission, which has been in operation for nearly three and a half years. The greatest pollution in the world is in the Niger Delta, and part of the problem is that some of the oil pipes are 50 years old. Recently, one of the pipes burst and had to be renewed, because if you do not replace them, you are sitting on a timebomb. I am very glad to hear about the principle that the polluter should pay. In the Niger Delta, Shell, BP, Agip and others have not been paying their polluting costs, and two cases are pending at the moment in the Supreme Court here. How can we be sure that the polluter will actually pay—and clean up, as well?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We are working very closely with the company here to get to the bottom of what caused this and make sure it does not happen again. The noble and right reverend Lord raises the issue of this kind of incident taking place on a much larger scale in other parts of the world. There are measures that should be taken through corporate governance to make sure that companies that are polluting are held responsible through clear ESG guidelines. That is a much wider and bigger debate, but I entirely understand the point he makes.

Lindisfarne Highly Protected Marine Conservation Area

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am lost for words.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in that the word “Lindisfarne” appears in my title. When this marine area was proposed, which would have caused a lot of the difficulty that the noble Lord, Lord Beith, talked about, he and I and the vicar of Lindisfarne consulted the people extensively. I was quite surprised that some locals thought that, by taking the title Baron Sentamu of Lindisfarne in the county of Northumberland, I had brought a curse to the island, so I am very glad that this afternoon I can go away without cursing anybody.

As it is a conservation area, will the same energy be put into ensuring that birds that come during their breeding season, particularly terns and others, and then go to north Africa, will continue to be protected? Secondly, the ferns on St Cuthbert’s, particularly the little one, are being eroded by global warming. What further work will the Government undertake to ensure that we do not lose those ferns?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble and right reverend Lord’s knowledge and understanding of this area and his support for the people who live there are appreciated. I had a letter from his successor, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, as well as letters from monks and many others, so I applaud the Church for its involvement in the consultation process. On his wider point, I entirely accept that there is an ongoing need for greater scientific understanding of what is going on. The value of our oceans in sequestering carbon is immense, and our understanding of blue carbon is increasing but not fast enough. In this area, some very valuable seagrass is deteriorating because of climate change and other factors, and we want to make sure that we are preserving it and, where possible, increasing it, because of its value to the environment.

Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 12th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

Seeing as my name has been mentioned, perhaps I ought to speak. I thought we were still on the two previous amendments. The difficulty I have with this is that Amendment 21 is really a continuation of Amendment 20, and Amendments 22 and 23 follow logically.

Let me just deal very quickly with this. Basically, what we are talking about here is the release of organisms into the environment, and the proof that we have done to those organisms what we what we said we were going to do. Of course, that particularly means looking at the phenotype of the animal, whether it is a normal animal and therefore not suffering in any kind of way, and at whether the editing has changed the genome in a way that is unexpected. Of course, the Minister mentioned off-target mutations, but that is only one thing that can occur with gene editing. Once the DNA is on a double-stranded split and there is a gap there, you can actually introduce foreign DNA—even human DNA; whatever is floating around in the laboratory. When we are doing very careful work in the lab with genetic material, we have to be scrupulously clean of the flow hoods and so on. Those things need to be considered, because they would be part of what is seemingly a simple procedure, but in reality there are really quite difficult safeguards. What I am really asking is whether the Government intend that there be some form of sequencing to see whether there have been mistakes, or some form of examining the genome of the animals after we have done the work required.

To my mind, there are two issues here. One, of course, is the need to get better data on the effect of the gene editing, wherever it is done, and, in particular, of gene editing in general. That will help the research. If we really want to promote a market, we need to show that we are what we promised to be: a leading scientific organisation in this country, doing this sort of stuff at the top level. That is important. The other issue, of course, is protecting the environment. Clearly, release of organisms that turn out to be not what we expect, and which would have the ability to produce progeny, is risking things further. That is basically the reason for all these amendments, but Amendment 21 expresses my main concern: to ensure that we have done what we promised to do, and if we have not, to find what went wrong so that we can deal with it.

The primary question of privacy of the information has to be discussed by us, but it is deliberately not in this amendment at the moment. There are pros and cons for doing that. There does not necessarily have to be openness, but there must be a proper register of the information. We may well not get the work done if we do not have complete confidentiality, although science is never done best when it is confidential. On the whole, openness has been described, in the general information about the Bill, to be an issue in it, and transparency is a word mentioned by the Government. In the interest of transparency, this amendment may be required.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, when I practised law before I started practising law and grace together, I was of the view that any lawyer enshrines into legislation an agreed public policy. Here, the public policy in Amendment 19 to Clause 3 is that really, if you are to develop these organisms, they must be

“for or in connection with one or more of the following purposes”.

The purposes are explained. The Minister has to work out clearly what the public policy is that he is trying to enshrine here, because any general knows that it is no good launching out into a battle when there are no soldiers coming behind you. One of those purposes here is to try to help the public to understand why this is being done. It is not just for money—although that, of course, is important—and it is not just because we think that science has developed and there is no control over it. At the end of the day, it is about the fact that we want to get our purposes to work out and progress. I hope that the Minister will see this as helpful in stating what the public policy is, why this is being done, and what areas may in future be brought into being.

Of course, I regret that the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, was stuck in Scotland and therefore could not be here, because, under Clause 3, if all those things that are supposed not to be let out are let out, what will be the sanction?

Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment Committee Report

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I am thankful to Members of your Lordships’ House who sent me their best wishes when I was created, by Her Majesty the Queen, Baron Sentamu of Lindisfarne in the County of Northumberland and of Masooli in the Republic of Uganda.

“Masooli” means “plentiful place of maize”; it is the village where I was born and grew up. Today is my birthday, and it would have been Prince Philip’s 100th birthday. He rests in peace and will rise in glory. Lindisfarne needs no explanation, save to say that Aidan of Lindisfarne’s great passion was to help everyone in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, especially the poor, to encounter Jesus Christ, His compassion and His friendliness. He greatly valued education and the development of young people.

Therefore, I am honoured to be delivering my “maiden” speech in this debate on Hungry for Change. I thank the Committee and all those who worked hard to bring this to our attention. Already three of its members have spoken and I associate myself with their views. This report covers many burning issues facing us today of poverty, social justice, and education.

There comes a time in the life of a nation when a great crisis challenges a thoughtful Government to reimagine not only their own vision of themselves as a governing body but their vision of the kind of nation that they hope to govern in future. It is an opportunity for radical reassessment, calling for courage, imagination, and a readiness to set in motion practical actions which will have transformative outcomes in serving the well-being and flourishing of all. The United Kingdom is not short of people who are hungry for change and have good ideas, but it is short in discerning the ways of achieving sustainable change and stability. This report hints at it. Therefore, let us keep to task. I am very grateful for it.

In the first half of the last century, the crises we faced were two world wars, a pandemic, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The result was a brave and radical reimagining, with some of the blessings that we enjoy today: the development of the “welfare state”—a phrase coined by Archbishop William Temple, instead of Beveridge’s “social insurance”—the great liberalising Education Act, and a National Health Service, the continued safety of which has been a key part of our Covid-19 response.

In the early years of this century, we have experienced two crises which offered similar moments for reflection, action, and reform. It could be argued that the financial crisis of 2007-08 was an opportunity missed for radical reform. I believe that austerity was the wrong medicine, and that it was applied for far too long. The second crisis is the Covid-19 pandemic. May we all learn the lessons and act on them. I am glad that our National Health Service is now the National Health Service and social care—so a full implementation of the Dilnot report is a must.

Thankfully, no one now talks about how there is no “money tree”. The furlough scheme and support for people’s livelihoods has lifted our gaze to the horizon of hope. We are all in this together, in word and in deed, in ordering our society, our politics, our economy, with well-being and human flourishing as our aim. As the late Lord Jonathan Sacks said in the introduction to his book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times:

“Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal democratic politics alone. It needs a third element: morality, a concern for the welfare of others, an active commitment to justice and compassion, a willingness to ask not just what is good for me but what is ‘good for all of us together’. It is about ‘Us’, not ‘Me’; about ‘We’, not ‘I’.”


He goes on to say that we need some kind of moral community

“for there to be a society as opposed to a state. States function on the basis of power. But societies function on the basis of a shared vision of what unites the people who comprise it. Societies are moral communities. That was Lord Devlin's argument at the beginning of the great liberalisation debate in 1957.”

Even before the financial challenges and loss of livelihoods over the past year due to the various lockdown restrictions, the statistics for food banks told their own story of poverty, hunger, income inequality and the need to change. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic is a global challenge, food poverty is truly global, affecting the third world here, too, in the United Kingdom. Poverty—food poverty in particular—long predates the problems of the pandemic. It is good that the committee has already produced this comprehensive study of the elements which underlie the problems and is making serious proposals for change and reform. For example, paragraphs 68 and 69 of the report refer to the staggering increase in food bank use. This crisis of hunger is real. Marcus Rashford’s campaign calls us to slay this dragon together for the sake of our children —so well done, Marcus.

Consistently, research has shown that children need a good diet to learn effectively. When children come to school without having eaten properly, they are less likely to learn, thrive and progress, and their future chances will be impaired. That is why breakfast clubs were set up, so that those who are not getting a proper diet could be given the necessary advantages to help them flourish.

Last year, I led a debate in your Lordships’ House on income inequality. It was a debate of unanimity. Today, this report focuses on the dangerous consequences of food inequality and draws our attention to the costs of a healthy diet. We have heard in the last year of parents wondering if they can give their children more than bread and potatoes, and whether they should go without food themselves, or heating, to feed their families. How heart-breaking is that? Please, may the report’s recommendation in chapter 3 receive further assessment, so that practical proposals for radical change are brought forward.

A dismaying table at paragraph 173 on page 65 challenges all of us to have courage and imagination for our future, and the will and determination to see it through to its conclusion. Her Majesty’s Government has learned during the Covid-19 challenge that big government solutions are important for big problems. Free vaccination for all is a good example. Can the lessons learned be applied to government action for the health and well-being crisis? I pray that they can and will, and may it be soon, promising less and delivering more. This is a vital report which we want to take seriously. May the committee continue to work out practicalities which resolve. I congratulate the committee on this wonderful report.

Floods and Water (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I have a feeling that that may be above my pay grade, but it is certainly an interesting and legitimate point. In all these areas, obviously we want to bring forward statutory instruments and legislation that command the support of Parliament. Parliamentary scrutiny—certainly the scrutiny that your Lordships present—is challenging and keeps a Minister on their toes and the Government’s feet to the fire. On this technical matter, I—

[The Archbishop of York]

The Minister has been very clear about the benefits of regulation, particularly for the environment, which, as he said, were brought about through sheer hard work, campaigning and persuading other people. Nevertheless, does he agree that EU regulations have grown into a jungle that has become very difficult to penetrate?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

When I read the first draft of the Explanatory Memorandum, my thoughts were that lawmaking can be extremely complicated and that the drafting sometimes takes further reading. The clear message on what we want to do through this SI and the earlier instrument is that we want to safeguard this country’s environmental standards. That simple concept sometimes involves fairly intricate matters, so I say to the most reverend Primate that I like and appreciate simplicity, but there are moments when we need to make sure that the law is produced in an intelligible and understandable form.