Finance Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 17th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I cannot say much about the budget except that it is inadequate for the scale of the problems ahead. We know that coronavirus has hit us hard and shaken all our systems, but the scale of the climate change crisis will knock all that out of the park.

I will set out some of the budget figures that I think are necessary, which are from the Green Party’s fully costed 2019 manifesto and which will show the Government what a truly ambitious green new deal budget would look like. It would include: £12 billion invested in renewable energy generation; £24.6 billion for insulation and deep retrofitting of homes; £10.2 billion for 100,000 new social homes built every year by local authorities; £6 billion a year for green research and development, and another £3 billion a year for green industrial processes; £12.2 billion a year for upgrading and electrifying railways—no HS2—and £2 billion a year for upgrading cycleways and footpaths; £10 billion a year to fill the black hole in local authority funding created by a decade of Conservative austerity; a £3 billion a year climate adaptation fund, to be administered by local authorities; and £6.5 billion a year extra international aid, to help all countries meet the climate and environmental emergencies.

The corresponding tax measures would include: a £76 billion carbon tax; a £12 billion increase in corporation tax; £3.5 billion saved from scrapping HS2—hooray; and £2.2 billion saved from scrapping Trident nuclear weapons.

We can do all this, and it is actually a good time to do it; when we have had such a huge crisis, people are ready for a different normal. These are the scale of figures that we need to face up to the reality of the climate emergency. The Green Party set these figures out in last year’s general election manifesto, but the need for a huge fiscal stimulus has become only more obvious. Our country can move rapidly to a high well-being, high-employment, net-zero carbon society, but we need the Government to make the investments to achieve that. With such low borrowing costs, it is time to borrow and invest in the green future. The question is simple: if not now, when?