Climate Change: Targets

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, for securing this debate and particularly for the way that she framed it as ensuring that legislation aligns. That seems to point us towards the Queen’s Speech and the need to mainstream climate and environmental issues in everything.

I want to pick out three Bills from the Speech, two obvious, one less obvious. The noble Lord, Lord Lennie, referred to the lack of an energy Bill in the Speech, although there is of course a Bill addressing energy, the draft downstream oil resilience Bill—so the only energy Bill we have is about oil. It talks about working with the sector and, in particular, about transferring to abatement technologies. Will the Minister acknowledge that the Bill is talking about the hard, inefficient way to store carbon? What we have with carbon capture and storage is oil, gas and coal in the ground—and leaving it in the ground is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to store carbon.

I move on to the planning Bill. This seems to divide the country into two areas: open-slather development in some parts, with a few other parts protected. It is a “sparing and sharing” approach. Yet we have seen the Government recently adopt—after a great deal of campaigning—a new nature target, which would seem utterly incompatible with allowing any more trashing of our desperately nature-depleted country.

Finally, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, I come to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. I spent this morning talking first to the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum about food security and then to Building magazine about a national retrofitting strategy. Both stressed the need for skills, the need for people and the terrible shortage of labour supply. This Bill contains plans for a flexible, lifelong loan scheme. We need these workers and these skills; surely with education being a public good, we should not be asking people to take on the weight of loans—to have debt hanging around their neck as a burden. Surely, to deliver our climate and nature targets, we should be looking to fund this education from public spending.