Brexit: Environment and Climate Change

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for his excellent chairmanship of our committee. I am a member of the EU sub-committee whose report we are debating today. I pay tribute to our specialist adviser and our committee clerk. As my noble friend Lord Trees once commented, the committee clerk, in effect, writes a PhD thesis every week. She has an extraordinary facility.

As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has already hinted, I will say a few words about climate change and in doing so I declare an interest in that for eight years I was a member of the Climate Change Committee and chaired the Adaptation Sub-Committee. I stepped down from those roles at the end of January this year.

Noble Lords will be familiar with the Climate Change Act 2008 which passed through this House with all-party support. It commits us as a nation to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. As noble Lords will know, the role of the Climate Change Committee is to advise the Government on the cost-effective path to 2050 through a series of five-yearly carbon budgets and to report to Parliament annually on the progress that the Government have made towards those budgets. The first five carbon budgets have been legislated for, taking us up to the early 2030s.

In its 2016 annual report, the Climate Change Committee stated that so far the Government are on track to meet their legally binding commitments. Emissions in 2015 were 38% below 1990 levels. This appears to be a good news story, and in some ways it is, but the good news has been achieved by a mixture of genuine progress through, for example, investment in offshore wind. The UK now has 40% of the world’s offshore wind capacity, making us the global leader. It is also partly through plucking the low-hanging fruit and in part as the result of the by-products of changes in the country that are not to do with climate change policy, such as the decrease in livestock farming and the offshoring of some heavy industries.

However, when we look to the future, the picture is not quite as rosy. In order to continue to meet the legislated carbon budgets into the 2020s and beyond, significant new policies will be required. According to the Climate Change Committee, by the mid-2020s, about half of the required emissions reductions do not yet have any policies in place to achieve them. Furthermore—this brings me to Brexit—many of the existing and future policies are dependent on European legislation. The Climate Change Committee estimates that more than half of the policy space through the 2020s is dependent on EU legislation. I shall outline some of the key areas: energy-efficient product standards for household appliances, buildings and so on; vehicle fuel efficiency standards; controls on waste and F-gases; policy on biofuels; investment in R&D to develop the technologies to transition us to a low-carbon economy; the EU Emissions Trading System, which allows us to meet some of our emissions reduction targets by buying allowances, and the EU electricity market, which enables us to purchase electricity at the best price on any particular day.

Brexit will pose substantial challenges for this country in meeting its legally binding climate targets through the 2020s and beyond. I hope that in his response, the Minister will give us some indication of how the Government intend to meet this challenge. One answer might be that the great repeal Bill will ensure that all the relevant EU legislation is translated into UK law, but as we have heard, the Secretary of State for Defra has indicated that around a third of the legislation which relates to the environment cannot be translated in a straightforward manner. We also heard evidence from an expert in environmental law, Professor Richard Macrory—about whom we have heard quite a bit in the debate and with whom I play tennis in Oxford; I declare another interest—who noted that the words “as far as practicable” have been used by the Secretary of State and could be an escape clause. I look forward to the Minister reassuring us on these points.

More generally, can the Minister tell us how far his department—along with others because climate change policy cuts across departments—has got in deciding how the Government will meet their legally binding targets post Brexit? Will we retain the same environmental standards for products? Will we remain in the EU ETS? Will we replace lost EU funding for R&D? Will we continue to retain strict controls on waste? One can imagine pressure from some industry players to lower standards, so it would be useful to hear that the Government are committed to adhering to their own climate targets and that they will be completely clear about standards so that there is a level playing field both within the UK and between the UK and the European Union.

I turn finally to the UK’s position as a global leader on climate action. We were the first country in the world to pass a law requiring us to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, we have been seen as a leader both in Europe and globally. A number of witnesses told us that our influencing role as a global leader could be weakened after Brexit because we will no longer be part of the EU negotiating bloc for international treaties. The Minister, Dr Jesse Norman, told us that he intended the UK to remain a global leader, but that it was premature to speculate how this might be achieved. I wonder whether it is still too premature or whether the Minister might tell us how government thinking has developed in the intervening months.

At the previous President of the United States said:

“We are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it”.


We should be proud of the fact that the UK has been a leader in formulating policies to do something about it. Brexit will pose new challenges for us. I seek reassurance that the Government are ready and willing to meet these challenges.