Natural Environment

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome participating in this debate and listening to what I think is the start of the Liberal Democrat manifesto from the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and the noble Baroness. I also welcome another engineer to the House of Lords in the shape of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I welcome his speech. There are not many of us and he has added quite a high percentage because of that.

The noble Baroness and my noble friend Lord Whitty made a powerful case for change, which I fully support. I want to outline some of the difficulties that we will have in achieving it, especially when people have the time, energy and resources to fight for or against it. Sometimes, of course, even those who are in favour of a particular green or environmental initiative actually spend more time fighting each other than achieving their objective.

I will give two examples. First, I will say a little more about air pollution, on which the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, gave us some very interesting data. The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, also mentioned this. We started off with a Question on 6 January which I put down about the premature deaths caused by nitrous oxide and the PM2.5 from diesel engines. We can all disagree on the exact number of people who may have died prematurely nationwide. The figure I cited was 55,000 people nationwide, with an average loss of life expectancy of more than 10 years. Other people have different figures, but I do not think it really matters. We can go on discussing the figures ad nauseam, but I think we all agree that the figure is very high and it could be reduced.

Again supporting the statement by the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, Dr David Carslaw, who is a highly respected scientist, has said that the pollution in Oxford Street is the highest in the world. That is a pretty challenging statement to make. I suspect he is right. The NO₂ annual concentrations and the hourly exceedances in Brixton Road may exceed those in Oxford Street in 2014. It is easy just to talk about London, but I think the problem is just as bad in many other cities.

The easy solution is to get rid of the polluting diesels, as the noble Lord has said. But how are we going to know where the problem is? The solution, of course, is by the network of measuring stations that, at the moment, local authorities are required to run. I have it on good authority that, before the London Olympics, the Mayor of London covered up the stations that were reading a bit high. Otherwise, the Olympics would have been performed allegedly in an atmosphere that was worse than that of Beijing four years previously. Whether that is true, I do not know.

Of course, it is much easier to deal with the problem by removing the evidence. I think it is extraordinary that Defra wants to remove the requirement for local authorities to keep maintaining such measuring points. It is going to be very easy for a future Government to say, “Well, there is no evidence of air pollution”. The noble Lord may be right that we will be able to measure it on our mobile phones. However, at the moment, having some official statistics is extremely important, because it is easy to say, “Well, there is no evidence, therefore we don’t need to tackle the problem”. Are the Government really allowing 55,000, or whatever the number is, premature deaths to continue because they will not only not ban diesels in the worst polluting areas but now want to remove the source of evidence as to where they should act?

My second example is railways—no great surprise there—an environmentally friendly type of transport and probably the best one, apart from walking and cycling, if people feel the need to move around. The issue of nimbyism is, I am afraid, as rife as ever. We have seen it in all the debates on High Speed 2. People even complain when the railway is in a tunnel, under- ground, two or three miles from their house; they say it will still affect them.

I have heard a more recent example in Bath, which I think is more serious. Noble Lords will know that the Great Western railway is being electrified. When you are putting wires above the trains, you need extra height, which means that you either lower the tracks or you raise the bridges. There is a very famous tunnel, which Brunel built, called Box tunnel, where the tracks have to be lowered to get the wires in. The problem is that there are bats in the tunnel. I love bats and have many friends who love bats. They seem to have survived and prospered in this tunnel for 150 years or so, even when 125 miles per hour trains are rushing through every 15 or 30 minutes.

The only time that Network Rail is allowed to lower the tracks in this tunnel is in July and August, due to the bat breeding season or something—it will do a lot of other work at the same time, which I could explain but will not now. That means that the railway through Bath has to be closed for two months in the summer. Bath, as we all know, is a World Heritage Site and summer is a good time of the year for tourists from around the world to come to Bath. However, because there are no trains, and Network Rail obviously finds it necessary to help move passengers around, it has to use buses. I am told that there will be 200 buses going in and out of Bath for two months in July and August.

We have to have a specially designed catenary because it is a World Heritage Site. We have to drop the track, which may end up on an old Roman ruin, which will probably close the line for another six months while the archaeologists dig. The question is: what price progress? This is one of the reasons why the cost of electrification has doubled around there. It is not Network Rail’s fault, because it has been told to do it this way, but one rather thinks that if the people of Bath and the people who are requiring all these changes do not want electrification, we should give them a steam train instead. We can let the people of Bristol get to London on the other route through Bristol Parkway and have a chuff-chuff between Bristol, Bath and Chippenham. They can pollute their town with smoke instead. Is it really justified for the bats, which clearly have to be protected to the extent that they can have a tunnel dug up only in August, although they survive all the rest of the year round with all this noise going through?

It is a question of what price we pay for progress, a debate that we will continue to have for a long time. There is an added cost and there are a lot of people who feel very strongly about this, but we have to have a balance. I hope in the future we will get a better balance.