Climate and Nature Bill

Caroline Voaden Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bowie]

I was actually right here on the Front Bench listening to my hon. Friend, and I agreed with a lot of what he said. However, we are here to debate the contents of the Bill and to decide whether they are something we should support, and I am afraid—to break with the consensus that has been expressed across the House this morning—that we cannot.

The Bill would undermine the power of this Parliament and its democratically elected Members and would bind their hands. As the Bill suggests, the Secretary of State would be duty-bound to act as directed by an unelected body. A world with a cleaner climate and with thriving nature and wildlife is one we all aspire to; it is the core belief of Conservativism that we should seek to leave the country and the world in a better place than that in which we found them, for both our children and our grandchildren. But I am afraid that this Bill would not do that.

In government, we aspired to be a world leader in the energy sector and to embrace a new energy mix that would reduce our carbon footprint, and that is what we did. We should want to pave the way for other nations, but it should be a path that they would actually want to follow. If the Bill means green levies, soaring bills, the highest electricity prices in the world, boiler taxes, job losses, and rejecting our ability to produce fuel domestically, while increasing imports from abroad and generating lower tax revenues as a result, nobody will follow this path.

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

Just last week, a report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries—we know that by their very nature, actuaries are cautious people—stated that if we continue on our current path, a plausible worst case is that global GDP will collapse by 50% between 2070 and 2090, and that 4 billion lives could be lost by 2050. That is an unimaginable future. Does the shadow Minister agree that the cost of doing nothing will be way more than the cost of acting now?

[Andrew Bowie]

As I have tried to explain, not just to the hon. Lady but to the House, we have not done nothing. We led the world in so many ways—halving emissions faster than any other G7 nation, building at speed some of the biggest renewable offshore wind farms in the world, which are generating power for the United Kingdom right now, and ending the use of coal for electricity production. No other country has a record that comes close to matching the United Kingdom’s. This is not a case of doing nothing; it is about doing things in a sensible way that does not impose further bills or costs on British bill payers.