Climate Change Policy

Debate between Claire Perry and Mary Creagh

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry]

Yes. One of the challenges that I have heard is that we need a fundamental reworking of the market-based system to solve all our problems. My recollection is that centrally planned economies historically had some of the worst records on environmental pollution, climate change and emissions. I have seen the power of the private sector investment that my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman) referred to earlier, the technology and innovation that come from competition and things such as the auction system—I see the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey), who previously occupied the post held by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and who helped to design the system—which have sent the costs of offshore wind tumbling over the past few years. The market-based system does deliver, but we need Government to set ambition, to regulate where required and to convene where necessary.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

This statement is very timely, given that Marsden moor, outside Huddersfield, and Ilkley moor, outside Bradford, have been on fire—raging—this weekend. Today, there has been a machinery of government announcement that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is transferring greenhouse gas business emissions over to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and 12,000 companies will now report on that. In that new guidance there are just seven pages on water, three pages on waste, two on resource efficiency and biodiversity, and woodland creation, and the greenhouse gases associated with it, has been relegated to one page in annexe K. May I urge the Minister not to lose sight of the natural world? When the new greening government commitments are made in 2020, may I ask that every Government Department is properly accountable? Our audits have found that they are failing to meet them in both the policy sphere and in their own operations.

[Claire Perry]

I pay tribute to the hon. Lady and the Environmental Audit Committee. She knows that I and others are very impressed with the work she does. She raises an important point. The whole-of-Government approach is so valuable. We can no longer just point to a silo and say that if we have solved that, the problem is solved. We have to advance on all fronts. I will look at what she suggests we review. If improvement is needed, we will deliver it.

Sustainable Seas

Debate between Claire Perry and Mary Creagh

Thursday 17th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend the shadow Minister is absolutely right. We do have to put our own house in order. We know that most of the plastics enter the ocean from, I think, five rivers in Africa and Asia. There is no point in our carrying out heroic clean-up work here at home if we are then going to export the material to far-away countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand that do not have the right infrastructure in place and whose own populations are now rebelling against being consumed in a mountain of our contaminated plastics. We need to do more, and there is much more that we can do. The Government can start by carrying out better enforcement. There are some great waste exporters, but there are also some criminals in the waste sector. The Environment Agency carried out just three unannounced inspections in 2017. That is not enough. When we sent in the National Audit Office, it found that the audit systems and processes for waste export did not tally, so someone somewhere is playing the system, and we need to crack down on it here at home.

[The Minister for Energy and Clean Growth (Claire Perry)]

I do have a question, but, with your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to genuinely thank the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) and her Committee for once again producing what I really feel is an excellent piece of work. She has heard me speak before about the work that this Committee does in looking across Government and across boundaries. We saw it with the “Greening Finance” report, which had some superb recommendations around understanding risk from a regulatory perspective, particularly for pension regulators, and she will know that the Government have responded to that. I genuinely thank her and her Committee for their work. It is an extremely high-quality Committee, with some very talented and able colleagues and very good Committee staff.

It is ironic, is it not, that this House is almost empty, but that it was packed when we were debating the next three years in Europe? There are very few of us here today to understand what is happening to 70% of our planet. This report joins up the challenge of climate and environmental sustainability across land, sea, air, and, of course, the very important littoral zones. That is what we need to do and are doing, and this is a superb report.

The Government, of course, are listening. The hon. Lady will know that she has made a number of recommendations that are relevant to my Department, as well as to the Foreign Office and DEFRA. I am off after this to have a meeting with one of the DEFRA Ministers. The hon. Lady knows, I think, that she is pushing at an open door with this Government, and we will continue to do whatever we can to support these recommendations.

Finally, I do have a question for the hon. Lady. So much of what she says is relevant to both our overseas territories and our Commonwealth partners, which, in many cases, are small island states facing down a barrel of disruption—literally—from climate change and ocean pollution. Has she communicated the findings of this report to those countries and organisations? If not, how can we as a Government facilitate her in doing so?

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the Minister for her kind words and for her many appearances before our Committee, giving evidence on a variety of different subjects. I have also been neglectful in not thanking our brilliant Committee staff, who have worked so hard on the various Committee reports that we have produced, and on this one in particular.

The Minister is right; here we are in an almost empty Chamber, with people at home saying “Why is nobody talking about this?” Obviously Brexit it taking up so much time because it is urgent, but this is also urgent and important. We debated whether or not to launch the report on this date, but we decided that we needed to talk about the other important stuff as well as Brexit.

The Minister is also right that our Commonwealth territories are on the frontline of illegal activities, including illegal fishing, which is depleting their domestic, more sustainable fishing practices. They are at all sorts of risk, not least from the changes in weather systems that come from ocean warming, which made the hurricanes that sadly hit them last September much more powerful, slow-moving and damaging.

We have not communicated this report to anyone in the overseas territories, although the Committee has met representatives of some countries, including parliamentarians from Belize in October. Perhaps I could meet the Minister at the back of the Chair to discuss how we can get the report out to a much wider audience in the Commonwealth and overseas territories.

Environmental Audit Committee

Debate between Claire Perry and Mary Creagh

Thursday 7th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I did not have time to go into our examination of the green investment bank. Our previous report in the 2015 Parliament recommended a green share in a special purpose vehicle, and I am pleased that has been taken up by the Government. The green investment bank was set up in 2012 to address market failure in this area. The question is whether that market failure still exists, and the answer is yes. Do we still need an investment vehicle to create confidence and to create that pipeline? The answer, post Brexit, is emphatically yes, which is why I mentioned access to European Investment Bank finance. Had we known Brexit was going to happen, would we have taken the same decision to privatise the green investment bank? Perhaps not.

Macquarie got the green investment bank, which has now been rebadged as the Green Investment Group, and there are still market failures. There is market failure in green transport, and our Committee heard there is no intermediate body to broker between the City of London and locals authorities that want to decarbonise their local housing schemes and council housing through low-carbon combined heat and power plants. The bank could have been that bridge.

We looked at how the process of privatisation was very disrupted and took longer than we expected, and we are concerned the Green Investment Group is investing in less risky projects. Of the four projects it has financed since privatisation, one is in Ireland, one is offshore wind in Sweden, one is in India and, of course, one is in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, for which I can claim absolutely no credit—obviously it was an excellent decision.

The Committee has an anxiety about where the Green Investment Group is going to go and whether it will focus on easier-to-finance, safer and less risky overseas projects now it is part of an international bank and lose its focus on green investment in the UK. It would be a tragedy if it does that.

[The Minister for Energy and Clean Growth (Claire Perry)]

I did not intend to ask the hon. Lady a question, but this gives me an opportunity to thank her and the Committee most sincerely for an excellent report. Again, I salute her leadership in this area.

Does the hon. Lady agree that the fact we still have a very substantial, multi-billion pound commitment from the Green Investment Group to invest in exactly the sorts of low-carbon innovation she and I both want to see is a sign of reassurance that the group will continue to access funds, in this case global funds, to invest in the UK and Europe?

[Mary Creagh]

I certainly hope that will be the case but, as we mentioned in the report, the Bloomberg figures show there has been a huge collapse in green investment in the UK—it has gone down from about £26 billion to £10 billion. We questioned the Minister on whether things are cheaper, whether there is policy uncertainty and whether there is Brexit uncertainty. I am pleased the Green Investment Group is promising to do that, and we look forward to seeing some of this project pipeline coming through, because we need £22 billion a year. This year we are on £10 billion, so we need to get that ramped up very quickly. I look forward to hearing more about how she will make that happen from a policy point of view.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Claire Perry and Mary Creagh

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

21. What assessment he has made of the adequacy of the level of investment in the renewable energy sector.

[The Minister for Energy and Clean Growth (Claire Perry)]

The development of renewable energy is a tremendous UK success story. Thanks to our significant investment and the support of all of us, renewable capacity has quadrupled since 2010. Last year, 30% of our electricity generation came from renewable sources.