Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Giddens Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 13th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I also warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on having got his Bill this far. It could be even bigger than the Big Issue, which you would think is big enough for most people—but not for him. Anyway, I much enjoyed his warm introduction.

As noble Lords have said, we live in a world of quite dazzling change. For us, the future is here in the present in ways that were never true before. Examples of that are everywhere. I can pick up my mobile phone, which is not just a phone but a supercomputer more powerful than those that sent humans to the moon a generation ago. I can call someone in Australia, see them on my device as they can see me and talk to them seemingly for nothing—although not really for nothing, as we know.

So much else is new, in historical terms, including machine intelligence, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Howarth. No doubt AI is a huge part of our future, but its trajectory is essentially unknown and very difficult to calculate. As in so many other areas, we face something of an unknown future. That is all the more reason to look ahead and think long-term, in the way in which this Bill proposes.

As other noble Lords have mentioned, the climate was once fixed, determined by Mother Nature. Today, we live in what climate scientists call the age of the Anthropocene, in which human activity is the dominant influence on our weather and the wider environment. This is amazing and disturbing.

To be topical, coronavirus, as was just mentioned, has spread more rapidly, and globally, than any other pandemic before. We simply do not know at this point how disruptive or otherwise its impact will prove, but its economic impact could be huge. We have to learn from this experience to try to act pre-emptively in the future and to connect the short and the long term.

The Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Bird, focuses on the well-being of future generations; it is an invitation to think positively, and I 100% approve of that. I have focused so far on risks, but I am not pessimistic about the future. The world in which we live today is a high-opportunity, high-risk world. The opportunities are at least as great as the risks, especially if we can learn to anticipate and manage them properly. We just do not know how the balance between the two will pan out, but I deliberately put the notion of opportunity first.

Consider once more coronavirus, which never goes out of our consciousness these days. It is much more global, as I said, than any previous pandemic, yet science and medicine are now global too. AI can help us break down the genetic composition of a virus—the Chinese have made some progress on this—and perhaps lead much more rapidly to treatments or antidotes than was true in the past.

The framework proposed in the Bill is well thought through, drawn as it is, in some part, from the Welsh experience. As has been noted, around the world, we see discontent with the framework of western democracy. The public see politicians like us squabbling over day-to-day decisions, while the world seems dislocated and even dangerous. The thinking embodied in the Bill can, I hope, contribute to remedying this situation, especially when coupled with the direct participation of citizens in the way that is proposed. I give it my strong support and hope that the Government will seek to pilot it into law. I hope that it gets wide cross-party backing.