Climate Change, the Environment and Global Development

James Heappey Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

Electric vehicles have been discussed quite a bit already today, and much more could be done to encourage people to buy them and to make it easier for people to charge them, as well as to get the charging infrastructure in all communities, including more rural ones.

Our Committee has produced several reports over the last few years on practical things that the Government could do. It has been disappointing at times that our recommendations and suggestions are often rejected by Ministers, when if they had accepted them, we might be a little closer to meeting some of our objectives. On electric vehicles, our Committee recommended that the target of 2040 be brought forward to 2032, and that was before the Government committed to net zero.

The Committee on Climate Change today said:

“The ‘Road to Zero’ ambition”—

which the Minister is obviously proud of—

“for a phase-out of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 is too late and plans to deliver it are too vague. A date closer to 2030 would save motorists money, cut air and noise pollution and align to the net-zero challenge.”

I urge the Minister to look at the evidence from the Committee on Climate Change, and the evidence that our Committee took, which points resolutely to the need to bring forward the date for phasing out the internal combustion engine.

While we welcome decisions by companies such as Jaguar Land Rover to invest in a new fleet of electric vehicles, we need to do more to work with our car manufacturing industry to turn the Faraday Institution’s ideas and research into practical applications that can revive our British car industry and keep more jobs here, while not polluting the planet in the way that the car industry has in the past.

Everybody who gave evidence to our Committee said that there is no way that we would meet even our previous targets without the roll-out of carbon capture and storage. But we are still waiting for Government decisions on investment in that industry, so that we are not just doing the research and development in labs, but are trialling it and piloting it in some of our communities. That goes back to the point that the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) made earlier about communities all over the country. The communities that stand to benefit most from carbon capture and storage are in the north-east, Humber, Merseyside, south Wales and Fife, for example—all areas that desperately need jobs and investment. If the Government unlocked the funding, which they have previously cut, they could ensure more good-quality jobs all over the country while contributing to reducing our carbon emissions.

Our Committee has also just concluded a report on energy efficiency, which we will publish soon. Without giving away the findings—my Clerk might be watching—we heard a lot of evidence that the homes we are building today will need to be retrofitted in years to come because they are not of a high enough energy efficiency standard. It seems nonsensical that we know we are building homes today that will have to be retrofitted in future. Those who got planning permission on a development five or 10 years ago only have to meet the energy efficiency rules and regulations from when they got that planning permission, not those in place today. If we just fixed those things, we would be building homes that do not contribute to global warming in the way that they do today.

The Committee also heard evidence that since the Government scrapped the green new deal, improvements to existing housing stock are just not happening. They are not happening in social housing, the private rented sector or the owner-occupied sector. Unless that happens, we have no chance of meeting the net zero commitments. I urge the Government to look at that when our report is published, and not reject our conclusions and recommendations, which happens far too often, but engage with them, adopt them and put them in place. Only by doing that do we have any chance of meeting the targets that we all say we want to achieve.

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

I have been following the hon. Lady’s Committee inquiry into energy efficiency with great interest. The evidence she has received has been compelling and I look forward to the report. Does she agree that the need to focus on energy efficiency is unarguable, because if we are going to pass on to consumers the inevitable cost as we transition our energy system, doing that alongside the savings that come with a focus on energy efficiency seems to me to be a fair contract with the consumer?

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[Stephen Kerr]

Indeed. I am grateful for that intervention and I will come on to talk about some of those issues, some of the lessons that we can learn and some of the opportunities that we can take advantage of, particularly from a Scottish point of view.

It is each generation’s responsibility to preserve and sustain our planet for those who will follow. I believe that this generation accepts the seriousness of that responsibility, but we politicians owe it to the people of our country to hold an honest conversation about what the change in law we made just a few days ago amounts to. Setting targets in law, holding debates, setting up committees and publishing reports are clearly not going to do the job in themselves.

This is the most difficult transitional change we will ever go through as a country, and we should not minimise the challenge. We do ourselves no favours by minimising the nature of the challenge that we face. I too will refer to the evidence that we received yesterday from Sir David Attenborough—appropriately enough, I would say, in the Thatcher Room. We should never forget that Margaret Thatcher was the first politician of stature to highlight the issue of climate change and the dangers that it posed to the whole world, most especially the poorest people on the planet. She did that 30 years ago this coming November, at the United Nations.

It was in the Thatcher Room that we took evidence from Sir David Attenborough. I doubt that anyone has done more to raise public consciousness of humankind’s wanton abuse and neglect of the planet and the impact of climate change than Sir David. As the Chair of the Select Committee has already mentioned, Sir David was indeed a star witness; the Public Gallery was packed—significantly, I would have said, almost exclusively with young people. At one point, he turned in his chair to face them and he applauded them. He told us:

“It is their world that we are playing with. It is their futures that are in our hands. If the faces around here do not inspire us to do that, I don’t know what will.”

It was an inspirational moment.

I had the opportunity to ask Sir David whether he was optimistic about our ability to meet the challenge of climate change, and he said:

“I see no future in being pessimistic, because that leads you to say, ‘To hell with it. Why should I care?’ I believe that way, disaster lies. I feel an obligation, because the only way you can get up in the morning is to believe that actually, we can do something about it, and I suppose I think we can.”

He went on:

“Whether that is optimistic or not, I do not know, and whether in fact it is going to produce a result or not, I do not know, but that is the only way I can operate. I have to get up in the morning and say, ‘Something has to be done, and I will do my best to bring that about.’”

The House will not be surprised to learn that, in the time I have been a member of the Select Committee, Sir David has been the only witness who, at the conclusion of his testimony, elicited a standing ovation from both the members of the Committee and the people in the Public Gallery. In fact, he is the only witness that the Committee has ever asked for a photograph with.

The young people of the United Kingdom are ahead of the curve on this issue, and it is for us in this House to take up the baton to build a new cross-party consensus. I agree with what was said earlier about the need for this to rise above the cut and thrust of party politics.

[James Heappey]

I am envious of my hon. Friend for having been able to hear such amazing evidence in person yesterday. Does he agree that perhaps the edge that young people have over older generations is that they understand the existential nature of the climate change threat? They genuinely see it as a challenge to their ability to live the life that they want to lead in the future. The sooner we can convey that existential threat to older generations, the sooner we will gain the public consent necessary to close meaningfully with these huge challenges of addressing climate change.

[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.

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[Stephen Kerr]

I understand the motivation, but, in good Scots tongue, “I hae ma doots” about whether that is a workable solution. I know the hon. Gentleman says that the Scottish Government are going to do it, but we will see what happens, and I do have concerns about that as there are other ways to get to where we want to get to without setting up some kind of state retailer for energy.

I am nearing the end of my remarks, but I want to mention the fact that we need to consider new electrical infrastructure. We need to consider whether the national wiring has the capabilities it is going to need. I really do not see, any time soon, there being a plethora of charge points around the country where we can recharge our electric vehicle in a few minutes, because we just do not have the wiring to support that kind of recharging network. Also, I know the Minister will be disappointed if I do not mention smart meters. A lot of money is being spent on advertising smart meters. This is an individual step to be taken by households across the country to attack the issue of climate change. I support that, because smart meters are a vital component of the creation of a smart grid, but I really think that the Government should explain to the House how we are getting on with our target of rolling out smart meters to all premises by 2020. From what I know of the facts as they stand, that target seems a long way off.

[James Heappey]

I share my hon. Friend’s concern about the pace of the smart meter roll-out. I also wonder whether that technology has now been overtaken by all the internet of things-enabled functionality that is going into people’s homes. Moreover, does he agree that the slow pace of deployment for smart meters does not fill one with hope for the 1 million homes a year that we will have to retrofit with zero carbon heating systems in order to hit our net zero targets?

[Stephen Kerr]

That was a good intervention from my hon. Friend, and I do have a lot of those concerns. For example, I have concerns about the status of the SMETS 2 meter installation, particularly in Scotland and the north of the country. There are technological reasons why the pace there is slower than in the rest of the United Kingdom. I am also concerned about where we are in general with SMETS 2 meter installation. And what about SMETS 1 meters? How are we getting on with having Smart DCC adopt them? The answers to those questions might be difficult for Ministers to bring to the House, because there is no shortage of challenges relating to smart meter roll-out, but we really should face up to those challenges. We have an opportunity now to properly review where we have got to. A fundamental question is how many SMETS 1 meters that have been installed will need to be replaced because they cannot be adopted by DCC. I hope the Government will make note of the need to update us on this, whether in a written statement or by some other means.

The generation of energy is important. I have already mentioned that no technologies should be off the table and that we should consider all possibilities. One of the final points I wish to make is about carbon capture and storage. A point that was made about carbon capture and storage in our Select Committee report was that there is need for a collaborative—[Interruption.] I am getting the signal, and I will conclude, Madam Deputy Speaker. Carbon capture and storage. Yes, this is very interesting point, or it is to me anyway. We have the opportunity of a first mover advantage, and we need to start removing carbon from the atmosphere. Otherwise, there is no hope of our becoming a net zero emitter by 2050. We should be prepared to take bold initiatives and risks with the roll-out of the technology. Finally, we need to plant more trees. They are nature’s carbon capture and storage specialists, and the current targets in England are frankly modest to the point of embarrassing and really not appropriate to a net zero target. Because of the rich offering of devolution in our wonderful Union, there are lessons to be offered to the UK Government from Scotland, which I hope they will be wise and examine closely.

In closing, I shall return to Sir David Attenborough’s evidence. We must remain hopeful. The challenges we are facing and discussing today are surmountable. We must play to our strengths as a nation. We need joined-up government across these islands—the United Kingdom at its best, working in partnership with our world-class university sector and the broadest possible coalition of industries and business interests. Our global reputation as inventors, creators, innovators and renovators must now be put to the ultimate test. We must find new ways to leverage old technologies, and we need to be bold and take risks with new technologies as never before. Then, we must take those solutions and our expertise to the wider world, where the UK can properly take its responsibilities as the leading developed nation in the arena to the next level. With proper investment, the new businesses that will grow and develop from this economic revolution will provide the quality of work and the valuable employment of the future. If we are wise enough, if we are honest enough, if we are brave enough, the opportunities may be limitless, and we will be able to sustain our planet—our blue planet, teeming with life—for generations to come.