Infrastructure Bill [Lords]

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

My right hon. Friend has made that point to me previously. Let me tell him, with a candour equal to that of my earlier expressions, that I am absolutely determined that the lines of accountability for the strategy we have in place should be clear and that Ministers’ lines of reporting in this House should be palpable and known. Indeed, I have missioned my Department to make sure that that happens.

I will make available in the Library of the House, not only for my right hon. Friend’s benefit but for that of the whole House, a description of precisely what those lines of accountability will look like. When he sees that clear description of how the House and Ministers are going to exercise their proper authority in the name of the people, I think he will be more than impressed and will feel that this Government and this Minister have gone further than even he expected us to.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

rose—

[Mr Hayes]

I give way to the hon. Lady. I was going to come to invasive species in a moment, but she has pre-empted me.

[Caroline Lucas]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; it is good to see that he is on his usual courteous form. He talks about the importance of facing up to the future, but the question is what kind of future it is. Why does this Bill lock us into such a high-carbon future at exactly the time when we need to be shifting towards being able to meet our climate change objectives?

[Mr Hayes]

As the hon. Lady suggests, the kind of future that I anticipate is very different from the one that she sees, for my kind of future is ambitious for Britain and virtuous in its intent; I am not sure that that is true of hers. I do not mean to be unkind in any way. However, as I said, I will come to invasive species by those that are apparently ornamental when they first arrive but turn out to be nothing but a nuisance.

Hon. Members will see a virtuous pattern that demonstrates my and the Government’s unrelenting commitment to delivering better infrastructure. At the heart of the autumn statement made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor last week was the biggest and most far-reaching roads programme in decades, with over 100 improvements to our major roads. As the House knows, that extra capacity will be underpinned by £15 billion of investment. Better infrastructure means more jobs, more opportunities and more growth. Those things will ultimately help to build a better future, drive down the deficit and inspire our people.

On taking office, we produced the first ever national infrastructure plan. We have made big calls on HS2, on Crossrail—the biggest construction project in Europe—and on shale gas exploration. We have got Britain building, with over 500,000 new homes built since April 2010.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Burden]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman has been a great advocate for his constituency, as are hon. Members across the House. That does not alter the fact that, as I said, I want to check that these Government announcements are all they are cracked up to be. Even a few examples indicate to me that there are a lot more questions to ask.

Investment in infrastructure needs to be long term. That is key, and that is why Labour is backing the proposal by Sir John Armitt, the man who delivered the Olympics—in practice, not just in theory—for a national infrastructure commission. That looks not just five years ahead, but 20 or 30 years ahead to produce an evidence-based assessment of national infrastructure needs. That should establish a cross-party consensus on priorities, breaking electoral cycles and ending the stop-start announcements we have seen up until now. It can also hold the Government to account for delivery. That would help the Government and it would help Parliament’s decision making. That is why it is backed by more than 89% of businesses surveyed by the CBI. For all that the Minister said about wanting to build a consensus on these things, words have, again, not been matched by actions. The Government had the chance in the other place to accept the idea of a national infrastructure commission, a cross-party body to plan infrastructure for the long term, and what did they do? They voted down such an amendment, and that commission is nowhere in the Bill today.

Let me now deal with some specific parts of the Bill. On highways and transportation, Labour supports long-term roads funding and we want to end stop-start funding. We want to give the supply chain the confidence to invest in skills and equipment, and enable the Highways Agency to negotiate better contracts and make efficiency savings. We want to see those contracts create new apprenticeships to train young engineers, as Britain will need 780,000 to meet demand by 2020. I am very pleased that the Minister has mentioned these matters in his opening remarks, and I am sure that if the Bill gets to Committee we will press him further on them.

There are three problems to discuss. First, Ministers have failed to prove why a top-down institutional reorganisation of the Highways Agency is needed to deliver long-term roads funding. After extensive debate on the rationale for this in the other place, the fact is—this came across clearly there—that the Highways Agency can deliver a five-year roads programme without being turned into a wholly owned Government company. The Alan Cook review showed that it can make £1.2 billion-worth of efficiency savings. That can be delivered through funding certainty, not because it should be a wholly owned Government company or because of institutional change. The cross-party Transport Select Committee has concluded that it is “not convinced” by the need for a new company. It is the roads investment strategy that will enable an efficient and faster delivery of roads, not necessarily an arm’s length body, and we will be looking for clear evidence from the Government of why this move is needed. I do not mean anecdotal evidence or what Benjamin Disraeli might have predicted; we need facts on why this is going to be needed to deliver long-term investment, as all we have seen to date is conjecture and confusion.

The Bill previously included clauses to set up more than one highways company. Fortunately, Ministers have rowed back from that, but the model is still confused. The body is to have a licence but officials recognise that it cannot have a “licence to operate” as it has no income stream or revenue-raising powers. With such a shaky rationale, is it any wonder that the Government proposal to set up a wholly owned Government company has met widespread concern from organisations ranging right the way from the Alliance of British Drivers to unions like the Public and Commercial Services Union and Prospect, who see this as a precursor to privatising an asset worth £111 billion?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am confused by Labour’s great love of yet more road building. We had a welcome article from Ed Miliband yesterday in which he talked about the importance of climate change. Some 25% of—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady must refer to the Leader of the Opposition as the Leader of the Opposition or by his constituency. This is not a tabloid newspaper; it is the Chamber of the House of Commons.

[Caroline Lucas]

I do apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. The right nomenclature momentarily went from my mind, but I am very happy to refer to the Leader of the Opposition—the honourable Leader of the Opposition. [Hon. Members: “Right honourable.”] The right hon. Leader of the Opposition. The point is that what he wrote about climate change is not in harmony with what we are hearing now, which is the Labour party saying that we need more roads. Roads are responsible for more and more CO₂ emissions, which cause climate change.

[Richard Burden]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right on this point: protecting our planet and our environment has to be centre stage for any serious Government at the moment. It is also absolutely right that in a whole range of areas we need to look for the most effective and environmentally sensitive forms of transport. Does one conclude therefore that all road building is wrong and that congestion does not need to be tackled? No, because all those things must be done as well, but they must be done sensitively and in harmony with our environment. That was said by the Opposition in the other place, and we will be exploring all those areas if this Bill gets as far as Committee stage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. Upgrading the UK’s infrastructure is vital to create jobs and prepare the country for the challenges that it is going to face over the coming decades. The Government stated that the Bill would

“improve how we fund, plan, manage and maintain our national infrastructure”.

I would argue, however, that without some fairly radical amendments—above all, to take account of climate change—they will fail on all those aims. That is why I sought—sadly, unsuccessfully—to amend the Bill. What we need are priorities that will put the UK on the path to a prosperous, zero-carbon, jobs-rich economy and will improve resilience to flooding and other climate impacts coming our way.

At present, sadly, this “business-as-usual” Bill will lock the UK into high-carbon, inefficient, polluting energy and transport systems in particular—and that at precisely the moment when we should be turning around and heading fast in a different direction for the sake of both our economy and our environment.

The crucial, overarching context for this Bill is helpfully illustrated by the new climate economy report launched in September. It builds on a growing consensus on the benefits of low-carbon economic development among leading international economic institutions such as the OECD and the World Bank—about as far from the so-called green blob as one could possibly get.

In an article coinciding with the report’s launch, the head of the OECD as well as the London School of Economics Lord Stern highlighted the choice that the UK and other countries must now make. They explain that if investment in infrastructure over the next 10 to 15 years is high carbon, the world will indeed “lock in” the risk of dangerous climate change. More positively, they write:

“What is now becoming clear is that reducing emissions is not only compatible with economic growth and development; if done well, it can actually generate better growth than the old high-carbon model…But governments must choose. Over recent years many governments have vacillated over climate policy. They have introduced carbon prices but then let them fall until they are near-useless. They have backed renewables but also subsidised fossil fuels. These inconsistent signals have created uncertainty for investors, damaging growth and retarding innovation.”

They go on:

“The prize before us is huge. We can build a strong, inclusive and resilient global economy which can also avoid dangerous climate change. But the time for decision is now.”

They could have been talking about the very Infrastructure Bill before us today, and as we enter the second week of global climate talks in Peru, I think it is clear that this Infrastructure Bill is sadly failing to make the right choice.

It is puzzling, because sometimes Ministers and indeed shadow Ministers go to great efforts to convince the public that they understand the benefits of transforming our economy to radically cut emissions. Last year, for example, the Prime Minister explained that

“we are in a global race and the countries that succeed in that race, the economies in Europe that will prosper, are those that are the greenest and the most energy efficient.”

I could not agree more with him on that. The Leader of the Opposition in The Independent yesterday set out a welcome and impassioned pitch for his ability to offer leadership on climate change, highlighting the increasingly stark science and the economic and social harm caused by dither and delay. Again, I agree. Yet the unswerving support from Labour’s Front-Bench team for the coalition’s new roads, whatever the delivery structure, and for fracking, however well regulated, undermines any such climate credibility. It suggests that they may be a little bit in denial about the inconvenient truth that carbon emissions do not come just from electricity generation. Crucially, for the purposes of this Bill, they come from roads as well.

Transport accounts for 25% of UK emissions and most of that is from roads, but there are many other reasons why building new roads should be at the bottom—not the top—of the UK’s infrastructure priorities. As the Government’s own figures and studies show, road building is bad value for public money, and it does not even cut congestion. More tarmac simply means more cars.

Today, the Environmental Audit Committee, of which I am a member, launched a new report that warns that air pollution from heavy traffic could be killing almost as many people as does smoking in the UK. During that inquiry, we heard that road traffic is the largest source of air pollution in most parts of the UK. To tackle the public health crisis of air pollution, we must redirect spending away from new road infrastructure, and into public transport, walking and cycling. It should be our priority to make those alternatives the cheaper, easier and more attractive options. Of course, we could also do more to improve existing local and national roads. I should like the Government to adopt the Campaign for Better Transport’s “green retrofit” programme for roads, which would be better value for money and good for local job creation, as well as having long-term benefits and undoing daily damage to both public health and our environment. I am also concerned about the setting up of strategic highways companies, a move which has been described as

“the final staging post to privatisation of the strategic road network”,

and which raises serious questions about accountability that have already been mentioned by Members

Let me now say a few words about fracking, because I know that the House would be disappointed were I not to do so. The proposals to allow fracking firms to drill beneath people’s homes and land without their permission is, to put it mildly, clearly hugely controversial and deeply unpopular. Ministers, however, are not listening to the public concern that has been expressed, although they keep talking about how important it is for the public to buy into fracking.

For me, the bottom line is that an effective response to climate change requires a complete shift to a carbon-neutral energy system within a generation in all the major economies, including Britain. We know how to do that: we have the technology and engineering capacity to do it, and we can afford to do it. All that we need is the political will, because we cannot do it while making ourselves more, not less, dependent on any kind of fossil fuel. According to the United Kingdom’s former top energy and climate diplomat, John Ashton,

“You can be in favour of fixing the climate. Or you can be in favour of exploiting shale gas. But you can’t be in favour of both at the same time.”

The Bill also provides for a duty to maximise the economic recovery of UK oil and gas. That flies in the face of the need for us to leave the vast majority of existing fossil fuel reserves unburnt if we are serious about tackling climate change. There was a growing amount of cross-party consensus on that imperative during last week’s debate on fracking. I hope that the Minister of State followed that debate, and I hope that his views on unburnable fossil fuels—and the financial risks of the carbon bubble—have changed since we debated such matters two years ago, when he maintained that my concerns were

“not only outside the mainstream, but, arguably, on the very fringe of the debate.”

That was his normal courtesy. I am only sorry that he is not present to hear me respond to it. He then told me that I should

“think again about the Government’s position.”—[Official Report, 18 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 828-30.]

Given that the Governor of the Bank of England is now among those who are agreeing that most existing fossil fuel reserves need to be unburnable and need to stay below ground if we are to keep climate change below 2°C of warming, I hope that the Minister himself has had an opportunity to think again.

Meanwhile, the potential of UK renewables is huge. The sector already supports more than 100,000 jobs. Solar PV, which is just one of many diverse technologies that are at our disposal, could alone support nearly 50,000 jobs by 2030, and could power the equivalent of 18 million homes. A thriving home-grown renewable energy sector should be a top priority for the Bill, but, apart from the references to community energy rights, it is entirely absent. I think that we should replace the duty to maximise oil and gas exploitation with a duty to maximise sustainable energy generation from the UK’s wind, wave, solar, tidal and other renewable sources.

As for housing, energy efficiency should be the United Kingdom’s top infrastructure priority, and there should be funding to match. Retrofitting the UK’s leaky housing stock is the only permanent solution to fuel poverty and high energy bills, issues that I know are a high priority for my constituents. It is essential if we are to meet carbon targets, and it is also an economic no-brainer. Research for the Energy Bill Revolution campaign shows that an ambitious energy efficiency programme could create 108,000 new jobs, and would generate £1.27 in tax revenues for every £1 invested.

We need that retrofit programme, but new housing is important as well. The Bill, however, introduces an unforgivable dilution of the zero-carbon homes standard, and an exemption that could mean that up to 80% of new homes in some areas will not have to comply. That might be good news for the profit margins of developers who have been lobbying for it, but it is definitely bad news for carbon emissions, bad for home owners who will face unnecessarily high bills as a result, and bad for British businesses that would otherwise see a stable and growing market for on-site solar power and other renewables.

The Government’s arguments simply do not stack up. The UK Green Building Council and the Royal Institute of British Architects have pointed out that the exemptions will result perversely in higher costs for small-scale developments. They have also pointed to the dire lack of evidence to back up the Government’s claim that the exemptions would bring forward more house building activity from small builders.

Finally, I shall briefly put three areas of remaining concern in headlines, as I know others want to speak. The Bill fails to include measures to strengthen the UK’s resilience to flooding and other climate impacts such as urban heat waves. The provisions on invasive non-native species need to be rethought if they are not to threaten much-loved species such as beavers and barn owls. The changes to the planning system raise serious concerns that the quality of decision making and the rights of local people to have a meaningful say over development in their area are being sacrificed, along with so much else, on the altar of corporate convenience and speed.