Climate Change, the Environment and Global Development

Derek Thomas Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan (Chichester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) and hear about examples of best practice in Scotland, that fantastic member of the United Kingdom.

There is no doubt that our actions are changing the planet. Our relentless consumption of the earth’s resources over centuries has consequences, and today we are starting to see them. Many of our once abundant coral reefs are bleached white and left lifeless. Vast expanses of land where rain forests once stood are stripped bare for farming. Even in Europe, some reports suggest that deserts will expand across the southern Mediterranean. We are destroying the earth’s natural carbon sinks, and with them, the wider biosphere—so much so that our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction. Not since the extinction of the dinosaurs have we seen such a loss of plant and animal species. According to one study, current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than they would be if humans were not around. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list found that more than 27% of all assessed species on the planet are threatened with extinction.

We have the facts about what is happening to our world today, and we know why these changes are occurring, so in theory the solution should be simple. In one sense, it is—we need to stop producing carbon dioxide and implement strict protections for vulnerable ecosystems. But to do that, we need both the political will and a sense of economic realism. We need to take the people of the country with us, which is why this must not be a party political issue.

I have heard the calls for putting the UK on to a war-like footing, immediately banning combustion engines, limiting flights and turning off the taps to traditional fossil fuels. It can be tempting to get swept away on this wave of emotion and the calls for drastic change. There is a serious risk of gesture politics overtaking pragmatic, sensible policy making. Setting goals without a plan is wishful thinking. We need a plan, but it must be carefully constructed to avoid the mistakes of the past. We all remember diesel cars—we were all convinced that we had to buy them. As a result, the market share went from 14% to 65%, and look what happened next.

We need to ensure that these actions are complementary. I co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on the United Nations global goals for sustainable development. We need to check that the policies we put in place are coherent, because some policies to pursue one goal may impact negatively on another goal. This is the whole world’s ecosystem we are talking about, and we need to take account of that.

[Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is right that we need to take people with us and ensure that this works for them. Does she agree that if we provide enough charging points for electric vehicles and support people to purchase them, we can help to clean up our environment and significantly reduce the cost of living, because electric vehicles are so much cheaper to run?

[Gillian Keegan]

Yes. Last year I went to the Nucleus conference at Goodwood and saw one of the world’s leading electric car manufacturers, NIO—a Chinese company—which is solving the problem in a different way. Instead of creating lots of charging points, they had changeable units that people could pick up and drop off in a garage, like we do with Calor gas on the continent. We need to consider all the best practice, because we do not want to get policy wrong again.

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[Derek Thomas]

I thank the hon. Lady for her enthusiasm and for the opportunity to intervene. She will be aware that the Committee on Climate Change has said that this is about upscaling and making sure that we have the skills we need right across the country. In places like Cornwall, which I represent, the skills are not there and low-paid jobs are the norm. Does she agree that this gives us the opportunity to create wealth and spread it across every corner of the United Kingdom?

[Rachel Reeves]

I absolutely agree. Some of those coastal towns, cities and regions stand to benefit the most. In my own region, Yorkshire and the Humber, the job opportunities from offshore wind have helped to transform previously deprived communities. There will be huge opportunities in Cornwall, with battery technologies giving huge potential for growth and jobs in an area that desperately needs them.

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[Stephen Kerr]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Now is the time to unite the generations and the nation itself to tackle the challenge that lies before us. Yes, we have filled columns and columns in Hansard discussing Brexit—it is the national obsession at the moment—but the issues in this debate transcend any of the matters relating to Brexit, which will very soon, I hope, be a chapter in the story of our nation. This is about the future of our planet, and young people absolutely get that.

It is essential that we build a cross-party consensus by dealing with the issues as they arise on an evidence-led basis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its most recent overview of climate science:

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.”

I repeat: it is vital that we have an honest conversation between ourselves as political representatives and the people we represent in our deliberations in the House.

The Committee on Climate Change has said there is currently no Government strategy to engage the public in the transition to a low carbon economy and adds that that will need to change. That warning—that very strong nudge—needs to be accepted by us all on the Government Benches. There needs to be a shared determination to address the need for a national conversation. My constituents, of all ages, reach out to me to discuss climate change because it concerns them. Sir David Attenborough yesterday mentioned how a 90-second, two-minute clip in one of his documentary series on the damage that plastics were doing to the ecology of the oceans of the world had galvanised a whole body of opinion not just in this country but across world.

That feeling was reflected in a meeting I attended the Sunday before last with the green team at Stirling Methodist church. They wanted to talk to me about their ideas and suggestions, which they wanted to share more widely, for how people could choose to act and even the mental attitude they could adopt to establish our own net zero carbon target. I could not help but think about that when I was listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan). In addition to sending a first-class Member of Parliament to this House, her constituents have done the planet a power of good by reducing the number of times she flies from 200 to something a little bit more manageable.

We have an individual responsibility in terms of our own lifestyles. In that meeting with the Methodists, we shared together as Christians our sense of having a covenant responsibility to be keenly aware of our responsibility as stewards of the earth. We all agree that we owed it to each other, to our children and to our children’s children to bring about a wider conversation in Stirling and beyond about what these new net zero targets would mean for our lifestyle expectations and how we behaved as individuals, not least in terms of diet. We must be under no illusions as to the real change that will be required of our country and of us as individuals if we are to meet the challenge we have set ourselves of net zero by 2050.

I will make a short list of some of the areas where we need action this day—to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill—and I will start with single-use plastics. Pragmatically speaking, we need to address this issue. There will always be a place for plastics, even single-use plastics—for medical purposes, food hygiene and other specific purposes—but we must adopt the default position that plastic should not be used as a single-use material. I intervened earlier on the hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) to highlight a report that appeared in the Scottish press a few days ago and which mentioned that Scottish households alone were spending £600 million just on the packaging of the goods they were buying, which they were then either recycling or otherwise disposing of.

[Derek Thomas]

I have been visiting schools for a long time now, and everyone I have spoken to wants a plastic-free school, but the pupils tell me that many of the items that are supplied to the canteens—over which they have no control—are wrapped in single-use plastic. Those children are at their wits’ end, because they feel that they do not have the power to bring about change. What does my hon. Friend think we should be doing about that?

[Stephen Kerr]

We need to do something, and I think we need to have a discussion about what that means, because I think the House has a part to play in that something that we need to do. I have become personally aware—much more than I have ever been—of the extent and volume of single-use plastic in my life. I know that during Lent some of my hon. Friends, and indeed some Opposition Members, engaged in a fast to clear their lives of single-use plastic. That was exemplary in setting the pace for all of us in the House and for the whole country, but we really need to apply some fresh thinking to the urgent need to deal with single-use plastic.

For instance, as I said earlier to the hon. Member for Dundee West, we need action on the proposed deposit return scheme. I know that it takes time for these things to be put together, and I know that it is important for there to be as much discussion as possible in Parliament, in Whitehall and, of course, with the business community, especially the retailers who will have to manage much of the scheme. I also appreciate that the Scottish Parliament, on an all-party basis, has done some pioneering work in this regard. I must say to the Minister, however, that it is surely not beyond the realms of possibility for all the Governments on these islands, at all levels, to work together to create a single UK-wide scheme for the return of plastic bottles in particular. That would remove any danger of geographical or cost anomalies. By working together, we could help to cement the idea of deposit return with the public. The sooner we do that, the better.

The second point that I want to make concerns transport. I do not want to repeat some of the things that have been said earlier, but it is important for us to understand that 15% of global man-made carbon emissions come from cars. We have a huge opportunity to move to lower emission vehicles, but we need many more electric charging points. The infrastructure is patchy to non-existent, and it does not give confidence to potential purchasers of low emission or electric vehicles. The planning laws throughout these islands should be changed to insist that car-charging points are installed in all new private houses and commercial properties as part of their initial construction. We also need a single system for using car chargers: expecting drivers to have several cards in their wallets and separate registrations for different charging points is absurd if we wish to make it easy for people to make the transition to electric vehicle use. Governments need to do what Governments, and only Governments, can do, and bring together every party so that a sense of co-ordination and working together is at the heart of this national infrastructure project.

Let me ask the Minister a question that I asked during a debate just a few days ago. Where is the promised competition for a standard charging point design—the so-called Hayes hook-ups? I think that that could capture the imagination of the wider public. [Interruption.] Yes —the Hayes hook-ups are named after our right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes).

With better infrastructure will come greater consumer confidence, but the Government should restore the incentives for buyers of electric vehicles that they reduced last year, because they have had some impact. We must be ambitious, and set new targets to eliminate the use of internal combustion engines from our cities by the middle of the next decade. I think that that is realistic. I also agree with something that was said by an Opposition Member earlier: it is important for the Government to give a clear signal to manufacturers, because investment decisions are made within the framework of public policy.