Draft Biodiversity Gain (Town and Country Planning) (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2024
Draft Biodiversity Gain Site Register (Financial Penalties and Fees) Regulations 2024
Debate between Barry Gardiner and Rebecca Pow(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Rebecca Pow
Obviously, that is an important issue to which a lot of attention has already been given. For example, I have spoken to my own local authority, which is rather excited about the whole process and has already had a lot of engagement on skills and training. But there will be more, and lessons will continue to be learnt as the whole system is rolled out and gradually reviewed. That is an important point because, for the system to work, local authorities need to know what they are doing. We have draft guidance, we have consulted widely and a lot of engagement is already taking place, but obviously more will be ongoing through both Departments.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
I appreciate the way in which the Minister is trying to set out the process, but there is a real concern among local authorities, only a third of which have a competent ecological officer who can do this enforcement. The Minister knows the figures on the loss of ecological expertise. Also, where the off-site gain has not been made within the area of the local authority, who is going to enforce that?
Paris Agreement on Climate Change
Debate between Barry Gardiner and Rebecca Pow(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but I really hope that we can make some progress this afternoon. The right hon. and hon. Members in the Government Front Bench team know that I have respect for them and that I do not seek to be partisan on this matter, but I will attack them if they do not keep to their commitments and I will continue to do so.
Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)
I have great respect for the hon. Gentleman, and this has been very much a cross-party debate on climate change, but the heart of the commitment on climate change is the Climate Change Act 2008, which was voted on in this House and is now part of British law. We have committed in the Act to achieve an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050. I echo the comment made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey) that the hon. Gentleman is creating an argument where there is none. The Government have not said that they will not ratify the treaty, and I fully believe that we will do so. We must think about this very sensibly, and I hope that we will continue to lead the way, just as we have done all along the line.
Barry Gardiner
I am delighted that the hon. Lady has referred to the Climate Change Act 2008 and to the fact that the commitments made under the Act are legally binding on us. Later in my speech, I shall examine exactly what the legislation stated and try to show precisely where the Government have deviated from it over the past couple of years. This is why we have been on a pathway of divergence rather than convergence in this House for the past two years. The bipartisan—indeed, cross-party—approach that used to obtain in the House on these matters has been severely tested by what has been seen as the Government’s backsliding on those legally binding commitments. I shall adumbrate that a little later.
Until this morning, it was not clear to me why the olive branch I had extended to the Government had been quite so haughtily ignored. Then I found out what the Minister had said to the Aldersgate Group and what the Secretary of State had quietly revealed to journalists at his departmental cocktail reception for the ladies and gentlemen of the press yesterday evening—[Interruption.] They laugh. They said candidly that they would not be publishing the carbon plan by the end of the year. Carbon plan? What is that?
This is not the kind of thing that any normal member of the public would think sounds terribly important. If I were to explain that it is really important because it is supposed to set out precisely how the Government are going to meet their carbon budget, that same hypothetical member of the public might look blank, because people do not talk in these terms. They do not talk in terms of carbon plans and carbon budgets; they talk in terms of effects, not budgets. They know that climate change is causing disruption across the world, with more flooding in some places and more drought in others, with stronger hurricanes and typhoons and with the loss of crops and arable land. They know that that is related to the emissions polluting our air and our children’s lungs, and these things are important to them.
That is precisely why we politicians agreed, back in 2008—under a Labour Government but very much on a cross-party basis—to limit the ways in which we were causing those problems. We agreed to reduce and limit those emissions that were changing the world with such devastating effect. That is why we created the Committee on Climate Change to set legally binding carbon budgets that would precisely limit the damage that we were doing, but we tasked it to ensure that we always adopted the most cost-efficient pathway, so that we could move towards the long-term target of at least an 80% reduction in admissions by 2050 at the lowest possible cost to the public, to industry and to business.
That is why this carbon plan is so important. How dare the Secretary of State let slip to a few journalists at a cocktail party that of course he will not be publishing the carbon plan by the end of this year? How dare the Minister reveal to the Aldersgate Group that he “may” find space in the timetable to publish it in 2017? May? May? I ask the Minister to read the primary legislation, which states that after the publication of a carbon budget, the Government must publish a plan to put it into effect
“as soon as is reasonably practicable”
thereafter. The fourth carbon budget was published in 2011. Five and a half years later, we still have no carbon plan. My grasp of the English language is not so weak that I would think that five and a half years, during which we have had a change of Government and a new Prime Minister, constitutes “as soon as is reasonably practicable”. And now the Minister says that he “may” get around to doing this in 2017.
Earlier this year, the Government promised that the reason for the delay was simply that they now wanted to include their measures for achieving the fifth carbon budget in the plan, which they set almost three weeks later than the legislation required. This is another area in which the Government have lost the people’s confidence. The primary legislation is very clear. It states that a carbon budget must be deposited on 30 June 12 years before it comes into effect. The Government published it before then, but they did not set it in legislation, as was required by law, until 19 July—almost three weeks late.
Barry Gardiner
I was of course referring to the hon. Gentleman being a denier of anthropogenic climate change, and he knows that.
However, there are sane heads who understand that when the world’s largest superpowers ratify a climate change treaty that commits the world to a net carbon future by the second half of this century, it is time to do what President Obama said last week and
“put your money where your mouth is.”
Last year, global investment in low-carbon technology was $286 billion. The problem is that investment in developing countries outpaced that in richer nations. We are locked in a low-carbon race and we are losing. The reason I want us to get on and ratify is not because Paris is some sort of totemic environmental symbol, but because political leadership sends a strong signal to attract investment. Countries with a clear policy framework are the ones that attract investment. Countries with a stable policy framework attract investment. The UK has had neither over the past few years.
On solar, the Government plan this month to hike the tax on businesses with rooftop solar installations through a six to eight times increase in business rates. In 2015, they cut all solar subsidy for commercial installations of over 5 MW and reduced the subsidy for the rest by 65%. The Government’s own figures show that that has resulted in a 93% fall in UK solar deployment and the loss of more than 12,000 jobs in the industry.
On wind power, the Government decided to end all subsidy for onshore wind farms despite them being the cheapest source of renewable power. For offshore wind, they took away all investment certainty by announcing that they would extend the levy control framework only to 2021.
On biomass, I wrote to the Secretary of State only a few days ago to ask why regulatory changes to the tariff structure of combined heat and power biomass plants were rushed through this summer, using secondary legislation to amend the renewable heat incentive without proper consultation. No impact assessment was made of the risk to business, and trade associations estimate that £140 million of investment is now at risk.
On carbon capture and storage technology, the Government broke their manifesto promise, cancelling £4 billion of promised finance—the latest £1 billion was cancelled last year just six months before it was due to be awarded, sinking the White Rose and Peterhead projects.
On energy efficiency, the Government ditched the zero-carbon homes policy and finally scrapped their green deal policy despite having no idea about how to replace it with other household efficiency measures.
On transport, the Government reduced the vehicle excise duty incentives for low-emissions vehicles. Is it any wonder that in just four years we have sunk from fourth to 13th in the Ernst and Young index of the best places for investment in low-carbon industries?
Just to make the investment picture complete, they took the quite monstrous decision to sell off the green investment bank. A bank that was precisely set up because there was a market failure that the private sector simply could not address. By abolishing the GIB, they are now prepared to starve low-carbon industries in the UK of the investment that they need at a critical phase of development.
However, not all parts of the energy nexus are being hit by this Government. In 2013, they announced that fracking companies would pay half the tax paid by conventional oil and gas producers. The then Chancellor called the tax regime the
“most generous for shale in the world”.
CCS, commercial solar, business rates on rooftop solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, biomass, the levy control framework, the green deal—is there any part of our energy sector that I have not mentioned? Oh yes, nuclear. Hinkley—oh dear. Dithering, delay, incompetence and an overpriced contract have led to a contract for difference that will now cost the bill payer, not the Government, not the £6.1 billion originally calculated by the Government but the £30 billion as determined by the National Audit Office.
The Hinkley project has already been delayed for eight years, and the Prime Minister has now thrown in into chaos. Two and half years ago, the Government should have reviewed the project on grounds of cost. To do so after the EDF board had taken a final knife-edge investment decision is to show a level of contempt for investors in our energy infrastructure and a lack of understanding of how company boards actually take decisions, sending out the most damaging message and turning investors away from the UK as a market of preference for low-carbon investment.
Rebecca Pow
The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point, but I suggest that it is all about the way one uses statistics. In this country, 16% of our energy comes from renewables, and this year 25% of our electricity is from renewable sources. He laughs, but in 2014, 30% of all of Europe’s renewable energy investment took place here. Does he not agree that that is an excellent track record, and that one of the best ways we can indicate we are combating climate change is by phasing out fossil fuel power stations, which is exactly what this Government are doing?
Barry Gardiner
The hon. Lady is right to say that we have had an enviable track record on the amount of our renewables and way in which they have been built up. But of course the statistics she referred to were created by the policies that previously allowed the subsidy into the renewable industry. The points that I have just been making show clearly how the Government, in the past 18 months to two years, have withdrawn those subsidies. As I said, the effect on the solar industry was a 93% cut in the projects that are now going ahead—in the panels and the capacity now being installed.