Cost of Living: Energy and Housing

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

Renewable electricity has more than doubled under this Government. The situation we inherited from the last Government was that we were at the bottom of the European league—no, I should correct the record: we were above Malta and Luxembourg—but now our position has improved significantly. I would have thought the hon. Gentleman would have welcomed that. We have put in place an excellent regime for investment in renewables and all low-carbons. The Ernst and Young report he refers to shows us to be the best place in the world to invest in offshore wind and tidal energy, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Secretary and I are very proud of the fact that we have increased onshore wind so substantially and that there is such a healthy pipeline of future investment in it.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned Malta: does he agree that his economic policy has led to a situation where child mortality below the age of five in Britain is now the highest in any western country other than Malta? One in 200 children is now dying under the age of five because of the brutality against the poorest. The university of Washington has related that to food banks, austerity and welfare. Does the Energy Secretary have anything to say about that? I doubt it.

[Mr Davey]

I simply do not recognise those claims. We have been doing a huge amount to tackle child poverty. The increase in the child care tax credit in the very first Budget was a major help for low-income families with children, so the hon. Gentleman should take that back.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Davey]

I will give way, but I want to make some progress as I am right at the end of my speech.

[Geraint Davies]

I want to ask about the concerns about waste water. There are examples in America of millions of tonnes of water being moved, destroying roads and the environment, and of its becoming contaminated and even radioactive and toxic in some cases, and there were issues with cleaning it, which contaminated the water table. I have heard of companies in Britain that want to do water treatment being turned away by prospective developers who seem to think that decontaminating the water is not a big issue.

[Mr Davey]

First, we have a strong regulatory regime for water, overseen by the Environment Agency. Before people can take water from water courses or put things beneath the ground, they have to get a permit. More than that, if we consider what is happening within industry processes and with some of the research and development that is going on in this area, we can see that the push for what are called “green completions” in the fracking industry is very strong. We are seeing companies minimise their use of water compared with the early years in the United States because it is in their interests and will reduce the amount of vehicle movement. This is a serious issue and I take it seriously. As I hope the hon. Gentleman can see, I have looked into it in some detail and we will continue to monitor that carefully.

Time has not allowed me to update the House on many aspects of our work that feed into the Bill and the Gracious Speech, most notably on our massive work on the international climate change debate. As the Gracious Speech says, Ministers will

“champion efforts to secure a global agreement on climate change.”

I can report to the House that Britain is leading in Europe, persuading European colleagues to go further and to adopt more ambitious climate change targets, just as this Parliament has done, and persuading European colleagues to agree to radical reforms of Europe’s carbon market, which is so crucial in encouraging investment in renewables, energy efficiency, nuclear and carbon capture and storage. The green growth group that I established in Europe 16 months ago has helped to lead that critical debate and a key task for the next five months up to the October European Council is to secure the deal Britain has helped to create. If we achieve that deal in October, Europe can then help to lead the rest of the world as we prepare for the critical climate change summit in Paris in December 2015, working with the United States of America after President Obama’s magnificent announcement this week on regulating coal plants.

The Government are delivering on growth and on green growth, on jobs and on green jobs. We have pulled our economy from the abyss and towards a sustainable, affordable future.

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[Sir Edward Garnier]

That matter was certainly mentioned in yesterday’s debate. Of course, female genital mutilation is a crime under our law. I share the hon. Gentleman’s disappointment at the lack of prosecutions so far, if that is what he is driving at, but I think he will understand that one difficulty that the prosecuting authorities and the police have had is in the gathering of evidence.

This is too obvious a point, but I will make it anyway: FGM does not take place in public. It is difficult for independent witnesses to come across evidence, although there will be children who are examined in hospital or seen by schoolteachers or general practitioners. Now that the subject is increasingly coming into the public arena, I am sure that such people will be on their guard to ensure that those who are already victims of FGM find at least some protection under the law, despite what has already happened to them, and that children who may be vulnerable to FGM are also protected. The hon. Gentleman’s point is not one of controversy—he and I generally agree that the more we can do to protect those young women, the better and more civilised our country will be.

It is a tradition in this House to have at least four or five criminal justice Bills every Session, most of which do exactly what previous Bills did in earlier Sessions and no doubt repeat what was done in earlier Parliaments. By and large that comes under the heading of too much legislation—often too much ill-thought-through legislation. The previous Labour Government passed something like 65 pieces of legislation on criminal justice. That was utterly wasteful of parliamentary time and most of it achieved very little. However, it makes Ministers feel good.

I think that the serious crime Bill will be better than that, although it concerns me—I say this gently—that there may be some rough edges to the proposed legislation. In parenthesis, I say to the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) that as I understand it, the Bill will strengthen this country’s ability to protect vulnerable children and women and extend the reach of powers to tackle FGM, and it will also make it an offence to possess paedophile manuals. There is plenty of good stuff in the Bill, but I am concerned that in dealing with the protection of vulnerable children, the Government may adjust section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 in a way that will have unintended consequences. I urge the House, and the Government, to be sure before they amend the 1933 Act that that does not do something that they should not or do not intend.

At the risk of being excessively prissy and overly legalistic—a very rare thing for me—let me tell the House what the Act currently states. It is an offence if someone wilfully assaults, ill-treats, neglects, abandons, or exposes a child

“or causes or procures him to be assaulted, ill-treated, neglected, abandoned, or exposed, in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health (including injury to or loss of sight, or hearing, or limb, or organ of the body, and—”

I stress—

“any mental derangement),”.

As I understand it, the new Bill follows a campaign from 2012-13 that wishes to extend that part of the Act to cover emotional distress. That seems to me a difficult area to move into when the Bill is already being interpreted in a constructive and protective way.

Some of my constituents, particularly those who are strongly religious, have written to me because they are concerned that the teaching of particular religious tenets—not just Christian or Muslim—would or could stray into the area of emotional distress. I have no view on that because I am not aware of the factual basis on which such things might be established. However, we need to be careful when wishing to send out these messages and signals—I am afraid that such phrases are used by the Government in their surrounding material for this Bill and others—because we are in danger of passing legislation that amounts to just a collection of early-day motions, rather than producing coherent, well argued and well constructed law.

Earlier this week, Libby Purves, the Times journalist, wrote an interesting article—which I recommend—headlined, “You can’t always bring ugly sisters to trial”, towards the end of which she said,

“is it not potentially damaging to ‘intellectual development’ to bring up a child in a strict religious belief that daily contradicts the evolutionary science they learn at school? Is it not detrimental to ‘social development’ to raise a girl—or boy—in the firm expectation that she or he will only marry by parental arrangement?”

She continued:

“Think how many things you could potentially include. Suppose a family has a baby by donor insemination, or indeed another father, and never tells that child…Is it cruel and diminishing to deny someone knowledge of their origins? Come to that, the emotional damage wrought by divorce is well-attested and divorce is a deliberate act by at least one partner: criminal?”

I place these suggestions before the House to encourage us to be careful, as we move forward with enthusiasm in the last Session of this Parliament, about passing laws that are eye-catching. They must have some utility as well. This also applies to the social action, responsibility and heroism Bill. I cannot think of a more wonderful title for an Act of Parliament.

[Geraint Davies]

Will the hon. and learned Gentleman explain how he seems to support the Picard law, which is about mental manipulation, but does not support the idea of dealing with emotional stress? Those are related areas. Does he support any move to tighten up on advertising standards, which is a form of mental manipulation, in relation to Wonga, for example, or breakfast cereals that are described as low fat but which contain high levels of sugar, and so on? How does he square these things?

[Sir Edward Garnier]

The hon. Gentleman, perhaps unwittingly, illustrates my point. If we were to criminalise advertising sugar-filled cereals, we would be stepping down a path that I have no intention of going down. I do not know enough about the Picard law to comment intelligently about it, but I understand from my constituent, Laura Palmer, that it outlaws the manipulation of people under a mental incapacity, or who are temporarily mentally disturbed, to extract money from them—this goes back to my Moonies example. That is not the same as extending section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, under which it is already an offence to do terrible things to children, including causing them mental derangement.

The better answer to the question posed by the 2012 campaign—and to what I fear may be the consequence of the relevant part of the serious crime Bill—is to reflect emotional or intellectual damage in the sentencing under section 1 of the 1933 Act, not to create a whole new category of offence based on intellectual or emotional damage or impairment.

I am just placing the arguments before the House—I do not want to be nailed to the cross on this point—but I am always cautious about this House’s being too ready to pass spuriously attractive pieces of legislation for the purposes of sending out a message or giving a signal without thinking about the consequences of doing so. The purpose of the various stages of a Bill—Second Reading, Committee and Report stages, and then its going through the House of Lords, where it is examined again—is to deal with rough edges or unintended consequences. However, there is no harm in pointing them out now, so that the Government are aware of at least some people’s concerns.

To my mind, those concerns also apply to the social action, responsibility and heroism Bill. I am sure there is much good intention behind the Bill. The Government say:

“All too often people who are doing the right thing in our society feel constrained by the fear that they are the ones who will end up facing a lawsuit for negligence”

and that they want to

“change the law to reassure the public that they can participate in good causes or intervene in an emergency. In the unlikely event that something goes wrong and they are sued, the courts will take full and sympathetic account of the context of their actions.”

They also tell me that the proposed law is

“designed to bring some common sense back to Britain’s health and safety culture. We will put the law on the side of people who are doing the right thing and building better communities.”

That is all well and good, but if one descends into the potential detail of the legislation a number of concerns arise. They are illustrated by an article written by the Secretary of State for Justice headlined, “Our Bill to Curb the Elf and Safety Culture”. I am as great an admirer of the advocates of the saloon bar as anybody else, but I think we need to be a little careful when we are framing laws that affect the way in which our courts treat litigation between citizens.

My right hon. Friend is perfectly right that there have been a number of cases where people have felt constrained—for example, from taking children on school adventure trips and so on—for fear that they, or the school they are employed by, will be sued if somebody breaks their leg or falls into a river and comes to harm through no fault of the school or the individual supervisor, be they a schoolmaster or schoolmistress. As I understand the law of negligence, if it is just an accident, then by and large the courts will recognise that it is just an accident and liability will not be attached to the supervisor.