Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Kyoto Protocol Registry) Regulations 2021

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 13th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, I respectfully disagree with his suggestion that any blame for lack of progress lies with the Committee on Climate Change. It is providing the advice that is needed. The failure is with government action, and I agree with the noble Lord on the extraordinarily urgent need for action.

I thank the Minister for his introduction to this statutory instrument. As he outlined, it establishes the new UK registry that is currently in development. As our own Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee noted with dry restraint:

“Until then, UK businesses that wish to trade KP units will have to open KP accounts in other countries’ registries.”


Once again, the Government are scrambling, still belatedly filling in basic gaps nearly six years after the Brexit referendum. This is continuity and compliance, as the noble Lord said, with an international agreement signed more than 20 years ago.

However, I will look primarily not backwards but forwards, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, did with his important focus on consumption emissions rather than just measuring territorial emissions. This debate comes on a day when both the Guardian and the ENDS Report carry articles from respected international figures expressing concern about the damage done to the UK’s moral authority, as chair of COP 26, by domestic decisions. Christiana Figueres, a key Paris climate talks figure, said:

“There have been recent decisions in the UK that are not aligning with the ambition of the net zero target. It is worrisome. There are raised eyebrows among world leaders watching the UK.”


What we have here is a problem not just with the decisions being made on roadbuilding, coal mines and airport expansion, but with the failure to deliver policies—the kind of slow, snail-like progress that we are seeing here today. Just look at a list of what the Government are supposed to deliver before COP 26: a heat and buildings strategy, a transport decarbonisation plan, a Treasury net-zero review, an England tree strategy, a hydrogen strategy, an industrial decarbonisation strategy, a nature strategy, and a net-zero strategy. Of course, we are still waiting for the crucially important Environment Bill, in the country ranked 189th in the world for its state of nature.

I do not expect the Minister to have complete answers to all these concerns today, but I ask him for an acknowledgement that the Government have heard these concerns from highly respected, knowledgeable, non-partisan international figures and are at least reflecting on them, and ask him whether he might acknowledge, at least privately, that attaching the label “world-leading” to every government claim is counter- productive and serves only to highlight, as today’s SI does, that the UK is currently profoundly unprepared for the climate emergency and nature crisis.

A “legally binding target” for net zero for 2050 is, in terms of its impact on members of the Government today, precisely meaningless. What matters is action— practical, workable, effective action today—to slash emissions by 2030. That is something the Government have to show progress on, once they are done with the catching up that this statutory instrument demonstrates.