Climate Agenda

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for securing this debate, even if perhaps it has turned out somewhat differently from what he expected. It has been a rich and encouraging debate, but I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has been watching the same debate as the rest of us. We have seen not a crumbling but rather a strengthening of the wall of understanding and common sense, particularly among the majority opposition party on this side of the House.

I join others in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, to your Lordships’ House, and to publicly offer thanks for her notably restrained resignation list, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, noted, offering the Green Party the seat that came to bring me into your Lordships’ House. I hope that she might encourage further moves in that direction from her new position in your Lordships’ House.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in introducing this, said that he wanted an honest and informed debate. I start by picking up a couple of the terms that he used, including “cheap energy”. Fossil fuel energy, as a number of noble Lords have outlined and as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, identified, has very considerable externalised costs. In fact, burning fossil fuels is costing us the earth. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, highlighted, looking at the risk of the ending of AMOC—the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, often referred to as part of the Gulf Stream—giving Britain the climate of Scandinavia would be a considerable cost and could not be called a result of cheap energy.

I pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on the drop in territorial emissions in the UK. As the Climate Change Committee has highlighted, we should be counting our consumption emissions. When we look at those figures, those emissions are only 19% lower in 2021 than in 2001. They are the goods and services that we are using, and we are responsible for the emissions associated with them.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, I think that the criteria that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has used to judge climate change action are interesting: jobs, growth and prosperity. I shall focus briefly on each of those. On growth, I am going to differ from most of the speakers thus far. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We are, whether we like it or not, in a post-growth world, and it is not just me saying that—I point to the fact that the IMF has just been saying in the past week that we cannot have expectations of growth in future like the ones that we have had in the past. The pie of our economy cannot get bigger. What we have to do is to stop forcing some people to rely on crumbs and slice that pie up fairly. Who is benefiting from growth in an economy where, in the UK now, we have 4.3 million children growing up in poverty?

The second point is jobs. Everyone is saying that we need to create jobs. I remind the House that in one debate this week we were looking at the new funded childcare places. We need 36,000 more workers to provide those childcare places. We are short of 50,000 nurses and 100,000 care workers—and look at the immigration shortage list, which has chemical and biological scientists, bricklayers, stonemasons, tilers and retrofitters. These are the activities of the economy that we desperately need. What we need to do is to stop having jobs that trash our climate and environment and ensure that, in a just transition, those skills, and the energy, time and talents of those workers, go towards doing what we actually need to be done. That is a just transition.

Finally, I focus on prosperity. One dictionary definition gives it as

“the condition of being successful or thriving”.

We are a society in poor and declining health, and what the noble Lord identified as “cheap energy” is a significant contributor to that ill health. There is air pollution, for example. We can look at recent mapping from the EXPANSE project at the University of Utrecht. There are only a few areas in the north of Scotland that have pollution levels at or below World Health Organization-recommended levels. Those levels of air pollution are contributing to heart and lung disease, COPD, lung cancer, dementia, lower birthrate babies and asthma. We are not a prosperous society, we are an ill society, and the burning of fossil fuels is a significant contributor to that. Climate action is also action to improve health in our society.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, questioned the insulating of homes. Having a warm, comfortable and affordable-to-heat home—a healthy home—is surely a foundation of life that our economy should provide to every single person. Let us not forget that the cleanest, greenest and cheapest energy that you can possibly have is the energy that you do not need to use.

I briefly mention childhood obesity, poor diet and our broken food system, based on fossil fuels. Our five year-olds now are shorter than they were a few years ago. The economy is not working for our people and it is not working in its own terms, so we cannot afford not to have a climate agenda—one that needs to be far bolder and more effective than what we have now. We should be looking for zero carbon by the early 2030s, because of the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the planetary boundaries that we are exceeding—but also for health and well-being and the prosperity of our nation. We need to ensure that we have well-paid and secure jobs in every role that actually needs doing. We need a climate agenda and a just transition for a society living within the physical limits of this planet.

There has been, and will be, a lot of talk about technological innovation. Of course we need that, but we also need social innovation—such as a four-day working week as standard, with no loss of pay; universal basic income; and free education. These are the social innovations that we need for climate action and for a prosperous society.

Public Sector Productivity

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Patten, I have to reflect on the experience of commuting, whether that is stuck behind the wheel of a car in a traffic jam or having your face stuck in someone else’s armpit on an overcrowded, delayed train. I really could not think of anything less productive than those experiences, which of course not allowing working from home forces people into every day.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for securing this debate and both your Lordships’ Chambers for timing perfectly the finish of the previous two debates, which has allowed me to run between the Moses Room and the defence review and this debate—an extremely efficient use of my time this evening.

I want to begin with a very quick overview of the state of public services in the UK. They have had 14 years of austerity and I am going to draw on an Institute for Government report from October 2022, ‘Austerity’ in Public Services: Lessons from the 2010s. It points out that our public services are fragile because of austerity. Austerity meant that the pay of workers was pushed down and the number of staff slashed so that people had to work harder. That was not a viable position, this report and I conclude. Very many people are now simply worn out. They are overtired. Many people have left. Huge amounts of experience, knowledge and skills have been lost. There were very few easy and genuinely effective efficiency savings to be found, and what there were have been found.

We saw situations, as happened with policing in prisons, where there were slashing efficiency cuts, but then money had to be put back in because the institutions had fallen apart. That meant that experienced staff left, and new, little-trained, inexperienced people came in, and that was really bad for productivity. Austerity is wildly inefficient. Of course, that is not the fault of the public sector but of politics. If we are talking about the productivity of the public sector, maybe we have to look very close to home for reasons why there might be issues.

A second issue that has been driven by ideology and politics is privatisation, financialisaton and marketisation. I recall marching in 2014 with the 999 Call for the NHS campaign on part of its Jarrow march against the privatisation of the NHS. Many of the people on that march were NHS staff, and they could tell the story of the past couple of years where they had had three or four different job titles, three or four different bosses, and had worked for three or four different organisations, and yet they had been seeing the same kind of patients in the same office every day. All of those things take vast amounts of time, energy and stress and lead to people getting frustrated, giving up and leaving, and all of it was driven by political decisions and political ideology. Why do we have a productivity problem? Let us look closer to home. We need a better quality of governance and politics.

Finally, on health, we have a terrible quality of public health. In the working-age population, we have a huge number of people suffering from long Covid and all sorts of chronic conditions who struggle into work every day and do their best. We need to find ways to get a healthier society, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, just mentioned; this is about taking a systemic approach to our society.

I want to devote my final minute to one simple idea. No one idea is a panacea, but here is one way forward: a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, who secured this debate, might like to know of an article published by the World Economic Forum which states—with invisible but clear exclamation marks—that a four-day working week as standard, with no loss of pay or extension of hours each day, “actually increases productivity”. The article also notes:

“Work smarter not harder has been the mantra of management consultants”.


I do not want to suggest a Stakhanovite, Amazon-warehouse type arrangement where everyone comes into the office, puts their heads down and is forced to act like a robot. Ultimately, however, we need to think about not just the productivity of our public services but the productivity of our society. A healthy society that cares for people and has time for family and community, which a four-day week would provide, would be a highly productive society.

Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 8th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am going to start with history. I used to live on Leather Lane in central London between the City and Westminster, where, despite Victorian urban expansion, a dairy farm continued to operate in the middle of the city. That was no historical accident. With the adulteration of milk rampant, with filthy water and much worse, the only way consumers could be sure that milk would not kill them or their children was if they actually saw it come out of the cow.

A few years ago I was privileged to visit the Rochdale Pioneers Museum in the home of the first successful consumer co-operative in the UK: the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844. Its aim was to ensure not just affordable products but safe and genuine products, without sawdust in the flour or arsenic in the sugar. But not everyone had a co-operative nearby. It was eventually conceded back in the 19th century that it was the responsibility of the state to protect consumers.

Amid a huge ideological debate about the freedom of traders to sell whatever they liked, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act 1875 was passed. However, it took time to take effect. In 1877 a quarter of all the milk examined by the local government board was seriously adulterated. However, the law worked. By 1894 adulterated milk accounted for less than 10% of all samples. Campaigning worked to get the law and the law worked for the good of the people. Lives were saved. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton of Doncaster, noting in her wonderful maiden speech that such protections are particularly important for the most vulnerable in society.

Today, in 2024, however, we are seriously failing to provide protections. The noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and others referred to the fact that it has been clear for some time that there is a huge problem with lithium-ion batteries and chargers. We have seen this problem, yet there has been no action. I would like to ask the Minister specifically about what timeframe the Government see for taking action on this. Do we have to wait for the Bill to go through the many months it will undoubtedly take? I do not know if that is necessary. Could something not be done sooner? As the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, said in bringing his particular expertise to this debate, in the current age we need a kind of agility in reacting to changing products, circumstances and methods of sale, but we are utterly failing.

Last weekend, I was listening to the London Review of Books podcast. James Butler, who closely followed and reported on the evidence to the Grenfell Tower inquiry, was speaking angrily, and rightly, about the decades of regulatory failure that led to the deaths of 72 people. When you read in Hansard the debates about the 1875 Act, we had people then making the same kind of arguments that are made today: about the need to protect business from extra costs; about the need to allow business to make profits; about the need to allow freedom of trade, even of substandard products. But what could be more central to the role of government than keeping people safe?

It is demonstrably clear that exercising the rhetoric of cutting so-called red tape has killed and continues to kill. Anyone using that language really should take a good hard look at themselves. Taking the US approach of waiting until a product kills and injures, then setting the injured consumer or their relatives against the enormous weight of multinational companies—or in pursuit of some fly-by-night trader who cannot possibly be located—in the hope of financial recompense through the slow lottery of the courts, years or decades later, when of course that will not restore their life or their health, is indefensible and ineffective. It is fit only for a society that does not care for its people.

Product regulation is not just a matter of life and death. It is also about keeping a basic quality of life and well-being, not just for the purchasers of products but for general society and our disastrously battered environment on this planet, where the boundaries for novel entities have already been exceeded, in addition to the now acutely obvious climate emergency and nature crisis. Product regulation is crucial in the quality of our everyday lives and health, in both obvious and more subtle ways. How much energy your TV or computer uses, how much noise your neighbour’s strimmer makes or how much pollution you breathe in as you walk down the pavement affect all of us, every minute of every day. With public health in the UK in such a terrible state, this is even more crucial.

Since Brexit, Europe has demonstrably continued to advance in health, well-being and the safety of its products—even if, as the European green parties regularly point out, still far too slowly—while the UK has been sliding further and further behind. I want to particularly note three briefings that I received before this debate from the Green Alliance, Friends of the Earth and the Institute for European Environmental Policy. Those organisations are, as those names suggest, particularly focused on environmental health. What we need to adopt, of course, is a one-health approach acknowledging that environmental health, animal health and human health are all intimately interrelated. In that context I have to note, as I acknowledge the Minister did in his introduction, that this is an environmental Bill. It therefore contains significant devolved elements which cover areas under the control of the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, has been listening closely to our debate and I expect that in later stages of the Bill we may well be working on these issues together.

However, it is probably already clear from my comments that the Bill is welcome from the Green Party perspective, if severely insufficient in its current form and approach. I foresee many a debate about “may” or “must” being in its clauses. Surely, the Labour Party will not be reversing the kinds of positions it took in debating such matters when they were on the Opposition Benches. I hope we are not going to see the kind of 180 degree U-turn that we saw from the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, much as I am glad to see that the Conservative Party is now concerned about Henry VIII clauses.

I want to focus briefly on a couple of areas. Chemical regulation is a huge area of concern, with the science fast exposing how disastrously we have poisoned this planet. I am looking forward to a commitment from the Minister, either today or down the track, to either a new chemicals strategy or a new chemicals agency. I note that the Royal Society of Chemistry has been calling for this.

I also want to take a brief look at the advances being made in Europe, particularly the EU’s eco-design for sustainable products regulation, which entered into force on 18 July this year. This is part of a wider circular economy plan, an approach I hope to see the Government taking forward. It is focused not on a particular problem or product; it is a framework law that aims to drive forward improvements across a whole range of products and product categories by encouraging products that use less energy—so saving consumers money—last longer, can be easily repaired or recycled, contain more recycled content and have parts that can easily be disassembled and put to further use. It ensures that each product should have a digital product passport, so that producers have to collect and record the sustainability of their products. This means we can look at how to best use these products in the future. Do the Government plan to take a similar approach?

I am perhaps surprised that this debate has not focused more on another issue. Chemical substances in toys are an obvious area of grave concern to the health of our current and future generations. We need particularly to protect children from exposure to harmful endocrine-disrupting chemicals. I note that public awareness of PFAS and “forever chemicals” is growing fast; the Government are going to find themselves coming under considerable pressure in these areas very soon. At the moment, the Bill’s powers appear primarily to cover products that come under the Department for Business and Trade and the Office for Product Safety and Standards. Are the Government prepared to consider—I would be delighted to discuss this with the Minister—whether the Bill can be extended to cover the EU REACH restrictions and bans on other consumer products not falling into those categories? An obvious example here is formaldehyde in furniture, an area of growing health concern.

I have two final points to make. One is about Clause 11, which lists the regulations to be considered under the affirmative procedure but misses an opportunity to deal with something that, again, the now Government frequently lamented from these Benches: the impossibility in your Lordships’ House of dealing with statutory instruments with regulations that are patently inadequate but which we have no effective opportunity to stop. There is a chance to create further oversight in Clause 11, including perhaps a potential option for the House of Lords to disapprove draft instruments, sending them back for extra homework where significant concerns are raised. This, of course, is crucial, given that in the Bill’s current form there are essentially no real commitments.

Finally, I want to pick up one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The noble Lord rightly highlighted how our trading standards enforcement has been absolutely sliced away by austerity. Your Lordships’ House can do wonders with this Bill, but without enforcement—if the Bill is not enforced—that is pointless. I hope that the Government will address the issue of austerity’s impact on local government, particularly trading standards, as a matter of urgency.