King’s Speech

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet. It is obviously on topics related to that role that I will mainly speak today, but I hope the House will indulge me on just a couple of sentences on House of Lords reform, as evidently I will not be able to participate in Tuesday’s debate.

I am glad that the Government’s manifesto set out a commitment to a smaller House and to ensuring that those who populate it will be appointed because of their ability and commitment to making a real contribution to our work. The Bill we were promised yesterday will obviously help those commitments by reducing the size of the House and ending a pathway to membership which simply is not acceptable in the 21st century. But when we look at the issue of the contribution which Members make, the effects of that Bill will inevitably make us consider whether some nuance may be needed, and that need to balance objectives will become even more apparent if we look at a hard-stop age limit on membership.

I much welcome the tone of the Leader of the House’s remarks yesterday. I hope that the House will be given an opportunity to work out the best and most effective way to reduce its size further, the need for which I am in no doubt, but without damaging its effectiveness as a scrutinising and revising Chamber or sacrificing expertise and experience. I am tempted to pursue the analogy of babies and bathwater, but in discussing an age limit of 80 that is perhaps not appropriate. What is essential—I hope the new Government will look urgently and seriously at this—is a cap on the overall size of the House and the concomitant reduction of the absolute power of prerogative which currently lies with the Prime Minister. That cap and a statutory appointments commission are, in my view, essential building blocks to ensure an effectively functioning second Chamber in which we can justifiably take pride.

Turning to the substance of today’s debate, I have a list of welcomes: a welcome for the recognition in the gracious Speech of

“the urgency of the global climate challenge and the new … opportunities that can come from leading the development of the technologies of the future”,

and for what has already been announced by the Government in lifting the de facto ban on onshore wind developments, an issue on which cognoscenti of debates on it in this House will know I have been campaigning for many years. I give congratulations on reviving the solar power task force and the much needed co-ordinating mechanism to ensure the achievement of the Government’s 2030 target for clean electricity. Equally, I welcome the legislative proposal to establish Great British Energy and

“to help the country achieve energy independence and unlock investment in energy infrastructure”.

There will be plenty to get our collective teeth into in the forthcoming Session of Parliament, so I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who I congratulate on his speech, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, to the formidable workload outlined. We have worked constructively together in the past. I look forward to continuing to do so and of course, if necessary, keeping their feet to the non-fossil fuel fire. I also want very sincerely to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Swinburne, and the noble Lord, Lord Roborough—who we recognise, from his speech, has tremendous and wide-ranging lived experience in these issues—to their position on the Front Bench, and to express my hope to work constructively with them as well.

It is almost exactly five years since the UK became the first G7 nation to legislate legally binding targets on net zero under the leadership of the then Prime Minister, Theresa May. The impressive progress that this country has made, of which I think we are all proud, would not have been possible without a broad and deep consensus in Parliament, and way beyond it, on the importance of tackling climate change. That consensus has, in the words of the Climate Change Committee’s report published today, “begun to fray”, but there is an opportunity for it to be rebuilt. Of course there will be differences of approach and debate about mechanisms, costs and timescales, but consensus on the seriousness of the issue and the urgency of taking effective action are prerequisites to creating opportunities for growth, for jobs, for cleaner air and rivers, and for global leadership on this most global of issues.

We cannot pretend, as some do, that the UK’s performance on climate change does not matter because it accounts for only a small percentage of global emissions. Half of all global emissions come from countries like us, responsible for less than 3% of the global total. If all those countries took that attitude then, frankly, the world would not make any progress on this issue. Without a sense of urgency at home, we cannot credibly lead from the front in combating international climate change as countries prepare to submit updated plans ahead of COP 30 next year.

We know that we must transition away from fossil fuels and need a clear and transparent plan for that transition which recognises the need to support affected workers and for them to be equipped for the new jobs of the green economy. I hope that the Government will pick up on our discussions from the end of the previous Parliament on continued exploration of taking fuel from the North Sea, and end the wasteful and polluting practice of venting and flaring. I also urge the Government to publish a land use strategy sooner rather than later to underpin the contested decisions that will inevitably need to be made in this area.

As well as building that cross-party approach, the other necessity to our work is urgency. The science is warning us that we are running out of road to make the changes needed to avoid climate tipping points. This Parliament needs to be the Parliament of climate delivery. Globally, we have seen records broken for extreme weather events. The eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2014 and we have just experienced the wettest 18 months ever recorded in England. But recently UK policy has stalled in critical areas, from improving the energy efficiency of people’s homes to readying our national grid for electrification, and to restoring nature and cleaning up our waterways.

Restructuring our economy to tackle climate change will not be straightforward and it will mean balancing off multiple factors. The challenge will be to make sure that, on each of these issues, we have the strategic focus but also the careful analysis to make informed decisions about how best to manage the risks and seize the net-zero opportunities before us. I suspect that the phrase already being used—trade-offs—will be a recurrent motif of debates in this Parliament.

It is really important that, five years out from the scientific and symbolic climate milestone of 2030, we make sure that the next stage of transition will be more visible to people and communities. This will therefore demand a new approach to secure public consent on how we implement it, but if people understand the detail and are engaged in discussion on the trade-offs and the benefits that change can bring locally and nationally, we will be much more likely to win hearts and minds. With renewed leadership and science-led decision-making, we can deliver on the issues that are vital today and will be critical to the legacy we leave for the future.