Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

Finally, my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond is ubiquitous. When this debate started, he was in Grand Committee addressing amendments of his own on the Financial Services and Markets Bill. I do not have his eloquent speech in my hand, but if, when she replies, my noble friend the Minister can assume that he made an eloquent speech on Amendment 14, which addresses specific issues concerning the disabled, that would be a courtesy. He would have spoken to the amendment himself but, as I said, he is only human and unable to divide himself in two. I would be grateful if we could have just a word or two on Amendment 14.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I support the three amendments in this group to which I have added my name, which were all very ably introduced by my noble friend Lord Stunell and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown. They are all about willing the means for the Government’s environmental and net-zero targets. We have seen a pattern in recent months of this Government not using the many Bills we have, such as the Procurement Bill and others, to actually will the means to deliver the targets. The targets are welcome but on their own they are completely meaningless.

On the first issue of access to green space, it was less than a month ago that the Government made the very welcome commitment for the first time ever to introduce an ambition for people to be able to access green or blue space within 15 minutes of their home. That is a fantastic commitment, and I applaud the Government for it. However, the point is that you then have to deliver the means to address this.

At the launch of the environmental improvement plan, when she made this commitment about green space, the Secretary of State said:

“We will … work across government to fulfil a new and ambitious commitment that everyone should live within 15 minutes walk of a green or blue space”.


I repeat:

“We will … work across government”—


that is what she said less than a month ago. This is the Minister’s chance to prove it. This is her chance to say that the Government believe in that commitment and welcome it, which the whole House would support, and that they will use this levelling-up Bill as the first mechanism to address it. That would give all of us, and indeed the broader country, a sense that this Government are committed to the environmental targets they are producing, and that they are not just a piece of paper about which they can say at hustings, saying, “Oh, we’ve set all these targets”. Let us see a bit about implementation. The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, is important because it is about finding the mechanisms to deliver this. I applaud her for that.

Secondly, I need to say very little in addition to what my noble friend Lord Stunell has said. He made the case powerfully with regard to why deprived communities are suffering the most burdens from climate change, and about the need for a just transition. A just transition is what levelling up is about in practice, and why all the missions—not only the new ones—should be taking account of the net-zero requirements. He made the point that we now have environmental targets; we have commitments on biodiversity and good-quality air. Again, the communities in the most deprived areas that are suffering the worst air pollution, which is an impact of the environmental degradation that this country has suffered in recent years, and why we need the environmental targets. However, again, we also need the means to deliver them, and this amendment from my noble friend Lord Stunell is a means to deliver them. We are not expecting the Minister to say great things today but we want her to listen, because willing the means is so important. If we are going to level up for people, we have to level up on net zero and the environment too.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. I share the disappointment of the noble Lord, Lord Young, that we will not hear from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. As someone who also knows that problem of running between the Chamber and the Moses Room all too well, I sympathise.

I do not feel that I need to add anything to the child poverty point made in the three powerful initial speeches. All one can say is that we hope that the Government in both Chambers were listening to those three speeches or will at least read them, because, really, how could they not act on the basis of them?

I want to focus on three amendments: Amendment 8, adding climate emergency as a mission, Amendment 18 on net zero, and Amendment 19, on the Environment Act. I broadly support what the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, said, but I slightly disagree with him because he said that he could not imagine a Government who did not have a net-zero-by-2050 target. I can imagine it: I know that we need a Government who have a target for net zero long before 2050, and indeed, who need to explore very closely that phrase “net zero” and what exactly it means. Perhaps I should add that that is a friendly disagreement,.

I am not quite sure that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, that net zero should not be sitting there as a target on its own. As he was speaking, I could not help but think about the often-repeated phrase that what is not measured is not prioritised. If it is across all the targets—I very much agree that it applies across all the targets—is there a risk that it just disappears into the “Yes, we’ll put a few nice words in without really putting the counting in there”? We are seeing from local councils, so many of which have declared a climate emergency or, indeed, a nature crisis, that they are desperate to do that—to be able to show their own contribution.

A lot of our discussion about the climate emergency has focused on mitigation and the possibilities of mitigation. It is important to put that in the current global context, where we see both the United States and the European Union—particularly the US leading, with the EU trying to follow—putting massive sums of investment into what is loosely called the green economy. If we think about the Government and their often-expressed desire to be world-leading, there has been a real change in the global context just in the last few months. In that light, I want to pick up a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. Most of the talk has been on climate mitigation. When we are particularly talking about what are commonly described as “left-behind communities”, such as the rural and coastal communities which we were talking about in the last group, the issues of adaptation and resilience to the climate emergency really need to be highlighted.

Here, we speak in the week when the UN Security Council had its first ever debate on the impacts of sea-level rise, and in just the last day or so we have seen some truly terrifying research coming out about the weakness of ice sheets that have the potential to cause a massive sea-level rise. As I was sitting here thinking about this, I thought about a visit I made to a small rural village called Hemsby in 2014 after it had been hit by a storm and a number of homes had been swept away. I just looked up Hemsby and realised that this year, Hemsby has been hit by serious storms three times again, and the lifeboat has lost its ramp again and again. If we think about places that desperately need support in the climate emergency, communities such as Hemsby have to be at the forefront. We have not really heard much discussion about that in this debate. I am not sure whether this needs to be a separate mission. The issue of resilience needs to be across all of the missions, making sure that everything we are aiming to invest in and build can stand up to climate and other shocks when we live in this age of shocks.

A number of noble Lords made the point about the interaction of human health and well-being and the environment. I do not know whether the Minister is aware—I point this out to her as a constructive suggestion—of a UN project called the Healthy Urban Microbiome Initiative, known as HUMI. It focuses on how human well-being benefits from a healthy environment even in the most concentrated urban settings. A more biodiverse setting, even on the busiest urban street, is better for human well-being. That has to underpin everything the Government are doing and thinking about here.