Air Quality

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I thank the noble Baroness. It is essential that we deal with the compliance area in the plans we are going to bring forward and, yes, it is well beyond five cities. That is where we were mandating action, because there was such a significant problem, but I would not for one minute want to suggest that all areas of the country having the current levels of air pollution is a satisfactory position, because clearly it is not. That is why, in 2011, when we were in coalition with the party of the noble Baroness, £2 billion was allocated for green transport initiatives. We are actually in a world-leading position on ultra-low emission vehicles, for instance. With that £2 billion we are seeking improvements. I know that everyone is frustrated—I share that—but we really do want to make progress on this.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, while action on diesel, however feeble, is welcome, and while five cities is a start—although nowhere good enough—if the Government are serious about improving air quality, how on earth can they have taken such a confident decision about the expansion of Heathrow, where nitrogen oxides are already in serious breach of health limits?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, the Government believe that the Heathrow north-west runway scheme can be delivered without impacting on the UK’s compliance with air quality limit levels, with a suitable package of policy and mitigation measures. Indeed, final development consent will only be granted if we are satisfied that, with mitigation, the scheme is compliant with our legal obligations.

Natural Environment

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, and congratulating her on initiating this debate. Her Motion does a crucially important thing, because it helpfully links the challenge and impact of global climate change with the importance of the local environment that we all live, work and play in. It is a hugely important link to make.

Climate change is of course very much with us. Thirteen of the 14 warmest years on record globally have happened in the 21st century. The sea level rise over the last two decades across the world has been 3.2 millimetres per year—nearly twice the average rate for the 20th century. Here in the UK, we have, as the noble Baroness alluded to, experienced extreme weather events over the last couple of years. I lived through the last winter as chairman of the Environment Agency. It was a traumatic period, especially for those people who were tragically affected by the flooding that occurred. That was a result of the biggest surge in the North Sea that we have seen in 60 years. There were violent storms over the course of Christmas and the new year, and the wettest January and February we have ever experienced in 250 years had an extreme impact on people with businesses around the country.

It is not just flooding. We are seeing more extremes of weather, both floods and droughts. In March 2012, when we were facing the imminent prospect of serious drought, the River South Tyne was running at 28% of its normal flow level for that time of year. Three months later, in June 2012, it was running at 406%. We are increasingly experiencing these extreme weather patterns. Over the last 30 years river temperatures across England have risen, on average, by 0.6 degrees.

We are seeing an impact on species too. The vendace, which is a very beautiful coldwater fish, has lived in the Lake District for centuries. We have now had to move them to higher lochs in Scotland in order to ensure they have the cold water that they depend on. Damsel-flies are now being found 40 or 50 miles further north than ever before. They are moving with the temperature. All this shows something of the impact that a changing climate is having on habitats, species, the nature of our countryside, the quality of our rivers and on the fate of the environment around us.

The importance of that natural environment needs to be emphasised again and again. I am delighted that the Government have realised some of this. The natural environment White Paper and the establishment of the Natural Capital Committee are welcome initiatives. The environment is not just something for us to wonder at, to enjoy, to find pleasure and to seek recreation in. It is also part of the natural capital on which we all depend. It is a resource, an essential part of our economic and social life. It is something we cannot do without and that we endanger at our peril.

Yet do we fully understand the importance of this natural bank of capital when we make decisions about what happens to our landscape, green spaces, trees and rivers? When we think about how we address the growing impact and prospect of climate change? I fear that, too often, we do not. The noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, talked movingly about the importance of trees. I could say exactly the same thing about our rivers. They are, of course, a source of life. They provide us all with water, but they also sustain industry, irrigate crops and permit agriculture in places where it would otherwise be impossible. They are also an ecological resource—a place for insects, fish and water-bank mammals—and we need to look after our rivers in order to sustain it. This includes responding effectively to floods and droughts in order to protect not just our water supplies but this rich diversity of habitat, too. Let no one tell me that European intervention has nothing to offer, when it is precisely things such as the habitats directive and the water framework directive that have provided the underpinning for a lot of the environmental protection that we need and value in this country.

This brings me back to those links between the enormous issue of climate change and our own local environment. Why is it that the environment rates so low among current public political concerns? Surely it is because we tend to speak of it in abstract terms. However, when you ask people about their own, personal, local patch of environment, they become really passionate about it. Their own piece of green space and the river at the bottom of their town are bits of the environment that they really value. We need to ensure that we link the value placed on those with the big, global issues that we also need to address.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds does this rather powerfully and brilliantly. I sometimes remind my former political colleagues that the RSPB has more than twice as many members as all the political parties in Britain put together. They do something that is very radical and progressive. They take people and say, “You are interested in something very small, very fragile—a dipper. If you are interested in a dipper, you need to understand about what happens to its habitat, to the rivers, hedgerows and fields. If you want to understand about what happens to those, you need to understand about the planning and development pressures, about agricultural production and what is happening to it and about the framework of local plans that decide what should happen to landscape and habitat. Then you need to understand the national framework that operates to determine and protect all this, what the European Union is up to and the international agreements that are reached in places such as Kyoto, Lima and, hopefully, Paris”. Before you know where you are, you have taken people from something very tiny—a dipper—to an understanding of the global forces that shape the importance of our environment. It is an understanding of how everything, from top to bottom, is interlinked. That is the realisation we need to capture. This debate has helped us to do precisely that.

Thames Tideway Tunnel

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, of course not. Government estimates at 2011 prices were for a maximum bill impact range of between £70 and £80 per year. These figures remain valid as an upper bound and would take Thames Water customers’ sewerage bills to around the national average. The construction costs are currently out to tender with consortia of contractors. We also consulted last December on a competitive procurement approach for the financing costs, although no decision has yet been made.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the Minister will know that the Thames tideway tunnel is robustly supported by the Environment Agency, which I chair, and by the Mayor of London. It was also supported by a range of voices in your Lordships’ House when we last discussed the matter. Unhappily, cost and disruption will be involved, but does the Minister not agree that this is the only practical way of ensuring that we do not continue to discharge raw sewage into the Thames at least 50 times a year and of bringing an outdated Victorian drainage system, on which this city sits, up to the modern age?

British Waterways Board (Transfer of Functions) Order 2012

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Parminter]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his clarity in setting out a number of issues around this order. Given that there are quite a few speakers, I shall focus on one issue and invite the Minister to say a few more words at the end.

The issue that I wish to raise is how we will ensure that the new charity—the Canal and River Trust—reflects the full duties and responsibilities entrusted to the British Waterways by Parliament. I refer specifically to the duty towards those who live on waterways without a fixed mooring. I have checked the Charity Commission website and can find no mention for the new charity of duties to those whose homes are on the bodies of water that the charity will control. As such, the new charity’s purposes and responsibilities do not reflect some duties that currently exist in legislation and which British Waterways undertakes. This is not a newly contentious matter as, at the beginning of the 1990s, British Waterways sought to remove the rights of boat dwellers who did not have a permanent mooring. Parliament took a different view and the result was Section 17(3)(c)(ii) of the British Waterways Act 1995, which enables boats to be licensed without having a permanent mooring as long as they do not spend more than 14 days in one place. The committee is concerned that people who have had the right to live on the waterways but without a fixed mooring might lose those rights.

As my noble friend mentioned, the Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee produced an excellent report on this recently. The evidence from Mr Evans of British Waterways to the committee says that the Canal and River Trust,

“will be a much more engaged organisation that will reflect the will of the people”.

However, reflecting the will of the people is not at all the same thing as recognising historic duties and responsibilities.

Having met representatives of the proposed new charity—as a former chief executive of a small conservation charity, I wish it well and know just how difficult it is to meet all the competing needs of stakeholders—I have no doubt that it intends through its council, its waterway partnerships and its specialist advisory groups to construct a far more open constitution than ever before on the waterways. However, engagement with some stakeholders is not always easy. Itinerant boat dwellers, for example, do not have a representative body, but their needs need to be considered alongside those of all other waterway stakeholders. To that end, it is illuminating that in the Government’s own explanatory document for the transfer, paragraph 7.16 highlights the “greater involvement” of,

“communities which live alongside waterways”,

and “waterways’ users” in how the waterways are to be managed in future, but excludes any mention of communities that actually live on the water.

I understand that any future by-laws from the charity will be subject to ministerial confirmation and I am grateful for the clarity from the Minister on that point. However, I would like it to be explicit on the record that the department will write to the CRT to ensure that the new charity must take all specific needs of stakeholders into account in developing future by-laws.

Further, it should be explicit that the grant agreement, which my noble friend also mentioned and which I think is for £800 million, accompanying the grant will set out the terms of the final agreement, and that it will make clear that the safeguard to consider the specific needs of all stakeholders, including itinerant boat dwellers, will be part of a condition for the grant being given.

To be clear, the House has a long history of ensuring that the rights of all stakeholders are upheld on the waterways. In the absence of any duty towards those people who live on the waterways in the new charity’s charitable remit, the Government must by other means ensure that this duty is safeguarded in the future. I welcome what the Minister has said, but I would like to be absolutely clear on the specifics of how the Government will assure that.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interest as chairman of the Environment Agency. I very much welcome the transformation of the British Waterways Board into the new Canal and River Trust and I am grateful to the Minister for the helpful way in which he introduced our discussion. I particularly welcome two things about what is happening. First, I welcome the encouragement and facilitation of increased public and community participation in decision-making about what happens to our waterways. I very much hope that the Government’s intentions in this respect will come to fruition in the way in which the new CRT operates. Secondly, I very much welcome the funding package which the Government have put in place to enable the transfer. In the spirit of the times, it is a somewhat generous package but it will enable a really good start to be made on the work of the new trust.

It is, of course, the Government’s ambition to go a bit further in two to three years’ time and to include the Environment Agency’s navigation responsibilities in the new Canal and River Trust. I welcome that ambition and we in the Environment Agency will do everything that we can to assist the process. At the moment, we have responsibility for something like 1,000 kilometres of statutory navigation. This includes, crucially, the River Thames and the River Medway, Rye Harbour, the Great Ouse, the River Nene, the Stour in Suffolk, the Wye and the Dee conservancy in Wales—substantial navigable rivers of iconic importance. Our responsibilities for those waterways include a duty to maintain them in a condition in which people can safely enjoy the statutory public right of navigation that exists on them. We will continue to endeavour to fulfil those responsibilities to the very best of our ability in the run-up to any transfer to the new trust.

We should remember how popular our waterways are. In 2009-10, the last year for which we have accurate figures, there were approximately 70 million visits to our waterways. There are 32,000 registration holders—boat owners and operators—on our navigations alone, let alone on the canals and waterways that will come under the new body. In the current financial year we will be investing around £10 million of grant in aid and £7.5 million of income, a considerable amount of that coming from boaters, in managing and operating the navigation structures on these waterways.

As we prepare for the further handover, and as we bear in mind the responsibilities that the new trust will have, a few points need to be borne in mind, and I very much hope that the Government will do so. First, on rivers in particular—this differs to a certain extent from canals—there are different traditions for different rivers; they do not all operate in exactly the same way with the same expectations for boat operators and users. Including an appreciation of the subtle differences between different waterways in any assessment of how things move forward is going to be important.

Secondly, and with the events of the past weekend weighing heavily on my mind, we need to bear in mind the need always to manage rivers for flood risk management. The importance of marrying navigation responsibilities with the continuing flood risk responsibilities that the Environment Agency will continue to have in waterways that transfer will eventually be an important part of what happens. Thirdly, it will be important that the money is there for any enhanced responsibilities that the new trust has when transfer occurs in a few years’ time.

Fourthly, in looking at how the new trust operates, both in its initial phase and in the second phase after the transfer of EA responsibilities, it is important that the new trust all the time bears in mind the interests of boat owners and users and the people who want to use our rivers for recreation, for quiet enjoyment and for the solace that very often our rivers can bring. It is being accorded an important responsibility. I have every confidence that the team and the arrangements that are being put in place will enable that to happen, but I hope that the Government will keep a wary eye on making sure that it does.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I also thank my noble friend for the explanation of this order. I share the enthusiasm of the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, for this good and imaginative proposal. I do so for practical reasons. One is that, as it says in paragraph 8.12 of the Explanatory Memorandum,

“one of the benefits of moving out of the public sector will be that it should enable and encourage more innovation and diversity in the way the new charity grows its income”.

There is also an emotional reason: the first holiday I ever spent, aged 16, with three friends from school, was to hire a canal boat and travel the Shropshire Union Canal and over the Pontcysyllte aqueduct on the way to Llangollen. I doubt that you would be allowed to take a boat out now aged 16, but in those days we did not have as much health and safety as we do now. When one compares and contrasts some of the things that one sees on the waterways now with what was going on then, one sees that a lot of the developments and improvements have been made by voluntary labour, so this is a welcome extension of a trend that is already present in the waterways movement.

The putative board very kindly had a briefing meeting on 6 July last year. It explained its plans for the future, and exciting indeed they were. However, one of the questions that I would like to funnel to it through my noble friend regards the enormous cultural shift that there is going to have to be within the organisation in order to pick up and respond to the challenges of working in the private sector. As some noble Lords know, my life is in the City. When I said, “Just tell me a bit about the return on capital and post-investment appraisals”, and those sorts of things, there was an answer but not one that I would describe as being of sufficient crispness if this organisation is to hold its own against the very sharp commercial operators with which it will have to carry out joint ventures to develop its various assets. It was slightly hazy. It is important that this very imaginative proposal should succeed. Therefore, I very much hope that this body will be able to up the game, if that is the right expression.

Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Environment Agency. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, although I would not agree with the entirety of his analysis of the problem. I fully support the Bill and the most important reason for that support is that, through the contingent support and underwriting it puts in place, it will enable the Thames tunnel project to go ahead. The Thames tunnel is desperately needed. The problem has been mentioned on several occasions by other noble Lords. In an average year, at the moment, 39 million cubic metres of raw sewage, mixed with surface water run-off, discharges into the River Thames. That will reduce a bit with the Lee tunnel and with other work that is under way, but it will remain a hugely significant problem. The reason, of course, is the combined sewer overflows.

Most of London is served by a combined sewerage system that collects sewage from toilets, waste water from sinks and washing machines together with rainwater run-off from roads, roofs and pavements. The system was designed so that overflows would discharge into the River Thames to prevent the back-up of sewage flooding into people's homes and streets. The system does this through a network of combined sewer overflows, stretching along the River Thames. During the course of a normal year, these discharge into the river something like 60 times. This is simply unacceptable in the midst of our capital city, not to mention the potential dangers of infraction from Europe under the urban waste water treatment directive. The fundamental reason is that we have a modern city of 8 million people, and many more during the daytime, which has been heavily paved and concreted over during the past few decades and is sitting on top of a Victorian drainage and sewerage system.

The Thames tunnel, I firmly believe, is the only sensible solution to the problem. Doing bits and pieces with local solutions for particular spots of difficulty would get us some way towards a reduction of discharge into the Thames; it would not provide the overall solution to the problem. Yes, there will be issues about the precise location of work that has to be done in order to construct the tunnel, which needs to be carefully chosen in order to cause minimum disruption. The noble Lords, Lord Jenkin and Lord Fowler, are absolutely right to draw attention to the need to ensure that that disruption is kept to a minimum, but the tunnel itself has to go ahead.

The tunnel will not only stop most of the sewage pollution that we have at the moment but will also help the sewerage network to cope with future impacts that will come from increased population and from what climate change will bring. We know, for example, that climate change will bring more frequent, concentrated downpours of rain over a sustained period. That will cause the problem to magnify if we do not do something in order to address it.

The tunnel will help to reduce health risks to river users and it will help to bring the river up to the healthy condition that it can attain. One of the great success stories of the past 25 years has been the improvement of water quality in the River Thames. Twenty-five years ago the Thames was a dead river but it now supports over 100 different species of fish. We have made huge progress over the course of those 25 years but the one major remaining problem is the combined sewer overflows and the pollution problem that they bring.

There is another reason, as well as the Thames tunnel, why I support the Bill. Its provision to allow support for major water infrastructure work more generally, not just for the Thames tunnel, could be vital as we seek ways to cope better with drought in the years to come. Because of two exceptionally dry winters, south and east England at the moment are already in drought conditions. Some river flows and most levels of groundwater are perilously low. The period from October 2010 to February 2012—the past 16-month or 17-month period—has been the driest since 1922. Rainfall in the south-east for the month of February just past was only 40 per cent of the average for a February. We are going to have to work very hard over the course of the next six to eight months to balance the needs of public water supplies, agricultural irrigation, the industrial use of water and the ecology of rivers and fish stocks in order to ensure that all those needs can be properly met.

In the longer term, if we look forward to the prospect of more extremes of weather patterns as a result of climate change, there is a need for water companies to do more to sort out the problems of leakage—frequently another problem that they have inherited from Victorian pipework systems—but there is something else that is desperately needed. Water companies and water regions need to get better at sharing water between each other. Interconnections are already in place and in use in some instances, but more are needed and every support needs to be given to water companies to put them in place. I am not talking about a national grid for water, which would not make any sense at all, but we need to get water better shared region to region and water company to water company, in local places and particular locations—short interconnections that will make it possible for wetter areas to assist dryer ones. Crucially, this will need to be a high priority for the next Ofwat price review round. The sooner that the capital schemes to put greater interconnectivity in place can be prepared and put together, the better, and it may just be the case that in some instances the provisions of the Bill might help. I wish it good speed.