Carbon Emissions (Buildings) Bill

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson). Like him, I will speak for the third time today. I hope I will be able to speak at slightly greater length than on the previous Bill, but I am very glad we have got to this Bill from my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew). He is not only a doughty champion for the people of Broadland, as we have seen in this place but a consistent champion for the environment in everything he has done. That is what the Bill is doing today. It demonstrates that the Conservative party is on the side of the people who want to make net zero a reality and who want to decarbonise our buildings. The Bill is concerned mostly with commercial buildings because of their size, but we also want to decarbonise our homes. We had some of the same discussions earlier, when debating the Electricity and Gas Transmission (Compensation) Bill presented by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), on the low carbon future we need to work towards. Decarbonising is absolutely vital for the future.

In that context, I would like to draw attention to some local data. I am pleased that, from 2010 to the start of this decade, total emissions from the building sector in my local area of Newcastle-under-Lyme have fallen by 42%, which is almost exactly in line with the national average. In the commercial sector, they have been reduced by 56%, from 77,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2010 to 34,000 tonnes in 2020. In the public sector, they have been reduced by 46%, from 28,500 tonnes in 2010 to 15,500 in 2020. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland said in his opening remarks, however, embodied carbon is completely unregulated, and that is what the Bill seeks to address and what we are discussing in the debate. His concept of whole-life carbon and the clauses to address that in the Bill are vital. There is no sense in our measuring just what happens on an ongoing basis; that is a bit like looking at a deficit without looking at the debt. If we are incurring a huge debt through concrete or anything else when we build something, we need to take that into account.

My advice to the Government is that, on principle, we should consider applying that more broadly when we think about decarbonisation, because it is a valid criticism of the Government that, although we have been the most successful country in the G20 at reducing our carbon emissions, we are offshoring them. We need to think about that and, therefore, about whether we are doing the right thing by the environment when we do not give permission for a coal mine in this country or for offshore oil and gas. It might be the right thing by our numbers, but the Bill makes the point that we cannot look at one number in isolation—we need to look at the whole ecosystem and life cycle, as my hon. Friend talked about.

My hon. Friend is right to focus on embodied carbon, which is the sum of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions released during the whole life cycle of a product or service. That is not just the manufacturing part, which is dealt with here. It is the extraction, transportation, installation, maintenance and, ultimately, disposal, because all buildings have a life cycle and most will not last forever—happily, we are in one that has lasted longer than most.

My hon. Friend is right to look at the whole life cycle and he is right that the industry would benefit from the greater efficiency and reduced operating costs that the transparency that he seeks through his Bill would introduce. The reduction in the 33 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year that arises from materials that are currently wasted would definitely benefit society as a whole. The construction sector is the biggest producer of waste in England and accounts for about two thirds of the country’s total.

If I may get on my hobby horse, that waste ends up in sites such as Walleys Quarry in my constituency, which is notorious for the local stink that is caused by construction and demolition materials that end up in landfill. I know that is not just my experience. We need to reduce the total amount of waste and one way to do that is to have the transparency that the Bill seeks to introduce. That is also, of course, what young people want; I was rather touched when my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) talked about his daughter’s birthday today. We have to look at what young people want for the future and make sure that we in this place are building—literally, in this case—a better, brighter, net zero future where we do not have to worry about carbon dioxide emissions or the warming of the planet.

My hon. Friend the Member for Broadland talked about what the Government need to do, and I am looking forward to hearing what the Minister has to say; I welcome her to the Dispatch Box for the first time. He mentioned that the Government have workstreams that they want to look at and he posed a rhetorical question about how much more consultation there needs to be. We often find in this place that there is always time for more consultation and there are always more opinions that can be sought, but he is right that the time for action is drawing near upon us. I am persuaded by his arguments, which is why I am glad that he has brought the Bill to the House.

My hon. Friend’s fundamental point that we have to consider the whole life of something—its building and life cycle—is a sound principle that we ought to take into account in all our decisions. Too often, we are guided by statistics, as we sometimes see in other sectors as well, such as immigration, and we are drawn to a headline number that we want to minimise or maximise. Actually, the route to good government is to think about things in the round, as a whole and in the long term. That is what the Bill seeks to do, which is why I hope that it makes progress and the Government engage with what he is trying to do.