Environmental Policies: Timeliness and Effectiveness

Lord Watts Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Environment Act requires the Government to respond within 12 months, and we will respond considerably more quickly than that. I know that the noble Earl is asking me a question, but does he agree with me that this is without any measure of doubt the greenest Government ever? I am proud of that and happy to be held accountable for all these measures. We brought in a landmark piece of legislation in the Environment Act. We have brought in so many other measures that have addressed long-awaited needs in this environment, and without doubt we have the greenest Government ever.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, is the Government not using the wrong benchmark? If they were to benchmark to, say, 13 years ago, and look at the improvements, that would be a different matter from looking at the last couple of years.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I do not understand the noble Lord’s position. Working off a baseline, we have to make sure that we are sharing data. We are publishing 800 pages of data so that the noble Lord, NGOs, parliamentarians and others can hold us to account on this. We use an accepted baseline in order to show an improvement. No net loss by 2030 and 10% improvement on that by 2042—those are pushing targets.

Poverty: International Development Aid

Lord Watts Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I do not agree with the noble Lord; we have achieved a great deal on the eradication of poverty. Focused on humanitarian support, we have provided more than £1 billion of life-saving support in humanitarian emergencies. We have committed £90 million to support in education emergencies, and the UK spent almost £1 billion on global health in ODA in 2022. I take the noble Lord’s point on Africa, and he will be pleased to know that, in 2024-25, we will increase our ODA spend there to £1.3 billion.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that we cannot do much about poverty unless we control population? Can he explain why, despite large amounts of money being spent on aid, millions of women still do not have access to family planning?

UK Sanctions Regime: Russia and Belarus

Lord Watts Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I record my thanks to the noble Lord for his kind remarks. I recognise, as he has, that this is about cross-party working and identifying what further steps we can take. I would not be bold enough to suggest that we have 100% compliance or that we are closing every loophole that has been identified; as I said, there will be further action in these areas. I also take on board some of the countries he mentioned where we can do further work. I will work with colleagues across government to ensure that, when we identify particular areas, I will notify the Front Benches in the usual way about action we are considering taking.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, what system do the Government have for monitoring these sanctions? It seems strange that the media seem to have been better informed than the Government. What measures will the Government put in place to make sure that they do this effectively?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, part and parcel of our work with the Treasury and, in particular, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation is, first, to ensure that we identify the actual structures being used and abused in this way to override sanctions and, then, to work directly with companies and inform them of mitigation methods that can be taken. This is ever-evolving, so, with the more sanctions we impose and the more sectors we look at, there is a lag time before they become effective. As I have already alluded to, we have identified that there will be a time lag while actions are implemented for particular sectors. I also accept that some companies act inadvertently and that we should not penalise them financially straight away; we should also look at other methods, including those we are deploying directly.

UK Food Aid: Ethiopia

Lord Watts Excerpts

Wednesday 14th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a hugely important point. It is worth saying that Ethiopia was long considered a success story. Over the last few decades, millions upon millions of people have been pulled out of poverty—with UK support, I should say; the UK has been a principal player in that process and can be proud of it—but those gains are being lost as a consequence of drought, conflict and the war in Ukraine, et cetera. The noble Lord raises the issue of adaptation. The UK has committed that half or thereabouts of our international climate finance should be spent on adaptation, the other half being spent on mitigation. A very big proportion of both will be invested in nature-based solutions to climate change, which provide both adaptation and mitigation. That is the lens through which we approach climate change, and it is the focus of all the investments in the £11.6 billion commitment that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson made at COP 26.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much support the Government’s view about helping Africa in the way they have set out, but last time I was in Ethiopia it was clear that millions of women did not have access to family planning. Is it not the biggest scourge of Africa that those women have no ability to control the number of children they have?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The noble Lord is right to identify that as a major issue, which is why family planning remains a big focus of UK aid across Africa. So many threats, risks, challenges and pressures face that continent, and climate change and environmental degradation, as mentioned in the previous question, are rapidly becoming the dominant threat facing many countries in the continent.

United Nations Population Fund Report

Lord Watts Excerpts

Wednesday 24th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My noble friend is right to make this point. There is no point having a strategy of the sort we have just published if it is not embedded internationally through our posts. I assure the noble Baroness and the House that all posts will implement the strategy. They have been directed to do so by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. To reinforce that, although it preceded the strategy, this issue is placed centrally as a high priority, indeed a top priority, in both the IDS and the integrated review.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister share our amazement that despite the amount of money we spend on aid here, around Europe and around the world that so many women have no access to family planning? Surely this should be our number one priority and should take precedence over some of the other programmes.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

On one level I am inclined to agree with the noble Lord but there are so many important themes that the Foreign Office has prioritised in our integrated review and our IDS—there is permanent tension between competing causes. It is a priority for the Government—that has been made crystal clear in all the key documents that have been produced in the last couple of years that set the direction of our funding for the next decade—but it is not the only priority.

Animal Welfare: Tourist Attractions, Activities and Experiences

Lord Watts Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

It is an important point and in fact, to give it credit, the Association of British Travel Agents—ABTA—has updated and published guidelines on a whole range of activities which it classes as unacceptable, and its definition is fairly closely aligned with that of many of the organisations that focus on this issue. It is a voluntary set of guidelines—what we are talking about today is something that will be harder than that, something mandatory—but it is worth acknowledging the steps that the industry is already taking.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, why are the Government so poor at managing their legislation programme? Every week, Ministers come forward and say that they are committed to something but they have not got a timeline for it. Is it not about time the Government got their act together and sorted out their legislation programme?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

This is a question that goes way beyond my own pay grade. All I can tell the noble Lord is that I am working very hard to bring the full range of animal welfare measures that we have been discussing now for a couple of years. I would also remind the House that, by my counting, there are 10 significant animal welfare measures which we have brought in, or which are very nearly through the process, so we are making progress in this area.

Ireland: Russian Naval Military Exercises

Lord Watts Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The noble Lord raises an important point. Obviously, I can only speculate, but irrespective of whether what the Russians were planning to engage in was legal—I think it is generally accepted that what they were intending to do was legal—it was undoubtedly provocative and overly assertive.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, is it the case that both Russia and China have a strategy and a plan to promote their interests, while the West, including the Government, has no strategy or plan for dealing with China or Russia?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I do not agree. It is essential that we work with and align as closely as possible with our allies. However, the single most effective thing we can do in relation to the current threat, which has become more than a threat in recent days, is to hit Russia where it hurts, which means imposing as tight a series and set of sanctions as possible to punish those who are closest to, and in many cases propping up, the Kremlin.

Ukraine: OSCE Special Monitoring Mission

Lord Watts Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

Yes, I am saying that the Government took their decision to safeguard the lives of the people in question. The noble Lord can draw his own conclusion. It is easy to make such statements from the comfort of these red Benches. Nevertheless, it is the Government’s job to ensure, as much as they can, the safety of those people on the front line doing extremely difficult work.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, is this decision not helping the Russians? They have a strategy and a plan for their misinformation. By withdrawing our people, we have allowed Russia to continue its misinformation and make more efforts with it during the next few weeks.

Kabul: Pen Farthing

Lord Watts Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I suspect that, like every MP, and probably every person in this House, I experienced an extraordinarily effective campaign mobilising people to write emails to their representatives. So, like everyone, I received hundreds, maybe thousands of emails from people on this issue, but my position—in writing, on the record—has always been that animals should never have been, and were not, prioritised over people. The noble Baroness asked about specific representation. I could spend hours, probably, relaying the torrent of emails that was received, but I will add one further thing: at no point did the Government as a whole receive any kind of authorisation on this issue, one way or the other, from the Prime Minister, who had no involvement at all. I think that was the point of the Question that was put to me and I emphasise that again.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, it is coming to something when the Prime Minister has a habit of not knowing what was going on in his department, and it sounds as though the Minister does not know what is going on in his. Can he explain why this individual was allowed to get a private jet in when there were still people we wanted to get out of there? How could he do it when the Government could not for a lot of brave people who will potentially give their lives because Ministers failed?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I think that is a completely nonsense question. The idea that the Prime Minister should be engaged in issues around the welfare of a handful of animals when we were engaging, as a Government, in one of the biggest—indeed, the biggest—evacuations this country has ever been involved in is just absurd. I would be appalled if the Prime Minister had been involved in such minutiae, frankly. As I said, we got 17,000 people out in a very short period of time. That is a record—it has never happened before. I think we can salute our Armed Forces and those officials who worked incredibly hard to pull off an extraordinary feat.

State Pension Age

Lord Watts Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I imagine that, if things go as my noble friend has just said, that is a possibility, but I am not able to confirm it. Again, I urge my noble friend, who has a raft of experience in this field, to get his point into the review.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord and declare my interests as set out in the register. Referring to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, does the Minister agree that the interaction between health and climate change really warrants a more sophisticated analysis of all the factors involved, rather than the assertions made by the noble Lord in his intervention?