Net-Zero Carbon Emissions

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for securing this debate and for his clear and powerful introduction to it. I particularly welcome those telling quotes from local government officials. I have enjoyed many of the contributions that we have heard already from all sides of your Lordships’ Committee. I particularly appreciated the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. Her phrases “from rhetoric to reality” and “from poetry to prose” are being reflected in the speeches of most other noble Lords. If this Committee were marking the Government’s work on integration of policy-making and the climate emergency, the result would surely not rise above D-minus.

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, whose 2004 Private Member’s Bill, which became an Act, on sustainable and secure buildings was ground-breaking at the time. It is such a tragedy that we have made so little progress on energy efficiency in the past two decades and we are still building dreadful-quality new homes, immediately in need of extensive retrofitting. That is a far more expensive process than building them right in the first place in our lax regulatory environment. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, beautifully summed up what was needed in new homes in a slogan that would even fit on the side of a bus: “Stop Building Badly”. I will not even start today on the green homes fund. Even the Government have admitted that that was a disastrous, ill-delivered policy and another outsourcing disaster. The terrible quality of our housing is a tragedy for the planet and for the households that have to live in such uncomfortable, inadequate environments and pay the heating bills for them.

As I turn directly to the Motion before the Committee, I should declare my position as a vice-chair of the Local Government Association. Reaching net zero emissions is a necessary condition to playing the UK’s essential part as an historically massive contributor to the climate emergency—as a former colonial power that destroyed much of the earth, leaving nations ill- equipped to deal with it. It is not, however, a sufficient condition: our current rate of progress is far too slow, as are our targets. We should be aiming for net zero by 2030.

Climate is only one of our problems. We also have the crisis in our state of nature: our soil is in disastrous condition and the world is choked with plastic waste. This is an appropriate time to mention that this is Reusable Nappy Week. An attempt to initiate it was made many years ago by the excellent Women’s Environmental Network to highlight the social and environmental damage posed by single-use nappies—a major source of plastic waste—but there has been no effective government action. I mention that specifically because this Motion focuses on the need for the integration of the efforts of national and local government. Here is one good example of excellent things happening piecemeal at a local level, often relying on volunteer-led approaches, such as nappy libraries. However, austerity-crippled local governments, with their powers stripped away in our incredibly centralised political system, have little capacity to deliver the consistently complete services—nappy libraries, support groups, centralised laundry provision—needed to make reusable nappies, which are better for parents, babies and the environment, the standard for all. What a criminal waste for the climate and for people to cut down a tree, pump up oil and turn it into plastic to produce an object used for a few hours at most before it becomes noxious waste set to remain in landfill for centuries or produce polluting gases in an incinerator—that it is if it does not end up littering the local park.

While we are on the interlinked issues of climate and plastics, where is England’s bottle deposit scheme? Not world-leading, not even world-trailing, but so far behind the arrangements in most comparable countries that we are on another planet.

Talking about the climate emergency and local government, it was striking this morning to see an article on Bloomberg News headlined “Cities are our best hope of surviving climate change”, which notes that cities consume two-thirds of the global energy supply and generate three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. As the headline’s wording suggests, this was a positive article. Top billing went to the globally fast-spreading 15-minute city proposal: the idea that what you need daily, for work, leisure, education and shopping, should all be within a 15-minute cycle ride of your home. The article notes:

“Paris has gone the furthest toward realizing this urban ideal citywide”.


It also notes that Barcelona has freed up entire swathes of its street grid to make pedestrian “superblocks”. That is something I was working on with campaigners to try to get going in central London, around Bloomsbury, back around 2008. Progress in the UK on this essential action for climate, for clean air, for cutting congestion and freeing the streets for people? Zilch.

In the Bloomberg article, what other places get mentioned for city action? Chicago, where

“rooftop vegetation proliferated after a 2004 mandate required private developments to include sustainable elements”.

The article notes:

“Bogotá’s whole public transit system—including its nearly 1,500 buses—is on track to be fully electric by mid-2022”.


I contrast that with figures I came across this morning for the entirety of South Yorkshire, which has 36 electric buses, all in Sheffield.

Back to the Bloomberg article and the good news: Izmir in Turkey gets a mention for heating an entire district using geothermal energy since 1996, with savings of 35% on heating costs for residents. There are so many good examples around the world. Great progress is being made, often led by local and city governments and delivering, in the jargon, real co-benefits, improving the lives of households and reducing poverty and inequality. That is the climate good news. But positive mentions of UK cities in this Bloomberg story? There are none.

When I sat down to think about this speech this morning, I realised with a sinking heart that I would inevitably be hearing that favourite government phrase, “world-leading”. So I have a question, a challenge, if you like, to the Minister: show one significant area where the UK is world-leading in action, not words, not targets, not meaningless “legally binding rules” that are nothing of the sort—for, as the independent Committee on Climate Change points out, we are not on track for the fourth or fifth carbon budgets, not even those target levels below what has been set now—but action on tackling the climate emergency.

Before the Minister brandishes the purely statistical accounting of our territorial carbon emissions, let us note that that figure ignores consumption emissions. The emissions associated with a washing machine made in China but sold and used in the UK are our responsibility. Offshoring emissions is not cutting them—is not climate action.

However, I always try to come back to the positive, so let us look at some positive things that are happening around the UK. Sitting in the other place, oven-ready—a phrase with which the Government used to be so enamoured—is the Climate and Ecology Bill. The last time I looked, it has the support of 118 MPs and Peers, yet the Government are denying the Commons parliamentary time to discuss it. A letter signed by 100 climate experts and environmentalists calls for the Government to back the Bill. Commenting on that, one of the signers, and designers, of the Bill, Professor Haigh, told the Independent that the law would replace “sorely lacking” mechanisms to turn ambition into reality. We have, the professor said,

“a hotchpotch of green initiatives, with no apparent joined-up thinking, while the Earth’s temperature continues to rise”.

But I am being positive. The Scottish Government published a draft public engagement strategy in December for a “net-zero nation”—an excellent model for Westminster to follow. If that seems politically unpalatable, call it something different. I really do not mind. The people of the devolved nations know that they are far ahead of Westminster on climate action, if still far from adequately advanced. That is one more reason why they are moving, at varying rates, in one direction across the range from “indy-curious” to “indy-convinced”. They can see their nations’ Governments delivering when Westminster is not, pushed by Parliaments truly representative of their people.

That is not to say that there are not lots of good things happening in England at the local level. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, referred to, after Bristol Council led the way, pushed by the brilliant councillor Carla Denyer, 300 of the 404 district, county, unitary and metropolitan councils have now declared a climate emergency. Eight combined authorities and city regions have done likewise. Some are developing plans on that, but we need integration and joined-up thinking— the Government working co-operatively with local government and not looking down on it.

But, again, I am trying to be positive. Since I focused on cities earlier, I mention just one example of the many thousands of smaller communities up and down the land that are taking action for themselves: the village of Ashton Hayes in Cheshire, a pioneering community of around 1,000 people, adopted the idea of being carbon-neutral long before it was a catchphrase. It has led in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Yet when I visited years ago, while admiring the efforts, I did have to look pointedly at the numbers and level of private car usage. Those leading the charge could only agree with me but, while public transport provision was so poor, people had no alternative. This was not something that a village of 1,000 people could fix.

We are back to the need for integrated policy-making and the provision of resources to bodies at the relevant level, not trickled out in tiny sums through government-controlled bidding processes but shared around the country to allow local decision-making, co-ordination and planning, based on local knowledge and conditions. Democracy would be a really good idea, as noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, reflected earlier.

To return to my list of positives, some of this would be really simple. One starting point would be within the ability range even of this Government: stop doing the wrong things. Fixing some of our mistakes would be easy; the Government could implement a net-zero test to ensure that all new policies and existing action support the 2050 target and give the Climate Change Committee more powers to hold the Government to account. That would kill stone-dead obviously indefensible government projects such as new roads and expanding airports.

The Government could also simply create the bodies and structures already announced. We were told back on 18 November that the 10-point plan would establish a “task force net zero”. That was 123 days ago. Those were words—literally hot air. Where is the action? As many noble Lords have asked, where is the Cabinet committee on climate change?

Finally, we have a new COP 26 spokesperson—even if we have fallen into having one—but, however brilliant they might be at delivering words and however shiny and new their backdrop, they cannot do anything about delivering action. The climate emergency is a scientific fact. It does not respond to rhetoric or bullying. It cannot be laughed off with a Latin quip. It demands action.