Finance Bill

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 1st July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Jones]

A lot of people wish to speak on this group of amendments, and time taken will squeeze future debates so I will be brief.

I support the positive words from my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), but I also want to highlight clause 102. It takes up two and a half lines in a large Bill of 7,500 lines, so it is easy to miss. It makes provision for HMRC to start work now on a new tax on plastic packaging containing less than 30% recycled plastic. I welcome this measure. Indeed, I hope that in time it might be possible to go further, but it is clearly right to start now. During the coronavirus crisis, we have heard little about the environment, although I think people have been pleasantly surprised by the real and noticeable difference to our environment—our clean air—resulting from the lack of vehicle use. That 2050 deadline for net zero carbon countries has got ever nearer, and reducing what we use and reusing what we have are ingredients for progress. Changing our plastic use in our lives is one way that all of us can make a difference.

This was a hot topic before the crisis and it will be one in the future, but it has not always been so. I launched plastic bag-free Harrogate with some colleagues in 2008, and although it was generally well received, some people did ask me if I had gone a little bit cranky. We nevertheless made a bit of a difference, and I see a difference being made now in the actions taken by national Government, regional government, local government and community groups. My local council, Harrogate Borough Council, has done good work in waste collection, recycling and education, and I see strong community groups and vibrant environmental groups such as Zero Carbon Harrogate and Knaresborough SPARKs moving the debate forward. We can and will go further and faster. So, although this measure has not attracted attention, it is very positive and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister on taking it forward and using a financial lever to change behaviour among companies using plastic packaging, and, through that, encouraging people to recycle more. That has to be a good thing.

There is one other measure in the Bill that I would like to highlight, and that is the measure on increasing the uptake of electric vehicles. Basically, it is a measure to ensure that employees and employers pay no tax on zero-emission company cars. It supports the measure on electric vehicle charging infrastructure. I have had responsibility for this, as both a Transport Minister and a Treasury Minister, so my views are known. I have shared them in this place on previous occasions, and I will therefore not detain the House with repetition. I simply say to my right hon. Friend the Minister that he will be even more popular if he goes on to further incentivise change in this area.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I come to the debate more with sadness than with pleasure, having read the progress report from the Committee on Climate Change on how the Government and the country are doing. The report is absolutely damning of the Government’s performance. It says that they are not even meeting the 2° warming target, they are failing the commitments that we made in Paris five years ago, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) said, they are not expected to meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets. The report goes on to say that many national plans and policies are not acknowledging the long-term risks of climate change, and that many Government Departments are not acknowledging those risks.

I am going to talk about a few different areas and measures, hopefully not for too long, to let other colleagues fully take part in the debate. We have with us a Minister who has spent time at the Department for Transport, along with my neighbour the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones), who was a long-serving Minister in that Department, so I will start there.

I am pleased that there are measures such as clause 83, which exempts electric vehicles from vehicle excise duty, and clause 82, which deals with the calculation of cars’ CO₂ emissions, but is that enough? We are talking about a country still addicted to petrol and diesel vehicles. Just look across the North sea to Norway. We have to thank the Norwegians, because their No. 1 selling vehicle is the Nissan Leaf. They are therefore supporting Nissan jobs in Sunderland with their Government measures, yet we are not sufficiently supporting them with ours. Those two measures in the Bill will not be enough to make Nissan Leaf the top selling car in the UK, which is what the Government should be aiming for. Not that I am particularly promoting Nissan—this goes for any electric vehicle. I have no interest to declare in relation to Nissan; this is about British jobs. We should look to Norway and its measures on sales tax, charging points and other things, which have meant that the majority of vehicles sold in Norway are electric.

Looking forward to COP next year, the reason why Paris was so successful was that the French showed global leadership, through domestic policy and diplomacy. The problem we will have is that we are not showing the same global leadership in domestic policy. We are a global leader, rightly, in reducing the use of coal-fired power stations, which will effectively have ceased in this country by the time we get to COP. However, we are not a global leader in any other area, so how can we secure a world-leading agreement in Glasgow next year? It is incumbent on the Treasury to introduce incentives to ensure that we reach those points, so that we can show that our measures work. It is not enough to talk a good game; we have to deliver.

Let me turn to some points drawn up by the all-party net zero group, which I chair, which should be instructive for the Minister. They are points that he should take on board and that hopefully the Government will look into. One thing we have seen in the renewable energy sector is a lack of confidence, because in many areas the Government have withdrawn support or not introduced it. One area where I would say the Government have done well and are world leaders is offshore wind. Contracts for difference have made a huge difference. However, we do not have the same confidence in other areas of the renewables market.

What has happened with solar feed-in tariffs has removed confidence from the solar market. Support for green hydrogen and the renewables to create it has not come forward in the way that it should have. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) mentioned the tidal barrage. Again, we are not talking about value for money; we are talking about a world-leading project that could create new technology that we could export. We are not thinking broadly enough about these measures, and the Treasury needs to rethink them.

Obviously we are in the post-covid period, and we need to think about retooling our workforce, because of the many people unfortunately losing their jobs and the Government’s own agenda of levelling up areas. I want to give one example of where that might really work. Not far from my constituency, in East Yorkshire, we have a plethora of factories that build caravans. I will come to the construction industry later, but the way in which we build houses is the 19th-century way of doing it. In fact, we have been building houses in more or less the same way since the Romans. Why are the Government not incentivising the repurposing of those factories to build modular, Passivhaus standard, zero-carbon homes, creating jobs in areas neighbouring coastal resorts, a lot of which are going to lose jobs, and making available houses at different specs for a wide range of people, from social housing right through to the most expensive types of houses in this country, all of which could be implemented quickly? The Prime Minister said, “Build, build, build”, but it is not enough just to build; we have to build in a way that creates a green recovery.

There is a real dilemma around how we incentivise the construction sector. If someone has a property—a terrace, a house or even a heritage property—and wants to refurbish it and put in green measures, they have to pay VAT. If they want to demolish that property and build a brand new one, they pay no VAT. Is that not perverse? Should the Minister not be looking to fix that? We have systems and financial incentives in place that are going to create more carbon, not less.

I will finish soon as I want to give colleagues a chance to speak. Every Department’s plans should include a green fiscal rule or measure that every single policy has to meet. Every time the Treasury or another Department are putting forward a new policy, they should be asking whether it will reduce carbon, and help to meet our fourth and fifth carbon budgets—and the carbon budgets after that, if we get to that stage. If it does not, that policy should not be coming forward, because we only have one chance to do this. There is no planet B. There is no second United Kingdom. We need to be doing this now and in the best possible way.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

Yesterday, like a number of Members across the House, I was lobbied—by 15 residents, in my case. The time is now.

Today I spoke to 180 delegates of CPRE, the countryside charity. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) was there as well. Those people told me what they wanted fed back to Ministers about the progress they would like to see in the green economy. They are frustrated with the lack of progress, and determined and ambitious to ensure that we get to net zero a damn sight quicker than the Government’s current targets suggest. They are keen to protect our green spaces and environments, and, in turn, to create great green jobs. Where there is development, they are determined that we have a brownfield-first policy, and that the houses built are genuinely affordable and carbon neutral. Picking up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel); there are some great examples of modular houses that we can build at scale and create the jobs, jobs, jobs that the shadow Minister spoke about.

We need real and bold investment in our cycleways and pathways, and affordable transport, until the point that it is in our DNA to ensure that our buses are electric, that we get more people working on buses and that our railways get people from A to B, which they clearly do not do currently. At Northwich station in my constituency, people who are disabled or have mobility problems cannot get to the other side of the tracks. That affects their mobility across the conurbation and productivity in terms of sustainable growth.

People have spoken about renewable energy, including the decision on the tidal lagoon. That was a retrograde step; the lagoon should have been invested in. There is a similar situation in Merseyside, where Mayor Steve Rotheram is taking forward a project. I sincerely hope that the Government can escalate that problem—not only for Merseyside, but for the whole nation.

Finally, on renewable energy, people have mentioned hydrogen, which is a real growth industry in my community in Weaver Vale. I would like to see the Government actually escalate such support and put some speed behind it. I would also like to see a recovery plan, which again is about jobs, jobs, jobs, but also about building back better and certainly building back greener with more ambition.