Mining: Pollution

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for his excellent introduction, because stories touch both the heart and the mind, harrowing as those stories of the people of Kabwe were that he shared with your Lordships.

This debate is timely because of the geopolitical tensions that we face currently, many of them connected to minerals needed to power our economies today as well as the economy of the future. Although much of the attention is focused on new mineral deposits, a key issue that is deeply relevant to the whole mining sector is how the legacy is addressed. Many companies that existed in the past no longer exist or have been subsumed into very different entities today. Some of these are still listed on the London Stock Exchange and therefore still have a relationship with their historic legacy, while others do not. The consequence is that many countries to which the UK has historic ties have legacy mine sites that can be anything from waste from a site, such as tailings waste, through to the old mine site itself.

Through the Church of England Pensions Board, which is a £3.6 billion pension fund serving the long-term interests of 44,000 members who have been members of the clergy or otherwise working for the Church, the role of mining has been a particular focus in recent years. The board recognises the systemic importance of mining to many of the other sectors upon which modern life depends and which the board is also invested in, such as aviation, shipping, construction, autos, technology and energy, to name but a few. But a particular focus of the board’s work has been on this issue of legacy, particularly related to mine waste, often contained in tailings dams, which, if not managed correctly, can cause significant social and environmental impacts. We have seen major disasters such as at Brumadinho in Brazil, killing 272 people, and at Jagersfontein in South Africa, killing two people and causing significant environmental damage.

To address this issue, the pensions board has led a global initiative with the support of both the UN and the mining industry to drive safety in tailings waste management by companies today. This has resulted in a global industry standard on tailings management with the creation of an independent Global Tailings Management Institute headquartered in South Africa. However, this still leaves the issue of the wider legacy of sites that are not operated by companies today or that are classed as orphaned, which litter the landscape of so many former British colonies and pose risks to communities and the environment around them.

Addressing that issue, which is deeply relevant to companies today whether they have legal liability or not due to the need to gain and retain the industry’s social licence to extract, requires an additional set of interventions. Through the Global Investor Commission on Mining 2030, which was set up and is chaired by the Church of England’s Pensions Board and backed by 100 investors with over $17 trillion under management, the commission laid out at the end of last year a set of recommendations on legacy. They will form a key part of conversations between the commission and the presidency of South Africa next month.

A couple of points arise from that. First, the commission notes that with many operations transitioning to closure in the next 10 or 20 years, coupled with the opening of new mines in so many different places, it is crucial to reflect on historical as well as future legacies and the role of investors in shaping a positive legacy for all. Investors have clearly indicated their expectation that the industry must address existing legacies while ensuring that new and operating sites create lasting value for people and nature.

Secondly, the commission has called for and is now working to support national-based legacy initiatives to rehabilitate unsafe or abandoned facilities using innovative financial mechanisms that incentivise reprocessing old mine waste to extract both the original and other minerals, as well as repurposing mine site land. Importantly, the investor commission is now working with the United Nations to create a global legacy fund to support the rehabilitation of lost or abandoned sites that do not have economic potential. Such a fund could support national-based solutions to long-standing abandoned mine sites, while also creating opportunities for local employment and economic diversification. The hope is that the first such demonstration of such an approach could be in South Africa and could provide a model that, if successful, could be replicated in other nations.

Given this unique collaboration and the historic relationship of the United Kingdom to many of the countries in which these legacy sites still exist, would the Minister be willing to meet staff of the Church of England Pensions Board? Will she commit to assessing whether His Majesty’s Government might support such a legacy fund through the UN? Indeed, joining the potential pilot in South Africa may be a very practical first step for His Majesty’s Government in supporting an approach to addressing this difficult issue of legacy. The benefit of doing so will be not only to the local communities of which the noble Lord, Lord Oates, gave such an incredibly moving snapshot case study—local communities blighted by the legacy of these mines—but to the whole mining sector and to our economy, which is intimately linked to what we extract.