Environment Bill
Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Lea of Crondall(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is obvious that in the international system there is a bit of a crisis in knowing how to take the world consensus forward. We are looking forward to Britain making an active contribution leading up to Glasgow. I say this because the international system has at some point got to agree specific concrete parameters so that we do not have an endless debate about China, India, Indonesia, Russia or Brazil, as it were, not playing by the same rules as other people. There has to be an understanding, which I think is to be supported, and an acknowledgement that the third world will have different rules from the second and first world. You can imagine the difficulty of agreeing internationally how to define those ideas.
I have great sympathy with the Government for trying to put together a leadership role for the meeting in a month or so in Glasgow, but this is very relevant to what is in this amendment. In practice, it is narrowing down to the question of how we in this country decide how to set targets for greenhouse gas emissions. One very important way of doing it is to define those targets or metrics in relation to the growth of national income. Everybody knows that there is some connection between the growth of national income and the growth of greenhouse gases. If people say that it is not possible to have a reduction in greenhouse gases without doing something to reduce the growth of national income, I say that the fact is that one can do that. We are doing it in this country already, partly because of the accelerated reduction in emissions arising from the use of coal to generate electricity.
We have to come to some conclusions about what exactly it is that we are concretely proposing. In this amendment, we have an idea that a 1% increase in the national income should be associated with a 1% reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. That is a very crude example, but it is impossible to make progress on the short-term link to the long-term aspiration of zero emissions without trying to find some way in which people can go forward—ideally with international agreement—on how we are going to change this coefficient. That is what is in this amendment.
I am very pleased to have had the chance of an initial talk with the Minister of State last week about how these propositions can be taken forward. I look forward to hearing what he has to say. I am encouraged that some constructive thinking is emerging from the proposition in this amendment.
This also means that there has to be quite a big change in how Whitehall and government generally set targets. We do not have short-term targets at the moment. We have excellent reports from the Committee on Climate Change and associated budget work, but we have reached the point where we have to bite the bullet and look seriously at trying to acknowledge that we have to reduce the coefficient around the world, where climate change is a risk because carbon and greenhouse gas emissions are growing at greater speed than national income. We have to reverse that.
I hope the Minister will accept that work should be taken forward on the idea of these metrics to reduce that coefficient and give a positive response to the principle involved. I look forward to his response. I beg to move.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I added my name to my noble friend’s amendment. When he first proposed it to me I was not quite clear what the intention was, but it is quite clear what it requires. It gives us a metric —a figure—to display to the public what is a central matter of political dispute in this and many other countries, namely the claim that to achieve green growth and a reduction of greenhouse gases is in direct conflict with the ability to grow and become more prosperous. This country is one of the few countries that has managed to resolve that over the past 20-odd years. In most years we have grown the economy and reduced our greenhouse gases. That will be more difficult in the future and it is more difficult around the world.
All the amendment is asking is that the Government, the Treasury and the Bank of England in particular adopt some metric as an objective of economic policy and turn the ratio between growth and the reduction in greenhouse gases into a forward-looking metric that reduces our dependency on fossil fuels while assuring the public that we are still increasing prosperity. It is possible that the econometricians, statisticians and everybody else can work out a more complex or a simpler figure, but we need one figure that on a rolling basis measures the past and gives us a target and a tool for the future, so that we can counter a very insidious position where the climate pessimists say it cannot be done.
Of course, the polemicists in this argument on social media and more broadly not only emphasise that position in this country; it is making life difficult in many other countries. It defined Trump’s America and to a degree still hamstrings the American Government. It means that, however sophisticated their regimes, the oil producers still trot out the conflict as an excuse for not doing anything that will lead to a meaningful delivery of either the Kyoto or the Paris commitments. Of course, the conflict and the political argument are at their most acute in the poorest countries, where constraints on fossil fuel-based energy are seen as a barrier to raising the living standards of the poorest and most wretched on the earth.
That is why having a clear metric might help us in international negotiations as well. At present, the post-Paris commitments of each signatory are expressed in different terms. Most of them are absolute reductions in greenhouse gases, some are reductions in what they call energy intensity, and others are just lists of particular measures. It is quite difficult to determine the relativity between these different commitments and impossible to compare the level of their commitment with what are supposedly the Paris objectives.
If we started here and the Government committed to getting the Office for National Statistics and the other relevant bodies to address this issue and to come up with a single, clear measure—one that carries at least the broad range of political opinions in this country —we could then move on to convince the OECD and the rest of the world. We can start here. Whether in this Bill or in some other context, the Government really need to commit themselves to having a clear metric here, and I hope the Minister can give some encouragement to that view tonight.
Budget Statement
Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Lea of Crondall(6 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, the state of the economy at the moment is gloomy in the extreme. I am sorry to those people who think that we ought to say that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but at the moment, there is not. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, in saying that we have to target one thing above all: we have to jack up the rate of economic growth to 2% or 3%. Nothing else will work unless we do that. That sounds a bit like George Brown in 1964; I say, “Come back George Brown, all is forgiven”.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Some parts are forgiven. We have to have a new deal in both senses of the term: a TVA-type new deal and a new deal for workers. There is an ambiguity to what a lot of the speeches add up to of where this productivity problem arises.
In passing, the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, made a speech that could have been interpreted as saying he does not quite believe the statistics and that the economy is growing in a way we have not recognised. I used to be a bit of a guru on national income accounting. Income, output and expenditure have to be measured to match. I cannot see how the ONS can be all that wrong in saying that the economy is not growing by nought point something.
On the idea that there is some mysterious factor in the economy we are not measuring, a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe the zillions of extra things we can do with the things in our pockets—our phones—must mean that productivity is rising. There is a puzzle there, but for the moment the statisticians are correct: they are not adding to our productive potential. We are just playing around on our mobile phones; we are not doing anything useful with them. That is a big factor, but at the moment there is nothing that is measurably happening.
We can have a look at measuring the rate of economic growth, but everything else is second order. The main candidate for something the Chancellor can do about it is public investment. It is a long time since we have been worried about productive potential, but it is the only term that meets where we are at the moment. It goes back to the strange discussion we had the other day on the industrial strategy with the noble Lord, Lord Henley, when he took some comfort from the fact that unemployment is down and that this was a good way of justifying lower productivity—“Don’t you people want lower unemployment?” It is one of those questions you get on the BBC’s “Today” programme, as our friend Mr John McDonnell found out the other day. You cannot look at a dynamic economy by trying to stick to questions and answers such as that.
We have to jack up the rate of investment. Whether we get the money off the Norwegian wealth fund, which is now worth $1 trillion, or not I do not know, but there has to be a dynamic piece of arithmetic and we can agree on some the answers—if you did get the economy to grow at that pace, then you would get this return through business growth and tax returns. We ought to raise the level of public discussion, whether at the BBC or anywhere else. We are not short of excellent material. The number of excellent reports we have heard mentioned is extraordinary. I will not go through them all because I only have two more minutes, but they all say roughly the same thing: we have a low pay trap, a low productivity trap and low investment, and we ought to transform the economy in some way. Mr McDonnell has said most of the right things about how to increase our productivity potential, as has the Social Mobility Commission. I congratulate Mr Milburn and the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, on the way they identified these cold and hot spots around the country, because that is also very important in terms of where public investment should be going.
We have to make sure there is some targeting in numerical terms in this debate—how do you get to, say, 3%? Even as a paper exercise it would show us where we need to do something. Without sounding as if it is all to do with pay, the fact is you cannot change the definition of value added without recognising that value added is pay and profits. There are people at the top earning zillions, but pay and productivity are low. I am not saying you do it just by increasing pay, but we cannot wallow as a zero economy, with zero growth in real pay and in productivity.
I have one final word on the Brexit effect. There are undoubtedly three very bad Brexit effects relating to this. First is an investment problem relating to trade barriers. The second is the spectre of the exchange rate falling, as it has at 90p to the euro. We can see circumstances in which it could well have parity with the euro. The third is the prospective collapse of investment in those industries with a single factory floor in Europe, whether it is Jaguar Land Rover, Airbus or Unilever, and all the other sorts of investment which require a change in the policy so that we stay in the single market and the customs union.
Euratom
Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Lea of Crondall(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for tabling this debate and I agree with what he has said. I intervene for only two reasons: first, to underline the importance of Euratom; and, secondly, to draw more general conclusions for the way in which the negotiations on leaving the EU are being carried out. I have a long-standing concern about and support for the nuclear industry, but I hesitate to say that it is now half a century since I worked for the AEA at Harwell and Culham. Even in those days you needed international agreements on the transport, storage and use of fissile and radioactive materials. During our membership of the EU, all that has been provided by Euratom. The organisation is also vital to the development of nuclear power, which in turn is vital to help us reach our targets on carbon-free energy supplies, both in this country and around the world. This is even more important because ownership of the UK nuclear industry is almost entirely in the hands of overseas firms.
Euratom is also vital to the development of nuclear science and research, and to keeping that expertise and facilities available in this country, in particular the important Joint European Torus at Culham and its fusion research. It is also vital, as the noble Lord has just said, to the provision of medical supplies and treatments. Radioisotopes are used to treat many key diseases including cancer, cardiovascular conditions and brain problems. I would venture to say, given the demography of this House, that many of us depend for our quality of life on such treatments and the continued high standards of safety and security of supply of such treatments. Euratom is also vital as a part of the non-proliferation treaty and therefore to world peace.
Legally speaking, initially the Government could not really make up their mind whether the vote to leave the EU inevitably meant that we would have to leave Euratom. As late as last December we were told that the Government were still,
“assessing the legal and policy implications of the vote to leave, including the potential implications for the UK’s membership of Euratom”.
Because Euratom was originally a separate treaty before the treaties were consolidated, it was arguable that we could differentiate even in the consolidated treaty. Legal opinions differ, but it would have been possible to argue that we could remain a full member of Euratom had it not been for the Government’s obsession about the jurisdiction of the ECJ, which in practice has not often intervened in Euratom business.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
Does my noble friend recall that the Republic of Ireland joined Euratom a long time before it joined the European Economic Community? In fact, I chaired a meeting in Cambridge in 1961 at which the Taoiseach said that Ireland was going to apply to join Euratom, which of course was a staging post to joining the European Economic Community, but equally that demonstrated that they are not exactly the same thing.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I agree with my noble friend, who goes back even further than I do. The issue of whether we could continue to be a member of Euratom ought still to be live in the initial withdrawal discussions because it will define the way in which we will withdraw from the European institutions. If the Government are not prepared to seek full membership of Euratom, they must at least publicly state their objective of having full associate membership so that we can still have some influence over how the standards are set, the areas in which research is directed, and the funds that are related to those.
If the Government do not treat Euratom as somewhat different from the rest of the treaty and show that they can have a different sort of relationship, they are in effect defining Euratom and its agencies as EU agencies. I have with me a list of 34 EU agencies and in all cases the industries and organisations which participate in those agencies want to retain something very close to the status quo. This morning my Select Committee was discussing aviation and the issues around the European Aviation Safety Agency. The same is true in food standards, chemicals, banking and so forth. The industries want to retain a position within those agencies that is as close to the status quo as possible. The way in which we treat Euratom may well be the template for the way in which we deal with all the other agencies. I hope that the Government will take on board the very widespread view that most of those agencies work to our economic, social and environmental advantage. We should try to retain as close a relationship as possible in these negotiations.
Brexit: Options for Trade (EUC Report)
Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Lea of Crondall
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that contribution to the debate. I join her in sending birthday greetings to the noble Lord, Lord Price. I gently say to her, though, that there was not much new in her speech. I had hoped that there would be a little more engagement with some of the points made by noble Lords. One of the difficulties as we go forward in this House, and in Parliament generally, is that if the Government continually repeat the same phrases it will increasingly sound like whistling in the dark. It might be whistling in the dark to keep their own spirits up, or it might be to make sure that we do not quite know what is going on. Either way, we need a little more than that. It was a good run-through, but it was only a run-through of things that we had heard before, generally speaking.
There was one little bit that might be new, although I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, would agree with me with his interest in customs, I thought the phraseology on the customs union was slightly different, and I will look at the precise text on that and see if there is a new measure there.
I am not going to make a great speech tonight; I thank everybody who has participated in the debate, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Gadhia, my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn, and others who had not participated in the debate; everybody else who spoke had participated in committees. I thank them very much for their work, as I thank again the staff. I just wanted to mention one thing in relation to staff: the clerk to our committee, Alicia Cunningham, has actually left for separate duties in this House this very week. I would like to put on record in this debate the work that she has done for us.
Of all the experts that were going to be quoted in this debate, I had not expected Mike Tyson to be one of them. However, knowing how the EU negotiators react is an important missing part of the jigsaw in most of this debate. There was a point in one of our debates, and the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and I are probably the only ones who remember it, when one of our colleagues—he was a noble and gallant Member of the House—said, “In these situations, I like to see it through the eyes of the enemy”. That might be going a bit far—I prefer the term “counterpart”—but nevertheless, we did not get much of an inkling during the course of our discussions with the Government that they were really getting enough intelligence on where the EU is coming from.
One of the things my noble friend Lord Lea and my noble friend Lady Donaghy will remember is our irritation, in trade union discussions, when the press always said that the trade unions made a demand and the employers made an offer. The reality of this is that that is how Europe sees this: we are the demander and it has to deign to make an offer to us. It has interests to preserve, but those are not necessarily the same as ours. We want to maintain a good relationship and so does it, but it sees us as the people who are walking away and, to some extent, stopping paying the rent at the same time. We start from that psychological disadvantage. If we do not try to understand and cultivate a better understanding of our position among our EU partners—I will still call them that for the moment—then this negotiation will fail. I hope the Government are up to this.
We need proper engagement in this Parliament. We are going to discuss parliamentary scrutiny again on the Bill, but whatever the results, there has to be a greater degree of candour between the Government and Parliament as we go through this process. We do not expect the Government to give their total negotiating hand to the world at large. I think my noble friend Lord Lea said of our report that it was ruthless and realistic.
Lord Whitty
I thought for a moment that he was talking about me; it would have been the nicest thing he has ever said about me.
We need to be realistic and some of the statements by the Government are self-evidently not realistic at this point. If this House is to be taken along with the Government during this very difficult process, we need to have an honest and realistic discussion of what the options are and how we are to deal with them. We need that to be on a systematic basis and I hope that the Government have taken that lesson from this debate. Certainly, we in our committees will be both honest and realistic. We will also recognise the limitations. But the Government will not get through this if they do not get parliamentary support in both Houses. I hope they recognise that and that we can therefore have a perhaps slightly greater engagement than we have had so far with Ministers and government. That way, maybe we can get through this difficult process. In the meantime, I thank everybody who has participated in the debate.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Lea of Crondall
Lord Whitty
Indeed, my Lords. The Scottish Affairs Committee in another place have performed a very good task in bringing this issue to light, but we have not seen everything; a lot of names on those lists were destroyed. Among them were people who some of us on this side knew, including my noble friend who obviously chose a change of career at just the right point. So far, at least, he has not been blacklisted from being a Member of either House of Parliament. This matter does not affect just some lunatic subversives out there; it can potentially affect solid citizens trying to conduct their trade, such as my noble friend in his earlier existence. This is a threat to liberty and freedom of association, and a threat to the Government’s reputation in the councils of the world. Please take this seriously.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Perhaps I may mention in this connection the comment of the Royal College of Nursing—a union that is not normally associated with industrial difficulties. However, it states:
“Both the Government appointed Certification Officer and the Government approved Assurer would have powers to access unions’ membership records. In addition, the bill also proposes that any third party would be able to lodge a complaint about union membership—there is a potential for this to be abused during periods of industrial dispute. A complaint would be considered by investigators who would, in turn, also have access to union membership records. These proposals pose a serious risk to confidentiality of trade union membership and place undue bureaucratic and costly burdens on trade unions”.
I thought that it would be good to place on the record that comment from the Royal College of Nursing.