Climate Change Assembly UK: The Path to Net Zero

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my colleague, neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) on securing this debate. As the then vice-Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, I attended one of the sessions of the Climate Assembly in Birmingham. I was impressed by the set-up: how assembly members had been selected, and the huge amount of work and expense that went into trying to ensure it was representative and reflective of the general population. I was also impressed by the contributions of expert witnesses and the efforts that were made to ensure that their work informed deliberative discussion in each group.

There were disadvantages. I share some of the scepticism of the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) about the exercise. It is expensive, certainly if we are looking to replicate it at a local level, as we are in Bristol. If we want to do it right, we have to put in quite a lot of resources. It also takes time. There is the question: we actually know quite a lot of these things, so why do we not just get on with it, rather than having an exercise that will inevitably delay things? One Conservative Member spoke about how the Government were introducing a deposit returns scheme. He implied that that had come out of the Climate Assembly report. The Environmental Audit Committee has been making these recommendations and investigating that side of things for a long time, and that was already on the agenda. On electric vehicles, the December 2019 Labour manifesto called for a phase-out of petrol and diesel by 2030. It did not really need the Climate Assembly to nudge the Government in the right direction; they could have just listened to the Labour party instead.

Having said that, I was won over by going along and listening to the discussions. There is a quote in the executive summary from an assembly member, who said that he or she—it was someone called Chris, so I am not sure—was worried when they got there that the debate would be somewhat one-sided and it would all be people who were very passionate about the climate emergency. They said it was refreshing to see that it ranged from people for whom it was a complete crisis to those who were in complete denial about the issue. Getting that balance is what an exercise like that should be about, but I worry that it means that the process will inevitably lean towards consensus. That could lead to a watering down of ambition when the scale of the twin crisis—the climate crisis and the ecological crisis—means that more radical solutions are needed.

Some people have criticised the assembly for not reaching the right conclusions and have said that that was because they were not asked the right questions. These are people who feel that the 2050 target is not ambitious enough. It is worth noting that proposals to bring forward the 2050 date, without a specific date in mind, were put before the assembly but were rejected, with quite a significant proportion of people unsure about it.

I attended the sessions on what we eat and how we use the land, which is a particular interest of mine. I was pleased with the recommendations on low-carbon farming, food waste and natural climate solutions such as peatlands and forestry. It was interesting to see that, by and large, people were coming quite new to those arguments, whereas perhaps if it was a discussion about transport they would have given it a lot more thought in their everyday lives. It was interesting to see the further information they were asking the experts for and how willing they were to shift their views as they listened to the answers they were given.

In the final few seconds I have to speak, I wish to reflect briefly on the additional recommendation that we should get to net zero without pushing our emissions to anywhere else in the world, which was endorsed by 92% of assembly members. The fact is that we are already doing that. We cannot tackle climate change in this country unless we also look at our global carbon footprint.