Climate Change: Wales

Craig Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Craig Williams (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Dowd. I first of all pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), both for securing the debate and the tone in which you opened it. Your tone made me rip up half my speech, and I appreciate that balance. I also echo your comments on digital services and the engagement around this debate, which I think is terrific.

I could touch on the comments of other Members but, in the good old tradition of Welsh Westminster Hall debates, the Welsh Government are good and the UK Government are bad, unless the Member is a Conservative, in which case the UK Government are good and the Welsh Government are bad. We have approached this debate in the usual fashion. I will try to break that down a little bit. I appreciated a lot of the global context that the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) introduced. I was taken aback today at Prime Minister’s questions when it was noted that 52% of the world’s urban global greenhouse gases come from 25 cities, of which 23 are in China. Clearly, the pressure on COP26 this year is immense.

There is excellent best practice coming out of Wales, and there is excellent best practice coming from Powys County Council and the Welsh Labour Government. There is also a huge amount of work, finance and regulatory change coming out of the UK Government, and it would be churlish for Labour Members speaking after me not to at least acknowledge that, if those before me have not. It is absolutely fascinating to see the pace of change. I will touch briefly on an issue that I have a little bugbear with the Welsh Government about— I have been nice, but I will have a little bash—and that is new road building.

Montgomeryshire is blessed with clean air and low emissions. The one thing that has helped Montgomeryshire more than anything to tackle emissions and improve air quality is the Newtown bypass, with Welsh Government studies and independent studies unquestionably showing that emissions have dropped around Newtown—the biggest town in my constituency—and the quality of air has improved. That is to be hugely welcomed.

In conjunction with the banning of new petrol and diesel cars, that means that road building in the future will be very different. The vehicles on the roads of the future will emit very different pollutants, if any. It is old-fashioned and traditional thinking to see road building in the traditional sense—that the roads will have heavy-polluting vehicles on them. They will not. Clearly, that is demonstrated by the ban on petrol and diesel vehicles. Clearly, that is demonstrated by great companies such as Riversimple in Powys investing in hydrogen cars. Clearly, that is demonstrated by the huge investment in hydrogen production and electric car production in this country. I hope there is time for a pause for thought. I welcome that this is a review and not a blanket ban, but road building projects in the future should not be judged on the environmental effects of the past. That is incredibly dangerous thinking as we see smaller, better, cleaner cars emerging on to our roads.

Equally, I want to be nice: Wales has led. The plastic bag tax is hugely welcome. To give credit where credit is due, the Welsh Government led on that issue, and now the UK Government are following. We must do that more in future: where there is best practice across a border—in Wales, Scotland, England, Northern Ireland or across the channel into Europe, or even further—we need to share best practice. We should not be shy in stealing ideas; after all, I read Hansard regularly and we normally steal each other’s speeches, so we might as well share each other’s policies.

In closing, I will draw the private sector into this. Of course, there is a lot of public money and regulatory change, but tomorrow I will visit Garth Holiday Park in Machynlleth, in the middle of Wales, to celebrate its private investment in electric vehicle charging on the site. A huge amount of EV charging facilities are going in now. Wipak in Welshpool—if you pick up a pack of Cathedral City cheese in this country, the packaging comes from Welshpool, in the middle of Wales—is investing hugely. It is a European-based company that manufactures in Wales, and it is investing millions over the next years to improve its production and to help us achieve our net zero ambitions.

If we do this together—the UK Government, with their sheer scale and international leadership, the Welsh Government, with their devolved powers and regulatory functions; and the private sector as well—we can achieve it. I fear that if we continue with a dogmatic, narrow vision of, “We are bad, you are good. This is right, this is wrong,” we will not get anywhere near the achievements that we need, and we will do a great disservice to the constituents that really care about the issue.

Mr Dowd, I have added to the greenhouse gases with my six minutes, so I will sit down, but I very much welcome this debate.

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

I remind Members not to use the second person singular unless addressing me. I call Jessica Morden.