Engineering Biology (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the gap and even more grateful for the leadership of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, in what was a most fascinating report to be part of, and for our excellent staff.

If we want to move away from fossil feedstocks for products such as fuel, chemicals and packaging, we need a long-term plan from this Government. We need a road map so we can see what is going to happen when and industry can plan its development to coincide with that.

As part of that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said, we need to know where our feedstocks are. We are looking at a world where concentrated carbon is going to be short, and in the ordinary course of events we need to take decisions which will make those feedstocks available. Things such as sewage, farm wastes and plastic, which at the moment we try to throw away in one way or another, we are going to need as our basic feedstocks. When we are building our infrastructure to handle those things, we need to recognise that, because it takes a good long while to build that infrastructure, and if we focus on “Let us burn it all, throw it away or spread it on the fields”, we are not going to have the infrastructure to make it available.

Another potential carbon waste stream is forestry. Most of our lowland British forests are in a sad state of decay, because the markets for their products have gone. If the Government want that to be available as a source of carbon, they need to start enabling industries to grow now. There is no easy solution to this. We cannot just say, “Oh, we will use some land”, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said, because we want that for other purposes—thank you very much. We need to be innovative in how we use the carbon that we have.

In recognising the shortage of carbon, we should recognise that we will probably need more carbon than we have. We will try to build industries in areas of carbon shortage, so the efforts of my noble friend Lord Willetts in setting standards will become extremely important, because that is the basis for enabling our businesses to flourish overseas.

Finally, I join those who said that we should sort out pensions. Some 40 years ago, I managed pension funds. We invested the majority of our funds in UK businesses, including—I am glad to say—that of my noble friend; now, it is down to 5%, as the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, said. We have done that as politicians in the pursuit of safety; without a thought for consequences or about how this works, we have merely generated a certainty of poverty. We need a Government—ideally this one, but, if not, a subsequent one—to take courage and make a radical change to where our money and pensions are used to support our country.