Climate and Nature Bill

Andrew Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Cooper (Mid Cheshire) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for all the work she has done and the courage she has shown to get us to this point. I think I am right in saying that she learned her rowing craft in Northwich in my constituency, and the strength and tenacity she has shown today is typical of members of that rowing club. I thank her for what she has done.

It is a privilege to have the opportunity to speak on this issue today, because, alongside the fight against child poverty, it is one of the core issues that defines why I entered politics and how we must act not for today but for tomorrow. We must take immediate and bold action to secure a sustainable future for our planet, our environment and our children, who will inherit the world that we shape today. The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our times, and bold action is essential to combating it. Climate change and environmental destruction are not distant threats. They are realities that we face today, and they pose an existential threat.

The science is absolutely clear: our planet is warming at an alarming rate, and the resultant consequences are dire. As the Met Office reported just a couple of weeks ago, 2024 was the warmest year on record globally and the first year that was likely more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. From rising sea levels to devastating floods and wildfires to unprecedented heatwaves, the effects of climate change are being seen today and they impact everyone.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Andrew Cooper]

I will not, because a lot of Members are trying to get in, and I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak.

I am convinced that to tackle this challenge, we must commit to a just transition, with ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that not only put us on track to meet our global commitments but pave the way for a cleaner, greener future for generations to come. We must protect our precious natural ecosystems. The biodiversity crisis is a pressing issue, with species declining at an unprecedented rate. The World Wildlife Fund reported in October that between 1970 and 2020, there was a catastrophic 73% decline in wildlife populations. It is essential that we not only seek to halt that decline but prioritise the restoration and preservation of habitats.

[Anna Dixon]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Andrew Cooper]

I would rather not, as so many Members are looking to speak.

By safeguarding our ecosystems, we not only protect wildlife but enhance our own quality of life. Healthy ecosystems provide clean air, safe water and fertile land, which are essential resources for our communities and economy. We must seize this opportunity to drive innovation and create green jobs.

As we transition to a low-carbon economy, we can harness the power of renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and cutting-edge technology. This transition will not only help us meet our climate goals but stimulate economic growth and employment opportunities in sectors that are vital for our future. Investing in a sustainable economy is not merely an environmental imperative; it is an immense economic opportunity. Too often, we hear opponents of tackling the climate crisis present this as all cost. I ask them, “Why would you leave this fantastic opportunity to be a global leader in these technologies and to sell our expertise all over the world to someone else?”

I know that the Government recognise this, and I welcome the action that has already been taken not only to get us back on track to meeting our climate commitments, but to create hundreds of thousands of good jobs and drive investment throughout our country. Removing the ban on onshore wind in England, committing £21.7 billion for carbon capture, approving solar projects offering almost 2 GW of power, launching Great British Energy and delivering record-breaking renewables auctions are vital steps in delivering clean power by 2030 and accelerating to net zero.

Moreover, we know that the public back action on climate, nature and the environment, with Oxford University estimating support at about 80% globally. Indeed, I have heard people across Mid Cheshire express their concerns on these matters. Prior to the general election, I participated in a dedicated climate and nature hustings organised jointly by Sustainable Northwich and Winsford Sustainability Partners, which have done a tremendous amount locally to raise awareness of these issues, provide forums for discussing topics such as carbon capture and storage, work with local schools on air quality projects, and much more. I take this opportunity to thank them for the work that they have done and continue to do.

Along with people across the country, those organisations are increasingly aware of the urgency of the situation and are calling for bold action. By listening to the voices of the people we serve, we can foster collaboration between Government, businesses and local communities to ensure that we create a collective response to climate change that is inclusive, effective and decisive.

According to the Local Government Association, more than 300 local authorities have declared a climate emergency, and nearly two thirds of councils in England aim to be carbon neutral by 2030. I am particularly proud that our first act as an administration after the local elections in 2019 was to declare a climate emergency in Cheshire West and Chester.

Perhaps there is a stereotype of Cheshire as a rural county full of cheese, cats and “Real Housewives” but, at the time of the declaration, Cheshire West was the fourth highest polluting borough for carbon dioxide emissions, with only Neath Port Talbot, North Lincolnshire and Birmingham ranking higher. The borough’s climate emergency response plan notes:

“Cheshire West and Chester is, in many ways, a microcosm of the UK. Few places can claim to have such a variety of key emitters and sectors located in one area.”

There is a heavy concentration of industry in the north of the borough in Ellesmere Port.

There are some who would have us deindustrialise and roll back on manufacturing or any carbon-intensive process. We have seen the consequences of such action. We have seen what happens when the rug is pulled from under communities with nothing to replace it, and how long it can take for a place to recover. And yet, time is of the essence. By providing strategic leadership, we have seen growth in the hydrogen cluster, investment in sustainable aviation fuel production and the approval of a first-of-its-kind carbon capture and storage facility that will have an effect equivalent to taking nearly 200,000 cars off the road each year. The latter was made possible by this Government’s commitment to providing certainty for business and investing in this energy cluster and the industries of the future.

Of course, this is not entirely down to the actions of the Government or the council, but if we set the challenge, lead on it and show businesses that we are prepared to back them, they will respond, as we have seen with industry-led initiatives such as Net Zero North West.

In my constituency, Tata is in the process of developing another world first. For a long time, Northwich has been synonymous with the chemistry of salt, and Tata, following completion of its EcoKarb carbon capture and utilisation plant, has announced that it will build a world-first facility to make the first sodium bicarbonate with net zero carbon emissions. Let us all move forward together on this fantastic work.

Rivers, Lakes and Seas: Water Quality

Andrew Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Cooper (Mid Cheshire) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes) on securing and ably leading this important debate.

The health of our seas and waterways is a pressing issue that affects each of us, and we have a collective responsibility to tackle this issue. Waterways are incredibly important to the soul of Mid Cheshire. My constituency is intersected and surrounded by waterways, including four rivers, three canals and a smorgasbord of meres and flashes—a legacy of our history of salt extraction. Indeed, Northwich played a particularly important role in the development of the inland waterways in Britain. At one time, Lawrence of Arabia was based there to oversee the spy ships that we built. Of course, Mid Cheshire’s waterways are not as important as they once were for powering our industry, but they remain vital ecosystems that support a rich tapestry of life, contribute to our economy and provide us with recreation and essential resources.

A consistent theme of this debate has been the alarming frequency of sewage discharges. For the sake of brevity, I will spare Members the statistics, but they represent the chronic under-investment in our sewerage infrastructure over a sustained period. That is a feature, not a bug, of how the water industry has been set up. If that was not evidence enough, we have only to look at the last two floods of Northwich town centre, which were caused not by the river’s flood defences overtopping, but by insufficient capacity in our drains to deal with the volume of water.

As stewards of our environment, we have a responsibility to act and it is good that the Government is doing that, not only through the Water (Special Measures) Bill, but through the independent commission on the water sector regulatory system. We must continue to advocate for the transformation of how the water industry is run, and seek to speed up the delivery of upgrades to our sewage infrastructure to clean up our waterways for good.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

The River Mole flows through my constituency. In 2024, it suffered over 2,000 additional hours of sewage discharge in comparison with 2023, despite similar rainfall. Does the hon. Member agree that despite recent efforts to protect our waterways—we appreciate what the Government are doing—the problem continues to worsen, and the Government must be more ambitious in their action to hold water companies to account?

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Cooper]

The hon. Lady makes a fair point. We are certainly at the start of the journey, not the end, so there is more to do to get the issue under control.

I will highlight the importance of citizen science initiatives and active involvement from communities and campaign groups such as Restore the Weaver and Northwich River Heroes, which often provide invaluable data that complements the work done by organisations such as the Environment Agency. It is a shame, however, that the EA has had to rely on such people, rather than being properly resourced for the task at hand.

I am pleased we now have a Government who have swept away the inertia, neglect and failure that characterised the previous Government’s approach to the activities of water companies and the protection of our waterways. Like my Labour colleagues, I have hope for a future in which we can look on poor river quality as a thing of the past.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robbie Moore]

I come back to the point that monitoring is incredibly important. This is why we brought out a requirement for all water companies to specifically carry out more monitoring: before 2010, only 7% of storm overflows were monitored. That is completely unacceptable. We needed to understand the problem so that we could not only use our regulators to enforce water companies to carry out the level of investment we would expect of them, but strongly hold those water companies, and indeed all polluters, to account. I encourage the Government to keep going with that, which is why we have taken a constructive approach to the Water (Special Measures) Bill that is working its way through the House.

There are three points which I want to focus on and I would be grateful if the Minister could address them in her response. First are the points that have been made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), to do with the £35 million allocation to the River Wye action plan, announced earlier this year. The River Wye action plan was specifically designed to address those challenges to do with pollution from our farmers. The plan set out a range of measures to begin protecting the river immediately from pollution and establish a long-term plan to restore the river for future generations. That included requiring large poultry farms to export manure away from areas where they would otherwise cause excess pollution and providing a fund of up to £35 million for grant support for on-farm poultry manure combustion combustors in the River Wye special area of conservation. The plan also appointed a chair.

I would therefore like to ask the Minister why the plan has been dropped, despite those things having been put in place? Where has the £35 million been reallocated? We are now six months into this Labour Government, but yet there has been no announcement on the River Wye and I fear that there will be no action taken. We are almost coming up to a year since that plan was worked on. If the Minister could update the House on that, it would be greatly appreciated.

The second point is the water restoration fund, which was specifically designed to ringfence money that had been collected from those water companies that had been polluting, to focus specifically on improving water quality. The fund, when it was announced, allocated £11 million-worth of penalties collected from water companies to be offered on a grant basis to local support groups, farmers, landowners and community-led schemes. Hon. Members have talked about how good their local campaigners are at utilising funds that are provided to them, and I absolutely endorse that, but that fund was specifically ringfenced for penalty money reclaimed from water companies to be reinvested.

The Government are not taking the water restoration fund forward, so will the Minister accept the Conservative amendment to the Water (Special Measures) Bill on that point? The water restoration fund came exclusively from water company fines and penalties, which are in addition to any other work the company must carry out to repair breaches that it has caused. Will the Minister explain why the Government are not continuing the fund, and why she does not think it is important that water companies clean up their own mess when money has been collected from them?

[Andrew Cooper]

The previous Government cut the environmental protection budget for the Environment Agency from £170 million in 2009-10 to £76 million in 2019-20. Does the shadow Minister accept that some of the actions that he has spoken about might not have been necessary had the Environment Agency been funded properly to carry out the important work that it was doing?

[Robbie Moore]

We all have to acknowledge that water companies have not been meeting their environmental obligations for far too long. That is why we implemented the monitoring. Regulators—Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Environment Agency—need robust powers so that they can carry out enforcement.

The water restoration fund ringfenced money collected from the water companies and that allowed farmers, landowners and the many great campaigning organisations that want to carry out nature-based solutions to improve water quality, and there was the additional expectation that water companies put in place their own improvement measures. I ask the Minister: why on earth would the Government not want to continue that approach?

My third point is about bathing water designations, which are a fantastic way of reassuring those who want to bathe in specific areas, whether our lakes, rivers or coastal environments. They also put a greater obligation on the Environment Agency and water companies to carry out additional monitoring.

In May 2024, I was delighted to announce 27 new bathing water sites ahead of the 2024 bathing water season. That brought the number of bathing water sites across England up to 451. In addition, I announced a review of the bathing water regulations, which I had been advocating for some time. Our constituents do not just swim at bathing water sites, but use them for other activities, including canoeing, kayaking and other water-based activities. I very much wanted to see the review of the bathing water regulations, and we announced the change to increase the user basis. I also wanted to see an increase in bathing water designations beyond May to September so that all-year monitoring could take place, and the removal of the automatic de-designation of poor sites so that sites that had been consistently rated poor could keep their designation to keep up the pressure on the water companies and the Environment Agency to continue monitoring. Will the Minister update the House on what is happening with that announcement, which was made last year? What is she doing to ensure bathing water regulations are enhanced and improved?

In the run-up to the general election, Labour made huge promises about what it would do to improve water quality. I feel that it is falling far short on its promises to the electorate. Although we will work constructively with the Government to improve their measures, campaigners—it is not just me—feel that the Water (Special Measures) Bill does not go far enough, and investors feel that they are being penalised while the Government expect them to carry out improvement measures. The Government are penalising our farmers, not only through the family farm tax, but by not providing water grants to them to carry out improvement measures.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed]

The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that we have announced the biggest Budget for sustainable farming—£5 billion over the next two years—in the history of our country, and that is to be welcomed by everybody in the sector and everybody who cares about it. This is a Government who believe in devolution. We believe that devolved Administrations should have the right to take decisions about their own countries. The consequentials mean that the appropriate level of funding will continue to go to those devolved Administrations, and our support for devolution means that the devolved Administrations will take their own decisions about the best way to spend it.

[Andrew Cooper (Mid Cheshire) (Lab)]

Chester zoo, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), does important and nationally leading conservation work. Zoos nationwide have faced regulatory uncertainty for nearly three years because of the previous Government’s delay in publishing new zoo standards. Will my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State set out when the Department plans to publish the updated version of the standards of modern zoo practice, to drive improvements in animal welfare and provide certainty to those institutions?

[Mary Creagh]

I have visited Chester zoo and seen the wonderful work that it does in species conservation. I will endeavour to write to my hon. Friend to update him on the regulations.