The Climate Emergency

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sue Hayman]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The matter was mentioned during Labour’s party conference this year, because we are taking this very seriously.

My concern is that the Conservative Government have a track record of missing environmental targets on air quality, major pollution incidents and biodiversity, and last year a leaked document showed that the Government had abandoned altogether an agreed target to restore 50% of England’s sites of special scientific interest to a favourable condition by 2020. It is therefore disappointing, but unsurprising, that the legally binding targets will not apply for nearly two decades.

Once the Government’s record on climate change and the environment is examined more closely, we find practices and policies that completely undermine and work against efforts to tackle the climate and ecological emergency. The Government continue to use UK export finance to support fossil fuels, but it is totally hypocritical for the UK to limit extraction at home while promoting extraction abroad. The Natural Capital Committee recently concluded that only half of our habitats currently meet minimum quality targets, with bees, butterflies, birds and many plants species continuing to decline.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has already mentioned the fact that we are financing fossil fuels overseas while trying to reduce their usage here, but we also consume 3.3 million tonnes of soya per year, 77% of which comes from high-risk deforestation areas in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. It is one thing to talk about protecting natural habitats here, but if our consumption habits are contributing to deforestation overseas, we are not really solving the problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I welcome the cross-party consensus around stronger action on climate change, but action there does need to be, including in the Environment Bill. In 2006, as Labour’s Housing Minister, I put forward a 10-year plan for zero-carbon homes by 2016, including a regulatory timetable, that was backed by the housing industry and environmental groups, but sadly it was ditched in 2013. We still need that stronger action to cut emissions from new and existing homes as part of our action on climate change.

I want to talk about the importance of public transport as part of our action to cut carbon emissions and the desperate need for more support for public transport in our towns, which was missing from the Government’s agenda, but first I want to make a point about the Government’s Brexit plans. It is deeply disappointing that the Government seem to be moving away from a Brexit deal with a customs union, rather than towards one, as that idea lost by only three votes in Parliament in the spring and is something that many Opposition Members have argued for. Fundamentally, we have to make a choice about what kind of trading nation we wanted to be: do we want our closest trading relationships to be with our nearest neighbours, through a customs union approach, and built on safeguards, standards and workers’ rights, or do we instead, as the Government seem now to argue, want the price to be deregulation and an opening up of markets to the biggest global corporations, risking cuts in environmental standards and prioritising a deal with Trump’s America?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I tried to intervene on the Secretary of State about this. I and the Chair of the Select Committee tabled new clauses 1 and 4 to the Agriculture Bill to say there should be no lowering of standards in any future trade deal, which I think was one reason why we did not see the Bill after last December. Does my right hon. Friend agree it is important that when the Bill comes back, such provisions are back in there?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We want rising standards and support for higher standards. It is the only way to cut carbon emissions, support our environment and protect our workers’ rights.

There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech to address the serious challenges facing our towns and the unfair deal they are getting. We see that particularly in public transport. Our bus services have been cut and our trains, particularly across our northern towns, are still rubbish. We are not getting our fair share of investment. Billions of pounds is locked up in transport investment in our cities, while in Normanton we still have only one train an hour to Leeds, even though it is just half an hour away, and we still do not have disabled access at busy stations such as Pontefract Monkhill and Knottingley. We had the awful situation of a constituent in a wheelchair having to crawl over a bridge because the Government, despite our requests, refused to fund the basic disabled access. Moreover, we still have rubbish Pacer trains and no proper plan for transport in our towns.

That compounds the wider problem of the growing gap between our cities and towns. Our towns, which have strong communities, are great places to live and are proud of their history, are getting an unfair deal, and Tory austerity has hit them harder. As public services budgets have been cut, many public services providers have pulled services out of towns altogether. We have lost libraries, sports centres, magistrates courts, police stations, fire stations, hospital services, maternity units, swimming pools, Sure Starts, jobcentres and council services, as so many of these services have shrunk back into the cities. We are supposed to travel to the nearest cities instead, but the public transport is not there, because bus services have been cut and the trains are inadequate.

Private sector investment, always pursuing economies of scale, is pulling in the same direction. Banks, ATMs and post offices in our towns have closed. The big cities and shopping centres may still be able to compete with Amazon, but our smaller town centres are struggling with business rates and parking charges, and having their heart taken out. The numbers of new jobs are growing twice as fast in the cities as in the towns, and as our town centres have shown, foreign direct investment in the cities is accelerating and our towns are not getting a fair deal. The Government’s stronger towns fund is still a top-down approach and only reaches a certain number of towns. Areas still have to bid and most towns still lose out.

We need a proper industrial strategy for our towns, which is why the Labour party’s approach of more investment in our towns, listening to towns and putting power back in towns is so important. We need towns to be at the top of the list, not the bottom, so that they can get our fair share of funding. We need public services back in our towns with a proper guarantee. We need a fair deal for Britain’s towns.