Brexit: Environmental and Climate Change Policy

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate, introduced by the throaty noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. I hope that she recovers, as I did a few weeks ago from a similar problem. The debate gives us an opportunity to speak on the future of environment and climate change policy following the EU referendum. The Labour Party has been strong in its support of environmental policies and EU policies, so many of us were of course very disappointed by the Brexit decision.

The UK’s membership of the EU has provided many benefits in terms of influence on the environment, regulations, the financing of policies and practical actions to be taken. These have been set out in the helpful Library Note. Moreover, as other noble Lords have commented, the EU has been very effective in dealing with adverse climate change. I declare my interests, which are on the record. These benefits, with the UK leaving the EU, are under great threat and will affect considerably the UK’s future. We have seen that the UK Government have been criticised in the courts recently for not meeting EU environment regulations, and the question is whether they will permit such legal challenges in the future. For example, the tendency to use the courts successfully in the UK is a relatively recent affair. Some 30 or 40 years ago I met the chief alkali inspector, who commented that the British Government had never lost a court case to do with the environment, but I am pleased to see that they do lose them now, and that has been greatly helped by our being in the EU. The other feature, of course—and I was involved in work in the old CEGB—is that one of the first areas of tremendous European collaboration on the environment was in monitoring and dealing with acid rain. This began as an intergovernmental collaboration and later became a strong policy of the EU. Transboundary pollution will continue to have to be considered and, without our being in the EU, presumably we will go back to the intergovernmental arrangements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Equally important, of course, was the way in which the EU established regulations for local air pollution, particularly in urban areas these have been taken very seriously by urban and national agencies across Europe. The UK’s cities, and those of many other countries, are not meeting the required standards. In fact, in the UK 16 out of 43 areas are not meeting the standards. Furthermore, as we heard this week, the Treasury is not prepared to permit urban areas to develop their own standards because the Treasury says it has not got enough money. The inevitable result of having different standards across Europe will be costly and inefficient and will not help the motor car industry.

Although I have been in universities in the UK and working abroad on research collaborations to do with the environment and on practical benefits, this co-ordination has been greatly helped by the EC. We had a meeting last week at the Royal Society on the polar environment. It was very interesting that there was an organisation that deals with the environment in polar areas and co-ordinates research between countries not only in the EU but in the areas around Europe, in North America and so on. Quite interestingly, it says that it has been considering what is going to happen in future, and that the co-ordination work by the European Union will almost certainly continue but the difference is that the countries in the EU will have funding to pursue their research, whereas UK research people may be able to co-ordinate and go to meetings but there will be no EU money for their work. It is clearly very unlikely that the kind of funding that now arrives to UK institutions from Brussels will continue. That will mean that we will begin to fade out in terms of this leadership role. In fact, as I heard yesterday from one leading scientist, they are receiving very juicy proposals from universities in other parts of Europe saying, “Why don’t you come and join us? There’ll be lots of money from the EU, and you wouldn’t want to stay in Britain, would you, where there will be much less funding for your research”. It is going to be a very big issue.

I turn to the other question that many noble Peers have talked about, the water environment. It was interesting that when the BBC commented in relation to the way the EC has led on the environment, with nice pictures on the television, it emphasised the way in which the cleaning up of the coastline has been a considerable success and has been welcomed by tourist organisations and local authorities. It is, of course, impossible to understand why the areas of the country which have so benefited from these kinds of programmes are the areas which voted strongly for Brexit. Others may have some political solutions for that argument.

When I was thinking about this debate I recalled that it is not just a question of the EU having regulations that make us, as it were, advanced environmentally, but there have been examples of where the UK has made contributions to the environment of other parts of Europe. We should recall that. In fact, we have just heard about the UK helping greatly in fishery regulation. The UK was the first significant country to develop congestion charging, which is still moving very slowly in Europe. The other one, of course, which enables us to go into restaurants and bars across the rest of Europe, is the fact that we introduced the cessation of smoking in public places. There have been examples where we have led the way. Will that happen in future? I hope so.

However, the most important long-term environmental problem has not been mentioned: what to do with nuclear waste. This will slowly decay over tens of thousands of years—some people say even longer—and the storage and clean-up will need to be co-ordinated even if the UK leaves the EU, and negotiations are continuing about how we co-ordinate with Euratom, which has a big role in this. This is a field in which the UK has technological capability and should continue to do so in future. An interesting scientific area that Euratom has been able to work on, with UK participation, is the transmutation of radionuclides so that decay can proceed much faster, rather than having to rely on geological storage.

Of course, an equally long-term global environmental problem that requires European co-ordination is climate change caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuel combustion and other gases such as those emitted by refrigeration and air conditioning. The consequence of all these dangerous effects is that it is necessary to find ways in which to reduce the emissions, not only the ones that are produced by industry and transportation but those that are triggered, for example, by methane from the polar regions.

Currently the UK works effectively with other EU countries, as we saw in Paris. But the big question is whether we are going to come close to reducing the ultimate temperature rise to less than 2 degrees. We would expect that the UK’s participation will continue even if we leave the EU. Some of this will happen through the existing intergovernmental agencies such as the International Energy Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, but the Government need to publicise the role of these agencies and use it in their future negotiations.

Finally, the EU is making a very large financial contribution to much of that climate research and it will be very important that the UK Government make their contribution. The politicians who advocated Brexit said that there was going to be lots of money to do things in the UK—in research as well as in health and so on—and we are waiting to see whether that will actually happen.