COP26 and Air Pollution

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered COP26 and the impact of air pollution on public health and wellbeing.

Sir Gary, it is my pleasure, on this day of all days, to have secured this Westminster Hall debate: a day when the whole world’s attention is focused on COP26 in Glasgow, and there are signs—some mixed, but some good—of what is happening there. There has also been a petition, as you of course know, signed by more than 100,000 people, calling for an introduction of charges on carbon emissions to tackle the climate crisis and air pollution. Forgive me, Sir Gary, but I am currently suffering from a bad cold and a booster jab, so if my voice fails at any time, you will know the cause.

Air pollution kills 64,000 people in the UK every year, yet the Government provide annual fossil fuel subsidies of £10.5 billion, according to the European Commission. To meet UK climate targets, they must end this practice and introduce charges on producers of greenhouse gas emissions. Most Members of the House, and especially the Yorkshire Members, know of the Drax power station, which is currently producing energy from wood pellets, either produced in this country or imported from South America. For that purpose, it received a massive Government subsidy of £900 million last year.

I want to start at the beginning; I have always believed in borrowing from the United States declaration of independence, because I love the language. I used to be the head of a university’s American studies department —indeed, I taught the Deputy Speaker at one stage. I believe that there is an inalienable right for every person on this planet to be born, to live and to breathe fresh air. At the moment, that is not the case. How bad is it? Seven million people die prematurely across the world due to air pollution-related conditions, with 36,000 premature deaths in the UK alone, costing an estimated £12 billion.

Of course, with COP26, there is a risk of a great missed opportunity, as I believe there was last week in the Budget. If I were marking it as a university teacher, I would grudgingly give it a lower second. Why? Because I thought it was very technically competent, but it missed any true originality. That is the mark of a good essay: true originality. Originality is so important to everything that is produced. I could see the technical competence in last week’s Budget, but there was a lack of the imagination needed to say, “This is the time—with COP26 about to start in Glasgow, with all of us conscious that the planet is warming up and with the future of this fragile planet in danger—to tell the British people that we must act.”

In my experience as the longest-serving Member of Parliament on this side of the House—I was elected in 1979—the British public are intelligent and resilient, and have good common sense. We can persuade them that something terrible will happen if we do not act, and that we need extra money and taxation to so do. They are persuadable, as they have been persuadable before. They were persuadable after the ravages of the second world war. They picked themselves up and went through a period of higher taxation in order to get through. The economy grew, and so we grew out of many of our problems.

What was missing in the Budget was a Chancellor who said, “The situation is so precarious that I am introducing a number of taxes that will raise money to give us more practical ways to tackle global warming, here in our communities.” That is what was missing. That is what I want to speak about today.

Too much of the talk at the moment is global. Two or three of us here had the foresight to be the first people to invite young Greta Thunberg to come to the UK and talk to an all-party parliamentary group, and what a pleasure it was to hear her speak. However, many people think, “I cannot be Greta Thunberg; I cannot be an international statesperson; I am not the president of any country. I am just me, in my community.” We are failing to give people the ability to say, “I can help tackle this. I can roll up my sleeves and make a difference in my community,” even though it may not be something that is instantaneously registered on the global index.

Today, I want to talk about clean air, because all of us can do something about it in a practical way, and we can do it now. Let us review how bad things are. I have mentioned the cost in numbers of deaths, and I have mentioned that we need individual campaigns, yet we are still giving subsidies to companies that are polluting the atmosphere. Today, I am going to suggest some quick wins.

I want real engagement across every town and city throughout the country on a journey to sustainability based on the UN sustainable development goals. Colleagues might ask what I am doing about it as a Member of Parliament. Two years ago, we brought a group of business people to Huddersfield who joined with the university and local charities to form the Huddersfield sustainable town initiative.

My constituents really dislike it if I say we are an average British town, so I must say that we are a typical British town, which we are across almost every criterion. We are a microcosm of the United Kingdom: the percentage of people in manufacturing; the percentage of people in services; the level of education; the skills. We are a microcosm. My philosophy, which is shared by the members of the Huddersfield sustainable town initiative, is that if we can change Huddersfield into a sustainable town, there is no reason that every community in our country could not become a sustainable town. Why can we not spread from Huddersfield? We are already working with 37 towns. Why can we not have 500 towns and cities in this country work towards sustainability?

People say, “Why all that nonsense? Just get on with it. Why would you want the United Nations’ sustainable development goals?” Sir Gary, you know of my great interest in road safety. I have campaigned on it for many years: I organised for seatbelt legislation as a young MP, and in my only successful private Member’s Bill, I banned children from being carried without restraint in cars. I am now chair of the Global Network for Road Safety Legislators, a World Health Organisation committee, and because of that, I know that if we take a particular subject—even safety in a community—and put it in the context of the sustainable development goals, we transform the potential of what we are doing. The great thing about those goals is that they are rigorous. I have been involved in environmental campaigns all my life with other colleagues, and those campaigns have done really good work across many areas, but too many of them are discrete initiatives: recycling, reuse, cleaning up rivers and streams, and that sort of thing. If we have the rigour provided by the sustainable development goals, and we start off our whole sustainable development programme by consulting local people with a questionnaire asking which ones they want to prioritise, we take a real step towards engaging the local community. That is what we have done in my own community.

One of the things that we are targeting in Huddersfield is clean air. How do we stop filthy fumes from going into the air, in our case from an ancient energy from waste facility? I am not against energy from waste if it is high quality, but we have an old facility, and it does not create heat that is used to heat homes. That heat is not used in the correct way: much of it goes into the atmosphere, which is very damaging indeed, so we must first make sure that every sustainable town, city and community rigorously meets those sustainable development goals. The goals give communities that rigour: they will say, “We’ve got to this stage—yes!” but to get to the next stage and get the accreditation, they have to go one step further.

We all know that transport is critical to those sustainable development goals. Many believe that transport is responsible for 40% of the emissions we breathe in this country, polluting London and cities across the country with noxious emissions. Some great friends of mine who are Members of Parliament for Lewisham and are active there know as well as I do—because of the work we have done in the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution—about Ella Kissi-Debrah, who passed away. Her mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, who I have met, had the insight and inspiration to get in touch with Sir Stephen Holgate, one of the leading professors and medical experts on clean air and its link to health and wellbeing, who works at the University of Southampton. He gave evidence at the inquest, and he got its verdict changed, because that little girl’s death was related to asthma but it was caused by the filthy pollution that she was breathing in, in a community that is just a stone’s throw from here.

All over London, we have schools; we have children; we have pregnant women; and we have elderly people. I particularly woke up during the first lecture that Sir Stephen gave to our APPG, when he said, “This is not just about NOx: it is the platelets on the NOx that cause the real damage to human health. Those platelets not only poison people and make them very ill indeed, but accelerate the aging process.” At my age, I sat up in my chair immediately thinking, “Yes!” However, that is only a lighter aside. The fact of the matter is that the air we are breathing in this country, in places where we might have thought we were guaranteed clean air, is not clean.

We have brought together a group of people in the Westminster Commission on Road Air Quality to try to do the research properly. We have an air health working party, a working party on air monitoring and a working party on education. Last week we heard from the experts on inside air, who said that where they have done audits inside schools—not just in the playground, not right by the polluting road that passes the primary school but in the classroom—the air is poisonous to breathe. If that is the case, it is time to take action, and take action we must. It also gives the opportunity for everyone to take action at the grassroots and to do it quicker rather than slower.

Yes, we all believe that we should move as fast as possible to electric vehicles, but all the research that I have been immersed in in my role suggests to me that the more we look at what is happening with electric cars, many of us believe that electric will be overtaken by hydrogen power. There is more and more evidence, in fact. Research is interesting because, with heavy goods vehicles carrying big loads, batteries are hard to use. In hilly areas, they do not have the ability to cope. Much of the research has been with HGVs, and the research that I have been privy to shows that already many HGVs are being produced to use hydrogen power. If that is true for big vehicles, it will come to small vehicles soon.

Of course, we must improve the vehicles on the road, but there are quicker things to do, too. We know that there are ways of adulterating—in the best way—the diesel that is put into commercial vehicles with vegetable extracts that make it much less polluting. Indeed, one of the people who has been educating me about that is William Tebbit, son of Norman Tebbit, who many of us remember very fondly. So this is not pie in the sky or wait a long time; this is stuff that we can do now, changing the fuel we are putting in heavy goods vehicles.

[Sir Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

Barry, to give others a chance, perhaps you would take just a couple more minutes.

[Mr Sheerman]

I am just coming to the end.

Another practical issue is, how many people realise that, at the moment, nothing in the MOT test tests how polluting someone’s vehicle is? There is nothing in the test about what comes out of the back end of a car. If the recommendations that have been brought forward could be acted on now, we could transform the quality of the vehicles on our roads. Someone gave me this information recently: if we take out the particulate emissions filter in a vehicle, or it does not work properly, that one vehicle produces the equivalent of a traffic jam between Westminster and Huddersfield. That is frightening, is it not?

We have many practical ways to change the air in our country and move towards a clean air environment. I believe that this is the secret to opening people to getting involved in the environment, to accepting—perhaps—higher taxes in order to stimulate that move, and all round, to moving towards more sustainable and greater health and wellbeing for our country. I recommend this big change in our country; let us do it now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Sheerman]

It has been a very good debate, as it always is with you in the Chair, Sir Gary. The fact of the matter is that we do not want too little, too late. We want it now. Children are being poisoned; 3 million children in our own country are being poisoned by fumes mainly coming from air pollution from roads. We have some short-term things. Yes, we need international and global leadership at COP26, but we need local empowerment and we need it now.

[Sir Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

Order.