Climate Change: Health

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for introducing the debate. I also associate myself with the importance of the Lancet project, to which she referred.

The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, mentioned the papal declaration. I was privileged to be part of the conference in Rome that produced it. Interestingly, the conference was called “Health of People, Health of Planet”. It is a very precise equation, which we must step into. I want to offer a few remarks on that very broad theme. What does “health of people” mean for the political ordering of our society, in terms of our culture and our responsibilities in a House such as this?

We face the massive challenge of the difference between having the right attitude and translating that into action, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, who said that people are seeing that there is an issue and getting the right attitude. One of the challenges is the great emphasis in our culture on the individual: individual rights and individual identity. Although that is important, the danger is that we will step into a world that the Pope calls the “globalisation of indifference”, saying, “I am concerned about myself and my little bit of the world, but I am not too bothered about other people. They can get on with their lives as they want”. We have shifted from a healthy toleration of others to ignoring others if they do not get in our way in our space. That will make the challenge of not just attitude, but action, in this area enormously difficult, in tackling the globalisation of indifference.

Health is a public issue. If we look at the briefing paper for the debate—there is also a note in the Library about global health inequalities—the issue of climate change is looked at through the lens of the individual. We aggregate individual illnesses, looking at how many people have died from a particular illness. If we are to order this in the political sphere, we need somehow to help individuals to join up in a common set of values and responsibilities that translate into common actions and what the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, called common lifestyles. That is a huge challenge in a world where we have allowed so many people to dissolve into their private spaces through the globalisation of indifference.

One of the tragic outcomes of the globalisation of indifference and disturbance of communities of people through climate change is the great increase in modern slavery, an issue with which I am quite connected. Part of the Church of England’s response—a thing called the Clewer Initiative—has as its strapline, “We see you”. We need to notice what is going on in the climate and how it is affecting people: are they being disturbed out of their environments and taken to criminal environments to be exploited? We need to talk up the importance of noticing, being connected and having common action together to push back against this disaster—I use that word, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue—that is coming towards us very quickly.

I will point to a couple of further challenges and ask some questions of the Minister. One challenge is that research shows that older generations are not convinced of the importance of the issue in itself. There is a demographic thing about older generations—the principle of what is happening and noticing and reaching out with others to respond. The same research indicates that younger people do get it, but feel their responses as an individual lifestyle choice, not a joined-up, societal response. Such is the magnitude of this challenge that we must have a joined-up, societal response. That is the challenge to us in a political Chamber such as this.

I will raise a couple of points that the Minister might like to comment on. The market drives so much of how we behave and where our values come from. The market looks for technological solutions to these issues. My plea, as noble Lords heard, is that there need to be lifestyle changes. It is not just technology, but how human beings live: how we use heat and coal, how we travel and all those things. Technology is an important part of the answer, but there is a lifestyle issue that comes much closer to home for us all.

That is why, like the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I welcome the Lancet’s emphasis not on presenting a problem that people make an individual response to, but on an opportunity to become a kind of society where people together have certain values about how to travel, behave and use resources. That is an enormous challenge in our fragmented political world. It would be interesting to know how the Government think we might get on the front foot with a positive opportunity to step into together as a society, rather than expecting individuals to make their private decisions and somehow hope it will add up to change the whole scenario.

The NHS employs, I believe, more than 1 million people. We present health as a private matter. We provide the NHS so that any of us can go as an individual and have our health looked after or be made healthier. But if health is a public matter, there is the whole thing about the atmosphere and what it indicates. As some noble Lords know—as a Christian I read the Bible—Genesis says that human life comes from breath. Breath—air—gives us life, and the pollution of breath damages our bodies, our souls and our minds. We know that. Whether you are a person of faith or science, it is the breath that is important.

Air pollution is something that does not discriminate. You cannot make an individual choice about it. You have to do something together, whether it is in Africa or Asia, where people are dying at very young ages because they are cooking over wood and coal, breathing in the smoke. I was at a conference where a heart specialist from New York talked about the major problem for her as a heart surgeon being the effect of the bad air on people’s bodies and hearts. It is not fatty foods or this or that, but air pollution. I sometimes spend time on Putney High Street, which I think is rated as a pretty terrible area in London for pollution. Air pollution affects all of us.

I look to the Minister for an answer on this: we have 1 million workers in the National Health Service who can help people begin to see this. People would not just go for private health treatment. These employees need to be advocates, for health is a public issue, about the environment we live in, the air we breathe and the way we treat it. Therefore, we are part of the solution. It is not just about giving people drugs and therapy, but about giving them the confidence to live a lifestyle together that would reduce emissions, change the way we travel and all the things that together would make a huge difference. The Minister might like to comment on the travel policy that a Government might have that will help us fight back together as a society in the way we travel, not just in terms of diesel emissions, but public transport and how it is driven.

Finally, I invite the Minister to comment on how we will develop and use indicators of public health—not an agglomeration of private cases, but what the public health of our society looks like in terms of its air quality, its travel patterns and the values people live out together, rather than retreating into their private indifferent spaces, which we will be for ever trying to shake them out of, making no progress at all. Our task in a political Chamber is to create the ordering of a society where those values can be recognised, owned, shared, lived out and acted. We need policies and encouragement about things such as transport and air quality, which will get people looking for an opportunity to live in a healthier environment and a healthier planet for healthier people.