King’s Speech

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, that impressive and wide-ranging speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo, indicates what an extraordinarily wide range is covered, at least notionally, by the title of this one-day session. I say “notionally” because the main burden of the contributions so far, including mine, concerns not what was in the King’s Speech but what was not. Enormous opportunities have been missed. I shall not dwell on the specifically economic aspects—the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, has spelled out all the things not being addressed by the Government in that respect—but shall concentrate mainly on the environment.

That said, the economy is being experienced by ordinary families in a particularly acute way at this time: falling real living standards, the precariousness of employment, the inability to improve jobs and a lack of training to do so. That needs to be addressed. As my noble friend Lord Woodley said, we did not see the employment Bill that was promised in 2019; instead, the Government have ignored the decline in working standards and in training for future challenges. We need an employment Bill, but I doubt it will come from this Government; it may come from the next.

So, there are serious economic problems, but the environmental ones are even more serious. We are not even prepared. The King’s Speech does not address the issues that the public themselves have brought up in the last few months. The most important issue they have concentrated is water: sewage and the state of our rivers and seas, the effect on wildlife and biodiversity, and the effect on agriculture, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has referred to. There is nothing about water in the Speech. We had a debate a few weeks ago in which some of us argued for a new approach to water regulation, but that has not been addressed at all.

Water is an important issue but it is not the only one, and perhaps not even the most important. The real problem with the Speech, one that demonstrated enormous government insensitivity, is that its first legislative commitment is to continue indefinitely to give licences every year to North Sea oil and gas. As my noble friend has just explained, we do not actually need it, and it sends the signal that we appear to be departing from a major climate change commitment. Probably the most important, positive achievement of the Johnson Government was holding the COP 26 conference in Glasgow. It was not perfect, but Alok Sharma did a tremendous job, and it gave us the opportunity to tackle climate change globally. Yet we are now signalling, as the first item in our legislative programme, that we are going back on that.

A few weeks ago, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, argued successfully that if the UK is to take a lead, it is impossible for us to continue exploring for oil and gas in the North Sea, when we are arguing that countries much poorer than us should not increase their dependence and open mines and oil wells. If we do that, we will have lost our leadership position. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Stern, who has spent a long time looking at these issues over the last two decades, emphasised that the loss of that leadership position is important.

I am afraid that that is part of a more general theme. We have set back the date for phasing out the internal combustion engine. We have put back the date by which landlords are expected to achieve a certain level of energy efficiency for their homes. We have put back the date for ending new gas boiler sales. As others have said, this is part of a political ploy to try to differentiate the Government from what they see as a woke green agenda. I do not believe the British electorate will buy it, and it is a real fault of this Government to think that such ploys are important, when there are many profound global issues that they should be addressing. To undermine what was previously a very effective position for the Government by doing that at this point is a political mistake of the first order.