King’s Speech

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. I think I agree with everything that she said, but particularly the points about our broken food system. I welcome the noble Lord and noble Baroness to the Front Bench. I have worked with both extensively on these issues and others—in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, particularly on health—in the previous Parliament. I hope that we will continue to do so on these issues, which in essence are about not politics but the physics and biology of this damaged planet and islands, and the unhealthy conditions that they are creating for our people and the world’s people—the One Health perspective that recognises that our health and economy are entirely dependent on our environment.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, I will take a moment to talk about constitutional issues, since we two Green Peers had to choose just two of six days, which is a reflection of the urgent need to see more Green representatives in your Lordships’ House. After all, we two current Greens have 1,931,880 voters to represent—or at least around 90% of those voters, since there are 40 Green MPs missing from the other place, who would be there if the number of votes matched the number of seats.

When we think about the constitution, it is not a question of whether people are doing the best with what they have but rather, as Danny Sriskandarajah, author of the new book, Power to the People, is asking: is this really the best we can do in terms of structures? Clearly it is not. We have multiple environmental crises but also, as the author says, an apparent “crisis of imagination” in thinking that we cannot change the deeply dysfunctional political, economic, social and environmental systems that we have now.

Constitutional change is not an issue just for the Green Party: it is in all our interests—the national interest. It is crucial to the future of our country. Double the number of people who voted for the Labour Party stayed at home. This is the 34% Government. With that in mind, I ask the Ministers about something unlikely to be included in the King’s Speech but crucial for starting to build public engagement with environmental and other decision-making. Do they plan to build on the tentative experiments in participative grass-roots democracy—people’s assemblies —that began under the former party of government?

I turn to the specific issues of energy, environment and housing. The Green Party embraces and commends many of the steps that the Government are taking, particularly on energy. The rooftop solar revolution is long overdue, and the release of the potential of onshore wind is a reversing of a decision that was one of the worst ideologically driven missteps of the last few Governments. But I would be interested to hear what plans the Government have to ensure that this is accompanied by home batteries and electric cars, which, through vehicle-to-grid systems, have the potential to support the stability of the grid and reduce the need for further generation. I point the Minister to the recently published results of a trial in Canberra of that approach.

The Minister referred to updating the community benefits protocol for renewable energy installations, but what about encouraging community ownership of energy schemes?

The biggest gap in energy policy is a failure to engage with the reality that the cleanest, greenest, cheapest energy that you can have is the energy that you do not need to use. Where are the plans for the massive upgrading of the housing stock that is essential to tackling both the cost of living crisis and the climate emergency?

Further on housing, during the election the Green Party talked about “Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price”, and we will continue to do so. It is pleasing to hear the Minister speaking about insisting that housing developments are accompanied by the essential provision of doctors, schools and public transport, but the handful of oligarchic housebuilders on which the Government seem to intend to rely for housing provision have a track record of failing to deliver even the promised facilities. We have the same problem here as with sewage, which I will get to. These companies’ raison d’être is to make maximum profit, and that often does not correspond with building houses but rather with not building them.

I heard some expressions of support from this side of the Chamber when the Minister referred to imposing housing allocations on local areas and local governments. But this reflects one of the chief intellectual fault lines of the King’s Speech: the Government talk at least about a far more constructive level of engagement in working with the nations and councils of these islands but then are seeking to prevent them making decisions in the best interests, and according to the will, of their communities.

I turn back to sewage. If you look up mentions of the word in your Lordships’ House this century, you find that there has been a total of 768, heavily concentrated in the last two years. I am sure the whole of your Lordships’ House would acknowledge the leadership the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, has provided in this area, as he did again today, noting that the private companies that own our water systems are causing “appalling damage”. I think the whole House would concur with that, but I very much doubt that the Government’s measures as in the King’s Speech are sufficient. Water companies and their bosses exist to make profits; that is their statutory duty. Until we bring this essential public service—this monopoly—back into public hands to be run for public good, the incentive to cut corners, dodge regulation and pollute will continue.

I have not the time now to cover the other multiple environmental challenges that I will be raising through other mechanisms in coming days, but I will tick off a couple of points. I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, about the urgent need for the long-promised land use strategy; with the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, about the need for more support for farmers and the central place of food security in securing our future; and with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about the need for a zero-waste economy, something on which UK policy lags far behind many of our European neighbours, particularly in consumer sectors. Big food and big business wrestled again and again with the previous Government on these issues and won; I hope we will see the new Government acting differently and standing up to big food and big business.

Finally, we are told that the number one mission of the Government is growth, yet we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We have an ageing population, an ill population, and a society in which lifelong learning provision has been trashed and young people loaded with unpayable student debt, while our universities have been left in a perilous financial position. The Minister talked about creating skilled jobs, but we are yet to hear at all from the Government—I acknowledge it is early days—about creating the skills and understanding we urgently need to tackle our polycrises, which are particularly but not solely environmental. I note that figures out today show a second annual fall in the number of students applying to universities.

I ask the Government to think about their definition of skills. We remember, as the Covid report comes out today, how suddenly, at the height of the pandemic, we realised that many of the low-paid, underrespected individuals in our society were essential workers, and that every job that needs doing—from sewer cleaners to school dinner servers to bus drivers—needs to be both decently paid and treated with respect. Every person has a contribution to make to repairing this broken Britain—our environment, our economy, our infrastructure and our society.