Net-Zero Carbon Emissions

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, a central concern of my remarks will be related to the growing divergence that can be seen on this chart produced last June. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, and I expect that he will confirm there will be another chart in June 2021. There seems to be a divergence between the target for reduction graph and the actual outcome; one is going down, and the other one has now levelled off. We do not have a Gosplan—even if we did, it would not work—so the question is how we do it. We can add up the numbers on paper but it is more difficult in practice and, as a number of noble Lords have said, there are no longer any low-hanging fruit.

If I specify the coefficient of reduction of greenhouse gases as a coefficient of productivity growth, that is not output as such but what drives the economy forward—and we do not actually want to reduce productivity growth, do we? We want to increase it against the background of global competition and world market share. So how do we square the circle? It will not be done just by virtue signalling and lecturing people at work.

I come from the TUC, which I was with for 35 years. I was a member of the UK delegation at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and on the original committee on sustainable development. I set up that committee in the TUC, and it has done some very useful work. But it is not straightforward, when you get down to brass tacks. I am 100% along the same lines as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, on the practical side; he was a trade union person in the same era as me. But why is there such a difference of opinion about where we are and where we should be going? There should be no need for a difference of opinion. We have all agreed the target. The Green Party, the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the Lib Dems and so on have all agreed that is the line that we have to be on—but we are diverging from it. So although we cannot have a Gosplan, we need something that adds up to have a reasonable chance of not only turning back the divergence but getting back on to the line we need to be on.

The former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said yesterday that this subject has to be approached in “50 shades of green”—ha ha. He does know a thing about this and the politics of it. It is a way of saying that we cannot be too simplistic, but equally we have to make sure that we have a methodology to see how the greenhouse gas coefficient versus productivity curve can be brought nearer and then in line with the dotted line of aspiration and government policy. It has all been agreed.

I say once again to people on the green side of politics, in the broadest sense: please do not think that there is nothing we agree on, because this is something we have all agreed on. The issue is how to implement it. We are all on the same side and we have to find out what is needed to achieve it. This has to include some mathematics. I do not think that the Minister, given his political background, will be attracted to Gosplan any more than my side is, but what will the methodology be to see how the gap can be reversed and brought back into line? We do not want constant lecturing at each other. That would not work.

Is there some means by which we can get the breakdown everyone has asked for—the engineering industry, local government, you name it—to add up to some figure that will reduce the divergence? We need to be honest with people that that is the object of the exercise: we have to gradually reduce the divergence. I think 100% of people in this country ought to be able to agree that that is what we have to try to do. We cannot shut down the economy, et cetera. It is a difficult period for statistical measurement and finesse with Covid, but it is pretty obvious that that analysis is where we will wind up.

I will give one example from the engineering industry. In the world today, how we can remove plastic is, to some extent, an engineering issue—all those plastic bottles that we drink water from. There are water purification methods. Britain has industries, large and small, that can do water purification with new technology, which we are good at in some fields, to have a world market share in those contraptions you put on an older bottle so that the water is purified as you drink it. There is no doubt that that would save many zillions of tonnes of plastic. I am a bit interested in the industrial policy aspects of this. It might not be Gosplan, but those sorts of companies say that they find it very hard to figure out how to work the Government’s financial system as to what they can apply for in grants and so on.

Can the Minister say that he will make it his mission statement to go round and find how true what I have said is—that people are finding it very difficult to work the government schemes on finance for engineering projects such as this? He would have some degree of authority from No. 10 to do something about it, and I think this is something that everybody could applaud. If people say that the Government have not quite done what they said they would be able to do a year ago, at least the road map and political administrative methodology would be fit for purpose.