Queen’s Speech

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate both of my noble friends Lord Coaker and Lord Morse on excellent maiden speeches. I am privileged to know both well and know that they will make valuable and valued contributions to the work of your Lordships’ House. I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests, particularly the reference to my relationship with St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and BioRISC, a research initiative that has set itself a challenge to provide cutting-edge evidence-based information about existing and emerging biological security threats and interventions.

I will make three brief points. The first draws on BioRISC’s work and advice. Biodiversity continues to decline at an unprecedented rate, as shown by the 2019 ground-breaking report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the 2020 report Global Biodiversity Outlook. Our natural environment underpins the delivery of clean air, water and food production, as well as promising solutions to the climate crisis. We have been reminded over the past year of the inextricable link between human health and the health of the natural world.

Public investment on environmental policies has had, at best, mixed success, as illustrated by the failure of many agri-environmental schemes which, despite costing billions, are accepted as having achieved little in preventing the dramatic decline of nature on farmland. This is unsurprising since, typically, their design and implementation have not been informed by the best available evidence from a wide range of sources. In medicine and public health, not using the best available evidence would be unconscionable, but it appears to be acceptable in this space. Does the Minister think that existing processes consistently use the best available evidence on the effectiveness of actions to inform decision-making and, if not, what mechanism will the office for environmental protection deploy to ensure the transparent use of the best available evidence, enabling scrutiny by experts and members of the public, to ensure that taxpayers’ money for our environment is spent cost-effectively?

Further, and also about evidence, six years after receipt of the completed report of the Government’s own Lead Ammunition Group recommending that lead ammunition be phased out, on 23 March, the Environment Minister Rebecca Pow announced plans to do just that. The fifth sentence of Defra’s press release is:

“A large volume of lead ammunition is discharged every year over the countryside, causing harm to the environment, wildlife and people.”


It accurately summarises the extensive harmful consequences of its use, which makes a compelling case for regulation as soon as possible to protect human and animal health and to enable us to move towards a greener and safer future. But, inexplicably, it goes on to announce the commissioning of

“an official review of the evidence to begin”

that day,

“with a public consultation in due course.”

Information on the impacts of lead ammunition on wildlife, the environment and human health has been known for years. The LAG report was informed by a comprehensive review of all available evidence. Given the Government’s view that extensive harm is being caused today, why have they commissioned a further evidence review?

Yesterday, speaking on the BBC’s “The Andrew Marr Show”, America’s climate envoy John Kerry said,

“I’m told by scientists that 50% of the reductions we have to make (to get to near zero emissions) by 2050 or 2045 are going to come from technologies we don’t yet have.”


UK FIRES, a major research programme funded by BEIS through UKRI, and comprising six leading universities, a consortium of UK-based industries and several policy advisers, in its report, Absolute Zero, published in November 2019, told us the same and set out the first description of the delivery of zero emissions in the UK with today’s technologies. The report informed the Council for Science and Technology’s letter of 20 January 2020 to the Prime Minister on whole systems and was the topic of a debate in your Lordship’s House on 6 February 2020.

The primary recommendation of Absolute Zero, reflected by the Council for Science and Technology, is that the Government should create a delivery authority to guarantee compliance with the Climate Change Act. It reminded us that the London 2012 Olympics were delivered on time and on budget by such an authority which, interestingly, adopted a principle of using no new technologies to guarantee risk-free delivery. The delivery authority would need to be substantive and enduring, able to hold accountability for delivery across different government departments and through to 2050, and necessarily an exemplar of the whole-systems approach recommended by the CST to co-ordinate across the government departments charged with emissions responsibility in different sectors.

The Institute for Government, in its report Net Zero: How Government Can Meet its Climate Change Target, said, at page 9,

“Government should also assess gaps in delivery capability and consider creating the net zero equivalents of the Olympic Delivery Authority to tackle infrastructure challenges, such as housing retrofit and renewable heat.”


Do the Government plan—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord that the advisory speaking time is five minutes.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I am finished, my Lords.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

There is very little new on transport in the Queen’s Speech, apart from promising a Bill for HS2 from Crewe to Manchester. As my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch said, there was a distinct lack of ambition for the transport sector in the Queen’s Speech. So, at the start of this new Session, it is time to review the purpose, benefits and likely outcome for HS2, and to ask again whether it is needed at all.

According to cost engineer Michael Byng, to whom I pay tribute for his professionalism and work in checking the cost of HS2, the latest cost estimate is £158 billion. Many would think that some of that could be better spent on improving the regional lines in the Midlands and the north, which need about £100 billion more to meet their levelling-up needs. HS2 costs have risen tenfold over 10 years, and it is time to bring to account those who have promoted it and withheld information from Parliament and the public since 2015-16.

I welcome the very powerful maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Morse. The National Audit Office has of course regularly investigated HS2’s costs and programme overruns. Quotes about its reports include:

“Ministers have no idea how much HS2 will end up costing”


and:

“The high-speed rail project is running wildly over budget and will not deliver good value for money”.


My worry, which I am sure the noble Lord will share, is why the Government ignore such advice and comments.

So I suggest that we go back 10 years, when there was a comprehensive campaign of cover-up to Parliament of the true costs and delays. At a Commons Select Committee hearing on phase 1, the DfT’s Permanent Secretary, Bernadette Kelly, when asked why her department had not given the Select Committee the latest and highest estimate, said that if they had done so, Parliament would probably have cancelled the project.

In January 2017 the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who was then Transport Minister, arranged a meeting for Michael Byng and me with an official from HS2, a man called John Stretch, and an official at the Department for Transport called Mike Hurn, to discuss the budget for phase 1. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, expressed surprised that Mr Stretch declined to provide a detailed, measured estimate in support of the costs that he was tabling. Later, during a meeting at the Oakervee review, of which I was deputy chair for a bit, HS2 directors admitted that they had no budget for measuring the work, despite having spent £11.4 million on cost consultants.

It was very odd that during 2018-19 Nus Ghani MP, the Minister of Transport, and Mark Thurston, chief executive of HS2, both stuck to the £55.7 billion figure when all the evidence led to new chairman Allan Cook’s stock-take of £88 billion, which of course left out quite a few elements of HS2 that would have taken it up to £100 billion. More recently I have received documents alleging that the Said Business School’s Professor Bent Flyvbjerg confirmed his earlier advice, given in 2015-16 to the then Leader of the Conservative Party, who of course is now Prime Minister. The forecast cost is supported by a presentation given in January 2018 by Jeremy Harrison, then director of risk and assurance at HS2, in which he stated that the total value of contracts for the entire project—without risk allowance—exceeded £80 billion. So the Prime Minister and other Ministers knew of this £80 billion figure in 2015-16. One has to ask why the Minister, Nus Ghani, and the chief executive, Mark Thurston, said three years later that the budget was still £55 billion.

The latest cost increase will be at Old Oak Common at the London end, where Michael Byng has finally costed the station at £7.1 billion, compared to a cost estimate from the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, of £1.67 billion. This is only a fourfold increase in costs—I suppose that is all right for HS2—but it does not include the cost of passenger disruption for trains using Paddington station, which will have its train and seat capacity halved for four years during the building. It is very clear that many DfT and HS2 officials and Ministers, with the honourable exception of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, have misled Parliament over years.

The NAO has stated that lessons need to be learned—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord of the five-minute advisory speaking time.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful for the reminder, but a Bishop was recently allowed to carry on for six minutes and 40 seconds, so may I finish?

Doug Oakervee has stated that pressure from the construction industry persuaded him to recommend that HS2 went ahead. This need could have been met equally well by regional upgrades in the Midlands and the north, so I suggest that HS2 be stopped now and the relevant officials and Ministers held to account for misleading Parliament.