Fisheries Bill [Lords]

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Ways and Means resolution & 2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Tuesday 1st September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It gives me great pleasure to respond to the Bill on behalf of the Opposition on its second outing in the Commons. Our fishers risk their lives every day to bring home food for us all. It is not a profession that comes without risk, and I join the Secretary of State in taking a moment to remember the six fishers who did not come back after their trips to sea last year.

Fishing matters to me. It matters to the people of Plymouth who I represent, with 1,000 jobs in the city, and to coastal communities across our four nations. Fishing is knitted into our national identities and our culture, our local flavours and, of course, our coastal economies. Recreational fishing—now larger than commercial fishing in GDP terms—matters to even more people. Labour will be supporting the Bill, defending the enhancements made in the Lords and proposing further necessary provisions.

[Peter Aldous]

The hon. Gentleman touches on a good point when he mentions recreational fishing. I think we have all received representations from the Angling Trust, but does he agree that, with the pandemic and more staycations, the opportunity for sea angling to bring real benefits to our coastal communities is crystal clear?

[Luke Pollard]

I do agree. There is a real opportunity in the waters around the south-west for a catch and release bluefin tuna fishery, for instance—it is a shame that DEFRA did not quite agree with me on that one—and there is certainly a real case for more support for the charter boat sector, which has been denied much of the support that it should have had throughout the coronavirus.

Fishing is a policy area where up to now soundbites have often triumphed over substance and where dogma has often won out over detail. That must end now, because fishers in our coastal communities cannot feed their families on soundbites and vague Government promises. Fishing needs to be more sustainable, both economically and environmentally. We need not only a fishing net zero approach and better management of lost fishing gear to stem the plastic pollution that it causes; we also need a replacement plan for dirty diesel engines, and better science to inform better quota decisions to protect fish stocks and jobs. Fishing needs a strategy to widen employment, to make fishing a career of choice for more young people in our coastal communities. It needs new methods and quota allocation to encourage new entrants, and a firm focus on viability and sustainability.

We know that coronavirus has hit fishers hard. The closure and disruption of export markets, the throttling of imports, the closure of restaurants and cafés and the huge drop in prices have made going to sea unprofitable for many of our fishers. The help for fishers that Labour argued for eventually came, but it took too long to come, and sadly it excludes some of the most innovative projects, such as the brilliant Call4Fish initiative that I have spoken to the Secretary of State about. DEFRA needs to learn the lessons here. It needs to look again at how it raided fishery support funding pots to pay for those schemes and at what the long-term cost to the industry will be of those pots having been raided.

Just as fish do not respect national boundaries, so our fishing sector is cross-border too. I support the move to zonal attachment from relative stability, which is an outdated method. There is a real case for that change. We import two thirds of the fish we eat and we export two thirds of the fish we catch. We do not eat enough locally caught fish, and our diets have been calibrated over decades to eat more of what is caught around Iceland and Norway than the wondrous ocean harvest of our own waters. We need to change that. That is why there can be no new delays at the border, no new burdensome customs checks and no new expensive Government red tape in implementing these and any future trade deals. We need to ensure that we can import and export as well as celebrating the fish in our own waters.

[Mrs Murray]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be promoting a link between a trade deal and the share and access to our waters. Is that what he is actually saying?

[Luke Pollard]

I thank my neighbour for that question. I know this is a point that she raises frequently, but it is probably one that she needs to raise with the Government rather than with the Opposition. We want to see our fishers supported, and I want to ensure that they get a greater and fairer share of quota.

Compared with the previous version, this Bill has thankfully been much improved, in part by Ministers adopting many of the amendments that Labour proposed in Committee during the Government’s first attempt at this legislation. I am glad that Ministers have taken the time to reflect on their decision to vote down those Labour amendments, and I am glad that this time round the Bill includes as much Pollard as it does pollock. I am sure we can agree that it is a good demonstration of constructive opposition.

I also want to note the improvements to the Bill that were passed by the Lords and in particular to thank Baroness Jones of Whitchurch for her efforts in the other place. The question now, which the Secretary of State has answered, is whether he will see fit to accept those amendments that improve the Bill. It is especially sad that he is choosing to reject the sustainability amendments and those that would generate more jobs in our coastal communities.

[Jim Shannon]

I respect the hon. Gentleman greatly, and he knows that, but does he not accept that the fishing sector wants a sustainable industry for the future, and that to achieve that, we need the co-operation of the sector? Does he acknowledge that the sector does not want the amendments that have come from the House of Lords?

[Luke Pollard]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that mention. I think he is choosing to call the fishing sector one single sector, but he knows as well as I do that the fishing sector has multiple sectors with different catches, different gears and different fishing approaches in different parts of our coastal waters. I know that not all fishers share the view that he has just put forward, because they have told me so.

This Bill is a framework Bill, so it is necessarily light on detail, but it does offer a centralisation of powers with the Secretary of State and does not deliver the coastal renaissance that it should have done. Ten years of austerity have hit our coastal communities hard, and now covid-19 means that we are standing on the precipice of a new jobs crisis, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1980s. The decline of fishing ports is a story told the nation over, but it does not have to be this way. Even before we see whether the promise of more fish from the Government will be delivered, more jobs could be created if Ministers were to use the powers they already have. I believe in British fishing. Growing the fleet, making fishing more sustainable and creating more jobs can all happen with improvements to this Bill.

Let me turn to the jobs in coastal communities amendment—clause 18—which the Secretary of State says he wishes to remove. I believe that if we catch fish under a British quota, Britain should benefit from that fish in terms of jobs and trade. I want to back our British ports to create more jobs and land more fish in Britain. Labour’s jobs in coastal communities amendment, which passed with cross-party support in the Lords, would establish a new national landing requirement, whereby two thirds of fish caught under a UK quota must be landed in UK ports. That would mean more jobs created in Grimsby, Plymouth, Newlyn, Portavogie, Brixham and Fleetwood, to name but a few. There are 10 jobs on land for every one job at sea, so landing more fish in Britain is a jobs multiplier.

[Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)]

Does the hon. Member agree that making it essential that people have to land their fish in the UK is actually detrimental to the industry, because UK fishers in the industry need to be able to land where they will get the better price?

[Luke Pollard]

I hear that argument, but I also hear that it is not in support of British ports when landing more fish could create more jobs, and I think we need to think about what benefit will be gained from leaving the common fisheries policy. If there is an argument for only supporting those with fish caught under a UK quota and landed in foreign ports, creating jobs in foreign ports, that is an argument the hon Member is free to make, but it is not one that will be made by the Opposition.

Labour’s jobs in coastal communities amendment is designed to ensure that whether the boat is Dutch, Spanish, French, actually British or just flagged that way, boats fishing under a UK quota would be required to land the majority of their fish in British ports. This would create a jobs boom for fish markets, processers, fuel sellers, boat repairers and distributors. With the virus, the recession and the consequences of austerity, could our coastal communities not do with more jobs? I hope the Government will agree with that, not continue to support fish being landed in foreign ports and not creating jobs in our communities.

[Mr Goodwill]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Luke Pollard]

No. I am going to make some progress, because I have gone on for some time.

The backbone of British fishing is our small boat fleet. These boats and businesses are the ones the British public want to see benefit most from our exit from the common fisheries policy. While industrial fishing has its place, I make no apology for wanting a fairer share for our small fishers. With just 6% of the quota, the small boat fleet has two thirds of the jobs, and I think it could have more quota. Reallocating quota along social, economic and environmental grounds, even if just 1% or 2% of the total catch were to be reallocated, could increase what small boats can catch by 25%. This is the second jobs multiplier that Labour has proposed in this Bill. It would be huge for our small boat fleet, helping give them a platform to invest in new gear and boats and to hire more crew.

Such rebalancing could easily be absorbed by the big foreign-owned boat operators within the current range of variation of total allowable catch, yet this is a policy yet again opposed by the Conservative party. I know the largest fishing companies, mostly foreign-owned, are strong supporters of the Conservative party, but, to borrow a phrase, Labour’s policy is for the many fishers, not the few. I hope Tory MPs will not be looking at their feet as the Whips demand total loyalty to Downing Street and require them to vote this amendment down when the time comes, because our fishing communities need a strong voice in Westminster, not just more Whips’ instructions at the expense of coastal towns.

Labour will be tabling an amendment to ban supertrawlers pillaging Britain’s marine protected areas. The Greenpeace campaign on this issue has attracted the signatures of a number of Ministers, but, sadly, of not a single DEFRA Minister. Labour will table an amendment to ban supertrawlers of over 100 metres fishing in marine protected areas. Britain has not one supertrawler of over 100 metres, so Ministers and Conservative Members have an easy choice to make: whether they are on the side of British fishers or foreign-owned industrial supertrawlers, harvesting huge quantities of fish and plundering the very habitats that Britain regards as special. I hope that would be an easy decision, but we will have to see.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

My understanding was that the Secretary of State has already said that the whole purpose of this Bill is to ban supertrawlers, because supertrawlers are actually allowed under EU law, not laws that we want to introduce.

[Luke Pollard]

I thank the hon. Member for that. I am not sure it is the main purpose of the Bill, but it is certainly a power that the Secretary already has. One of the key things about the amendments that Labour has tabled is that they are about using powers that the Minister already has. Whether or not there is more fish from any negotiations with the EU in the future, these are powers that the UK Government—the Conservative Government—could use today if they chose to do so. They do not need to wait until after 31 December or for the passing of this Bill. It is in requiring them to use the powers that they have chosen not to use that we are making our case for this provision. There is a good case for banning supertrawlers of over 100 metres from fishing in marine-protected areas; Ministers should have acted already, and there is an opportunity to put this in law here.

[Peter Aldous]

rose—

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

rose—

[Luke Pollard]

I am going to make some progress, because I only have limited time and I do not want to take time away from people at the end of the call list; apologies.

On safety, progress is being made towards making fishing safer, but much work still needs to be done. I want to see fishers wearing lifejackets all the time that come as standard with personal locator beacons which take the search out of search and rescue when boats go down or fishers are washed overboard. I want more work on stability, especially for smaller boats when they change gear. Remote vessel monitoring and CCTV on board—another amendment won in the Lords—will help to ensure that fishing stays within the law, but will also incentivise fishers to wear a lifejacket and come home safely to their families after each trip. I know that this is a cross-party concern, and I commit Labour to working constructively to help to save more lives, as we have in recent years.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I endorse what the hon. Gentleman says with regard to safety at sea, but there is another aspect to this issue that has become apparent to me recently, through the activities of the “Persorsa Dos”—a Spanish gillnetter that was quite reckless in its conduct off the shores of Shetland recently, endangering the lives of the crew of the “Alison Kay”. The UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency was powerless to investigate that incident because it happened outside the 12-mile limit. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me, and will he support in Committee moves to extend the jurisdiction of the MCA to a 200-mile limit?

[Luke Pollard]

I thank the hon. Member. I recall during the last Fisheries Bill Committee making the case that foreign boats in UK waters should be adhering to the same safety standards as UK boats. That is an argument that we can pick up in Committee this time around.

I want briefly to look at the quota allocations. In support of zonal attachment rather than relative stability, we need to recognise that this is a complex case. There are fishers with complex historical catch records; that needs to be looked at. That is why we need to make a clear case about how the fishing quota will change over time. Labour has proposed a phased draw-down period, not a rush to reallocate quota. That would give British fishers the chance to invest in new gear and recruitment, as well as giving time—if there is transfer from our EU friends—for those boats to be decommissioned and the workers retrained. Allocating quota in contested waters where there are complex fishing records is difficult, and it is an issue that will require careful negotiation with our EU friends. I want to flag to the Minister that British fishing needs continued access to distant waters to preserve current activities, because it is worth nothing that not all British fishers fish in British waters.

I realise that my time is running out, so let me briefly say that to achieve any of these grand promises made to fishing—not just the ones that have already been broken by Ministers, such as the solemn pledge that fishing would not be in the transition period—we need Ministers to keep to their word and stick to their timetables. Today the Government are a whole two months late on the new fisheries agreement. It was meant to be concluded by 1 July, according to the boasts of their so-called oven-ready deal. We know that the Government think that there are serious concerns about

“illegal fishing, border violations…violent disputes or blockading of ports”

in the event of no deal. What additional resources has the Minister discussed with the Ministry of Defence for allocating to the Royal Navy to protect our fishers, and why is there nothing in the Bill to express the concerns around enforcement?

I want to see more fish landed in British ports, more of it processed here and more of it eaten here. I encourage Members to set an example by buying, eating and promoting local fish. Will the Minister tell the House whether zero tariffs will continue to apply to fish imported from Iceland, Norway and the Faroes? If so, what additional support will be given to our domestic industry?

What are the Government’s plans to incentivise processors to process more UK-caught fish? How will they encourage the biggest players—the supermarkets—to put more British fish on their shelves? I would like to see Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, M&S, Waitrose, Asda, Lidl, Aldi and the Co-op selling more British fish. I read out their names deliberately because I would like them to write to MPs to set out how they will sell more British fish, because that is a decision that they can take. We do not need Ministers to take it for them; that can be done by supermarkets and there is a case for their doing that.

Labour will support the Bill while proposing and defending the necessary improvements. It is a shame that the SNP is, with its amendment, playing politics with the Bill. Mock constitutional outrage will not feed the families of fishers in Peterhead or Fraserburgh, and nor would blocking the Bill at this stage help to put in place the legal certainty necessary after 31 December. I say to the SNP that the Government are quite capable of messing this up all by themselves; they do not need the help of the SNP’s amendment. For that reason, Labour MPs will not back the SNP amendment this evening.

On behalf of the fishers I represent in Plymouth and those for whom I speak in my shadow Cabinet role—the fish processors, distributors, merchants, chefs and scientists—I say that we need a Fisheries Bill that is focused on sustainability, viability and a better future for our coastal communities than we have seen for the past decade. We will not oppose the Bill, but we will argue strongly to defend the improvements made to the Bill in the Lords, to insert a new focus on creating jobs in fishing and to ensure that fishing is truly sustainable.

Oral Answers to Questions

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

The hon. Lady makes reference to media speculation. I am sure hon. Members will understand that I cannot give a running commentary on our discussions on a future trade agreement or comment on such media speculation, but I will say that there are many ways, through a trade deal, that a country can agree with another country how to protect food standards—both food safety and animal welfare.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

The public do not want our British farmers to be undercut by food produced to lower standards abroad. Research by Which? published today shows that eight out of 10 people are worried that trade deals will risk our high animal welfare standards. With the National Farmers Union petition now on 1 million names, it is clear that Ministers are on the wrong side of the argument here, so does the Environment Secretary need any more help convincing the International Trade Secretary to put the Conservative manifesto promise into law?

[George Eustice]

The International Trade Secretary and I are both absolutely committed to delivering our manifesto commitments, but we also have a manifesto commitment to expand the number of free trade agreements that we have, and it is also the case that the UK farming industry has offensive interests, particularly in dairy and in meat such as pork, lamb and beef, in other countries, particularly Asian markets. We want to expand the number of free trade agreements that we have to create opportunities for our industry but also to protect our standards, and that is exactly what we will do.

[Luke Pollard]

I think we all know that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ministerial team are part of the eight out of 10 who are worried about animal welfare in trade agreements, but may I press the Secretary of State on a slightly different issue related to food standards—the outbreaks of covid-19 in food processing plants across the United Kingdom? This is serious. Any outbreak needs to be contained. Food standards matter, and standards for the people who work in those plants also matter. What assessment has the Environment Secretary made of whether meat processing plants and food factories are especially at risk, and what assessment has he made of the low level of statutory sick pay that forces many people to work in those plants instead of staying at home because they simply would not earn enough money to pay their bills if they did so?

[George Eustice]

I pay tribute to all those working in our food sector, including in manufacturing, who have worked very hard to keep food on our plates during these difficult times. The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. We have heard now of three outbreaks linked to meat plants. They have been picked up through the testing and tracing approach that has been adopted and we are reviewing the guidance. We suspect that these outbreaks might have been linked either to canteens or, potentially, to car-sharing arrangements in those plants. We will be revising guidance to ensure that businesses have the approach that they need to prevent further outbreaks in future.

Oral Answers to Questions

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

We recognise that, as a result of the coronavirus crisis, the financial vulnerability of households has also increased. That is why, last week, the Government announced a new £16 million fund to support food charities, including refuges and homeless hostels. The food will be distributed by our existing partners in FareShare.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Food bank demand is surging, up on average by between 60% and 80% from pre-virus levels. Now, unemployment is soaring, up by nearly 70% last month. It is clear that we need measures that match the scale of the crisis. Last week, the Secretary of State whipped his MPs to reject Labour’s sensible proposals for an emergency coronavirus food plan. With The Times reporting that the Prime Minister is now keen on a food plan of his own, dealing with obesity and coronavirus, will the Secretary of State confirm that the Government’s urgently needed food strategy, which must include a coronavirus focus, will be published before the recession bites?

[George Eustice]

The food strategy that is being developed by Henry Dimbleby, one of our non-executive directors, will involve an initial report in the autumn setting out the approach and the nature of the challenges, and the final report is expected in the early part of next year.

Remote Division Result: Amendment 39

Luke Pollard Excerpts

3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 13th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard]

Labour will not allow farmers to go out of business to secure a trade deal with Donald Trump. It is unusual for any party to vote against Third Reading of a Bill, but we will vote against this Bill because the issue of farm standards for our food is not a technical one; it is fundamental to what kind of country we are. We support high standards for our British farmers, and we demand that all food imported into our country after our Brexit transition periods ends adheres to those same high standards that our British farmers have to adhere to.

Two hours and fifteen minutes having elapsed since the resumption of proceedings on consideration, the debate was interrupted (Order, this day).

Agriculture Bill

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 13th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the shadow Secretary of State, Luke Pollard, who is asked to speak for no more than eight minutes.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will speak to the amendments that stand in my name and that of the Leader of the Opposition. Food policy has been overlooked and sidelined in our politics for far too long. Empty shelves, crops underwater in flooded fields, food bank growth and the growing obesity crisis demand that it enjoys more of our focus in the next decade than it had in the last. I want to see a greater focus on the quality and resilience of the food that we eat and the quality of the air that we breathe. Our new focus on food is for life and not just for coronavirus.

I place on record my heartfelt thanks to all the food heroes—the hidden heroes—who have kept the nation fed throughout the coronavirus crisis. From the fishers and the farmers, the distributors and the drivers, the processers and the pickers, to the shelf stackers and the supermarket workers, these people are finally getting the recognition that they deserve as key workers. The pay, conditions, pensions, protections and political focus on them must now follow. In declaring my interest, may I remind the House that my little sister is one of those key workers, as a sheep farmer on her farm in Cornwall?

At the very heart of this debate today is a very simple question, which the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) mentioned in his opening remarks. What kind of country do we want to be—one where farm standards are a pawn in a trade deal with our values traded for market access, or a nation that says Britain is a force for good in the world and upholds our high standards for food grown locally and food imported alike? At a time of climate crisis, we must choose to rebuild a better, greener, more sustainable and fairer Britain than we had before.

The path ahead of us is uncertain, but we must learn the lessons of those who came before us. We must not trade away the values that make us British and make us proud to be British: high environmental standards in food production; decent pay for those who tend our fields—at least, they should be paid well; animal welfare standards that increase, not slide; and a determination that we will never, ever again be held hostage by our inability, by choice or natural cause, to feed ourselves.

The Agriculture Bill is not a trivial matter; nor is food production. The Bill will fundamentally change the system of farm support, so it deserves our attention. However, an Agriculture Bill without a focus on food is an odd beast. It almost entirely omits food, and therefore does not even begin to solve all the problems that the virus has both caused and revealed. I would wager that the Environment Secretary and the farming Minister did not have the whip hand in the timing of this Bill, and that it is down to Downing Street and its free marketeer agenda, seeking to see off a rebellion of Tory MPs rightly unhappy and uneasy about leaving the door open to imports of food produced to lower standards, that we are here today on a contentious piece of legislation in the middle of a national crisis.

The new clauses in the names of the Chairs of the two Select Committees—the hon. Members for North Dorset and for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish)—and those in the name of the Leader of the Opposition and me all seek to do one very simple thing, which is to put Government promises into law. The promise from the Conservative manifesto says:

“In all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards.”

These words are meaningless unless they are backed up by law. The amendments today reflect a cross-party concern that the promises of high standards will not be kept unless they appear in black and white in the Bill. The right place to deal with farm standards is a Bill about farming. Indeed, the Leader of the House has just said from the Dispatch Box that he is about delivering on the manifesto and that this is essential. I agree on this point: those standards are essential, and they must be delivered on in law.

I suspect the Minister will shortly say that the subjects of these amendments would best be dealt with in the Trade Bill. I disagree with her on that and, unfortunately, so do her own Government. It seems the Government’s trade team are arguing that the Trade Bill is actually not for setting up trade architecture. They argue that it is a continuity Bill for rolling over existing agreements that Britain is a party to as part of the EU, so we will need another trade Bill that has not been published, written or designed yet to deal with matters such as democratic oversight of trade deals. There is zero chance, as the Minister knows, of such a Bill appearing or passing before the 31 December deadline, so we come to the necessity of this issue being dealt with in this Bill, where it can be discussed and implemented ahead of the 31 December deadline. It must not be parked or lost in the long grass of future Bills that have not yet appeared.

These amendments are being opposed, to my mind, simply because they would make it harder to have a trade deal with nations for which lower food and farm standards are the norm. The inescapable truth of Ministers refusing to put these sensible amendments into law is that allowing British farmers to be undercut by cheap imported food is part of the Government’s plan, and it should not be. Labour has tabled the amendments because we will not allow British farmers to go out of business because they are being undercut by cheap imports that would be illegal if they were grown or produced in the UK.

There is no urban-rural divide on high farm standards or on animal health and welfare, no divide when it comes to wanting high environmental standards preserved and no divide between feeders and eaters when it comes to food safety and food quality. This Bill is, by and large, a reasonable Bill.

DEFRA officials and Ministers have worked hard to get the detail right, but the political handcuffs placed on the Environment Secretary and his Ministers to tie them to oppose these reasonable, sensible, necessary and essential amendments betray the bigger political agenda at play here. Both the Environment Secretary and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who has responsibility for farming, have good agricultural pedigree, and I am reassured that those with experience are at the helm of the Department, but if orders are coming from the Department for International Trade, they have my sympathy for being caught in the invidious place of choosing between what is right and what they are told to do.

Oral Answers to Questions

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

It is very important to note that we have significant resilience in our food supply chain, in that food manufacturers are used to coping with increases in demand, not least every year during Christmas. There is not a shortage of food. The challenge we have had is getting food to shelves in time when people have been purchasing more. That is why we have taken steps including setting aside delivery curfews so lorries can run around the clock, and relaxing driver hours to ensure that deliveries can take place more frequently. We are in discussion with Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government colleagues about other support that we would deliver locally to get food to those who are self-isolating.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Secretary of State for meeting me and the rest of the shadow DEFRA team this week to discuss concerns about the national crisis and food availability. I urge him to go further on some of the measures he has set out. I hope my questions are seen as being asked in a constructive spirit.

People are worried about how they will feed their family, especially if they are self-isolating, have had their income slashed to statutory sick pay or have lost their job. However, millions are already in food poverty, and this is an immediate family emergency for many of them. With food banks running low on food, and given that many food bank volunteers are over the age of 70 and will soon need to self-isolate, what steps is the Secretary of State taking to assist those in genuine hunger today?

[George Eustice]

As I have said, we have taken a number of steps to ensure that we can get food to supermarkets. I have been in daily calls with the food supply sector. Those have included discussions about food banks, and we are in dialogue with supermarkets to ensure that they get access to the supplies they need. I welcome the constructive approach that the shadow Secretary of State is taking. We are also working on specific proposals to help the most vulnerable—those with clinical problems—to ensure that we can get food to them should they be self-isolating.

[Luke Pollard]

I thank the Secretary of State for that answer. I think he will need to provide more detail for those who are in genuine hunger today; the hope of detail in the future is not reassuring people at the moment. If I may press him further on supermarkets, we discussed the so-called grey hour, when elderly people can shop before the rest of society goes into the supermarkets. Will he press the Department for Transport to relax the times for free bus pass use to ensure that people can get to the supermarkets? Will he also ensure that every supermarket, not just the Co-op, is still contributing food to food banks and organisations such as FareShare? I suspect that he and his colleagues will want to ensure a private sector-led solution wherever possible, but I press him on this issue, because we will not get through this crisis unless there is Government intervention to support those people and ensure that food supply chains remain open.

[George Eustice]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that there is a role for the Government. We must take action to set aside any obstacles to making the food supply chain operate in a way that ensures that people have food. On food banks, as I said, we are in discussion with supermarkets. We have also had discussions with them about competition law, and we will take whatever action is necessary to ensure that they can jointly plan their approach to these matters. For the most vulnerable, we are working on proposals that my colleagues in MHCLG will announce shortly.

Sentience and Welfare of Animals

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It gives me great pleasure to respond to this very good debate on behalf of the official Opposition. There is cross-party support for enshrining animal sentience in law, and I want to express Labour’s full-hearted support for the effort to do so. We have heard powerful speeches today, but there are also community groups in each of our constituencies who engage in advocacy and campaign for 21st-century animal welfare laws. We know that what we do will make a difference to animals—domestic animals, animals in agriculture, and others—if measures are put in place correctly.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) for her unrelenting campaigning on this area. She has a good position on the Petitions Committee, which gives her a new platform, and will continue to use that with force, ferocity and cross-party support for as long as Ministers fail to listen to her arguments. She made a good argument today.

I congratulate the Minister. This is the first time since she has been in her new role that I have had the opportunity to speak from the Bench opposite her. I am a big fan of cross-party working, and for most animal welfare legislation there is a lot of cross-party support. Sometimes the only thing that holds us back is the ambition to achieve what cross-party support has the potential to deliver. In relation to animal sentience, we have an opportunity.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

On the basis of cross-party working, will my hon. Friend please push the UK Government to end the barbaric practice of puppy smuggling across the UK, which hurts so many domestic pets and families?

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend raises an important issue and, if the Minister has not yet read Labour’s animal welfare manifesto from the general election, it is very good and well worth reading. Puppy smuggling is dealt with under point 10. It is horrendously cruel, on an epic scale. There is huge public support for dealing with the cruelty that organised crime gangs perpetrate on those tiny little dogs.

The debate shows why Parliament’s online petitions are good: the fact that 104,000 people signed and 43 organisations back the petition shows that there is public support for enshrining animal sentience in law. I thank everyone who clicked on the link, then went to their email inbox to find the email and clicked the confirmation link to make sure their name could be added. I thank them for participating in earlier petitions as well as the present one, because the arguments have not changed. There may have been a slight adjustment as to which faces are around the table, but the importance of animal sentience remains.

The petition states:

“EU law recognises animals as sentient beings, aware of their feelings and emotions.”

That is enshrined in the Lisbon treaty and the Government chose not to move that provision over in Brexit legislation. There was an outcry at the time and Ministers have been dragging their heels ever since, trying to make the case that although the issue is important, enshrining it in law is not really necessary. I say that it is necessary and important, and that there is cross-party support for doing it.

To be fair to the Government—I regard the present and previous Governments as one continuous Conservative Government, although I know they like to think of themselves as fresh, since December—in 2017 they introduced a Bill. They withdrew it in 2018, but we are yet to see any signs of the crucial legislation since then. However, in the intervening year, a prominent and successful Conservative Back Bencher wrote in The Guardian:

“There is currently a cross-party consensus that we should enshrine the recognition of animal sentience in statute to underpin all our existing policies and inform new ones.”

The writer was, of course, the brand new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, during his brief sabbatical from the role of Minister. One reason I have a lot of time for the Environment Secretary is that initially when he was freed from the clutches of office he made a bold, clear case for changes in agriculture, fishing and animal welfare. I hope that now he is thrust back into ministerial office—in the Cabinet, no less—the same independence of thought that he demonstrated on the Back Benches will come into play.

In the same article in The Guardian he said:

“One option might be to suggest that the US introduce a similar piece of legislation at federal level to drive the modernisation of its own laws. We could even send British advisers to Washington to help them do it as part of our trade negotiations.”

I am not certain that the US President would take kindly to British trade advisers advising him on animal welfare standards, but there is something important there: the people with whom we want to do trade deals must not undercut our animal welfare standards, in relation to agriculture, domestic pets or any element of the high levels of animal welfare we enjoy at the moment.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I assume that my hon. Friend is referring to the same Guardian article that I mentioned in connection with the Agriculture Bill. It is hard to believe that the Secretary of State would have written for The Guardian twice during his brief period of freedom. Did he not go on to say that we should protect animal welfare and other standards in future trade deals by enshrining them in law—in the Agriculture Bill, for example?

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend is dead right. There is an amazing amount of good political meat in publications by the Environment Secretary from the time when he was on the Back Benches. It feels as if the Opposition do not need to remind him of them, because I am sure his officials have churned through those plentiful publications, and the amendments he tabled to an earlier Agriculture Bill. Sadly, his new batch of Ministers recently voted against those proposals, but they include things for which there is a lot of support, and there is cross-party support for what we are discussing today.

I do not think British diplomats in Washington instructing President Trump to raise his domestic animal welfare standards to get a trade deal with the UK would work, but it is important to maintain high levels of protection in law, so that during negotiations the people we are negotiating with know the strength of feeling of the British people and Parliament: that we will not accept any lowering of standards or undercutting of them in any trade deal. That is why we need the animal sentience legislation to be implemented before the end of the implementation period. We cannot allow our animal welfare standards to fall behind those of the EU, especially after the plentiful promises of Conservative Ministers.

The animal sentience legislation that I hope the Minister will announce needs to apply to all policy areas and all sentient animals. If an animal is sentient, they are sentient no matter how they are being used by humans or where they are living. The law needs to confer an active duty to respect that sentience on all aspects of government. Simply having a function within DEFRA to advise the rest of Government is insufficient because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East said, there are other Departments that need to reflect the importance of animals in their day-to-day work and that might not, as standard, take animal sentience on board. That is why an independent monitor is such a good idea.

The legislation should require the Government to publish an annual report detailing how the duty has been acted on, including the policy options considered and what animal welfare impact assessments have been undertaken. It also needs to recognise that decapods and cephalopods—that is, crabs and lobsters, octopuses and squids—are sentient animals. In Labour’s animal welfare manifesto, which, again, is a very good read and still available on the website, we make the case that lobsters experience anxiety, crabs use tools, and octopuses have been known to predict the results of football matches—at least, that is not quite in the manifesto, but the sense of it is.

That is why, in our manifesto, we talk about not allowing those precious creatures to be boiled alive, for instance. We know that if you put a lobster in a boiling pot of water, it experiences pain. The pain may be lessened by the experience of being slowly heated, but it is pain none the less, and there are better ways of doing it.

The petition calls for a new body to support the Government in their duties to animals, which I referred to briefly, to ensure that

“decisions are underpinned by…scientific and ethics expertise.”

It has been proposed under a few names. The experience of Scotland was mentioned by the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald), and the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Allan Dorans) spoke about how Scotland has already got there. In Scotland, it is called the animal welfare commission, but it could also be an animal welfare advisory council. In our manifesto, we talk about an animal welfare commissioner. Regardless of the name or the precise format, the function is the same: to support and critically analyse, to advise Ministers and Government to make the right decisions, and to ensure that the effects are truly understood.

My party prides itself on being the party for animal welfare. At the last election, we were the only party to publish a manifesto exclusively on animal rights. In it, we set out how we would appoint an independent animal welfare commissioner to operate in England and in collaboration with the devolved Administrations. Now that the UK is no longer a member of the European Food Safety Authority, we need to establish a body that can advise DEFRA and all of Government independently, and to represent the wealth of scientific, ethics and animal welfare expertise available in the UK.

We know that at the moment there is no specific body that is under a statutory duty to enforce the welfare requirements of Labour’s landmark Animal Welfare Act 2006, which my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock) mentioned. That needs to be placed on a statutory footing, and an animal welfare commissioner would help to achieve that. I recommend that the Minister cut and paste that from our manifesto into her Department’s work plan; if she did, it would enjoy the cross-party support that we have seen from the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) and my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), who were united in the same effort here.

The commissioner would be responsible for gathering the latest scientific evidence on animal sentience and welfare, to ensure that there is the most up-to-date, evidence-based understanding across Whitehall, and to ensure that our nation maintains its top ranking in the animal protection index. Working alongside Government, the commissioner would assist in the promotion of best practice in animal welfare internationally because, although we pride ourselves on the legislative framework, Britons care about animal welfare both at home and abroad. To see that, we need only look at changes that the tourism industry has made to remove animals from so many of the products sold to British tourists, because that is not something Brits support.

Ministers are often found saying that the legislation that has been proposed now that we have left the EU is world leading, but time and again the evidence does not support that high-falutin’ soundbite. The Bills that have come out of DEFRA recently on agriculture and the environment have, I am afraid, been disappointing, at a time when many of us—including many of the “greenies” from across the parties and across the divide here—had high hopes that they really would deliver on that promise.

We cannot be world leading without an animal welfare commissioner. We are not even leading in the UK, because Scotland already has an animal welfare commissioner. England is already lagging behind. That matters as well. My little sister is a sheep farmer in Cornwall and, if she were to move north of the border, the animals that she now keeps in Cornwall would have a different legislative framework and different protections. That does not quite seem right for the same sheep, and I think there is an option to look at that again. I am not advocating taking sheep out of the Secretary of State’s own county along the way, for fear of offending him, but having those standards across our islands is important when it comes to animal welfare.

As I conclude, I will mention briefly the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), who said in his remarks that he was exasperated by the language around chlorinated chicken. Indeed, many people in this place are, and the answer is very simple: put it in the Bill. That would prevent our standards from ever being undercut. If the hon. Gentleman believes the words of Ministers—they are said so very often—there is no reason for that not be put in a Bill, because those words are already on record. The thing is, I do not believe Ministers when they say that. There is an important element of building trust in these areas.

[James Daly]

Can I ask a very simple question? What shred of evidence does the hon. Gentleman have to back up what he has just said?

[Luke Pollard]

The difficulty when we sit on the Opposition Benches, where our job is to scrutinise rather than to support, is that we look for evidence of the words. There is a genuine risk that standards could be undercut.

It is important to make a distinction here, because this is frequently lost in interventions, although I hope that will not be the case with the hon. Gentleman. It is not that we think the Government will somehow lower our standards immediately, but by signing trade deals that undercut our standards and permit food produced to lower animal welfare standards or with negative environmental impacts, we will be allowing in produce that undercuts our own farmers and our high animal welfare standards, and that creates an incentive to lower regulatory pressures in the UK—or protections, as the Opposition like to think of them.

That is not something that is supported. It is not supported by Labour, it is not supported by the SNP and it is not supported by many Conservative Members, nor is it supported by the National Farmers Union and other groups. There are elements of cross-party support for keeping standards high and keeping that in law; it is one of those areas where we can come together on a cross-party basis to say that animal sentience should be in law. If we did, it should be a simple Bill with good scrutiny—the Minister knows that there are many experts in this House who would happily advise her for free along the way—because it is important that we get it done. At the moment, far from getting done, it is just getting delayed.

I hope that the Minister, when she gets to her feet, will give a boost to the petitioners—all 104,000 of them, in nearly every single parliamentary constituency of the country—and reassure them that this petition will not only enjoy warm words from Government, but see Government action before the end of the implementation period at the end of this year.

Flooding

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes the damage caused by Storms Ciara, Dennis and Jorge and expresses thanks to workers from the Environment Agency, emergency services, local councils and volunteers; and calls for Ministers to set up an independent review into the floods, including the Government’s response, the adequacy of the funding provided for flood defences and prevention, difficulties facing homes and businesses with getting insurance and what lessons need to be learnt in light of the climate emergency and the increased likelihood of flooding in the future.

It is a pleasure to move this motion on flooding on behalf of Her Majesty’s Opposition. Flooding has devastated our communities after three successive storms—Ciara, Dennis and Jorge—each compounding and deepening the damage caused by the storm that preceded it. I start by paying my respects to those who lost their lives as a result of these storms. I also thank all those involved in mitigating and fighting the floods: our fire and rescue service, police, local councils, the Environment Agency, and all who have helped to protect homes and businesses, rescue people and animals from rising flood waters, and reinforce flood defences. The motion thanks them for their service.

The motion also pays tribute to the work of the BBC in keeping communities informed about flooding incidents, diversions and emergency measures. BBC local radio, in particular, but BBC Online as well, have been invaluable lifelines to those communities under water. I hope the Secretary of State will add his voice to mine in thanking them when he gets to his feet.

It would be very easy to dismiss the recent flooding as a freak accident, an act of God, and leave it at that, but we need to take a difficult step and recognise that more could have been done. As the climate crisis produces more severe weather more often, we will be having more flooding more often, so we need to learn the lessons.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

As the climate emergency produces more and more flooding, so flooding will become more frequent, and yet the resources for the Environment Agency have been severely cut over the last decade. Does the hon. Member agree we need long-term, not just short-term, funding for the Environment Agency?

[Luke Pollard]

The hon. Member pre-empts my speech. It is important that we have a long-term plan for flooding with long-term funding attached to it so that we can protect communities at risk of flooding.

We know that more could have been done to ensure that our fire and rescue services were fully equipped to deal with this national emergency; that more could have been done to put in place long-term flood defences; and that more could have been done to slow down the impact of the climate emergency.

[Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)]

I recently visited a natural flood management project in the Wychwoods, in my constituency, a partnership project with local councils, Wild England and many others, involving flood diversion, wildlife creation, habitat, leaky dams and so forth. It has been very valuable in protecting the villages of the Wychwoods. Is this something we could see much more of elsewhere?

[Luke Pollard]

Having more natural solutions to flooding is part of the solution; it is not the sole solution, but it is a very important part, and I will come on to that in a moment.

Our motion makes a very simple ask—one that I am amazed but not surprised that Ministers are running from: that we have an investigation to learn the lessons from the floods, an investigation that will seek to protect more homes and businesses in the future, an investigation that will look at the difficulties people encounter in buying affordable insurance for their homes and businesses and in receiving timely pay-outs, an investigation into what measures are required from Government to fund flood protections and upstream catchment management measures and to resource emergency responses.

When choosing the wording of the motion, the Opposition had two choices: we could have chosen wording that went hard on a part-time Prime Minister who was missing in action throughout the floods, a part-time Prime Minister who refused to call a Cobra meeting and unlock the scale of funding necessary for flooded communities, a part-time Prime Minister who failed to show national leadership when it was required; or we could choose wording that could unify the House in a sensible effort to learn the lessons, calmly and sincerely, from this disastrous series of floods. Labour chose to rise above that partisan debate, which is why every single Member of the House should feel able to support our motion. How is learning the lessons from an incident—in a review of what actions took place, what actions did not work as well as was hoped and of where improvements could be made—not a sensible and proportionate step to take after a national emergency such as the recent floods?

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I represent the most flood prone constituency in the country—my constituents are presently under 400 million cubic metres of water. How does the hon. Member envisage this inquiry working with the section 19 inquiries already commenced in my area and in many other flooded areas, given that their purpose is to determine exactly those things.

[Luke Pollard]

There will be local inquiries and there will be different agencies looking at their own responses, but we need an overarching investigation into the whole response—the consequences of austerity, the flood prevention measures that could and should be taken, the fact that flooding will become more frequent, and so on. That is what is on the table in the motion today and what I hope hon. Members on both sides will vote for.

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

In light of the fact that places such as the Calder Valley have had three 100-year floods in the last seven and a half years, does the hon. Member not think that another review would only cost more money and waste more time? We need action. We already have this information. We know exactly what happened in the floods. We had four times the monthly average rainfall in 24 hours.

[Luke Pollard]

I agree we need action, but it was action we did not get during the floods. It was action we required from the Prime Minister to call a Cobra meeting that we did not get. It was action to unlock the necessary funding that we did not get. I agree we need action and hope he will support this motion so that we get a lessons learned review that helps Ministers to make better decisions next time and get the action he desperately wants.

The review we are asking for would look at how we learn lessons as a country, how the Government learn lessons and how the work and innovations of local communities can be recognised, but the Government’s amendment seeks to do only one thing: not learn the lessons of the flooding. It would delete the lessons learned review and silence the voices of flooded communities. I want the voices of those communities under water heard in the review we are proposing. I want to hear from the small business owners in Telford whose shops have been flooded about the difficulties they face replacing stock when insurance companies refuse to insure them. I want to hear from the farmers next to the River Severn who fear that their crops will have been destroyed by the water damage in their fields. I want to hear from the homeowners in west Yorkshire who have yet again had to wash dirty water from their homes, wash the smell of sewage from their homes, replace their furniture and carpets and worry about whether the insurance will pay out and how much the premiums will be next year, if they are to be covered at all. I want to hear the voices of the emergency services who have had their numbers cut and cut again by years of Tory austerity. I want to hear from the Welsh coal mining communities who are now living in fear of a landslide from water-sodden spoil tips.

I want to hear from all of them in this review, and yet Ministers have proposed an amendment that says they will not have a lessons learned review, will not look at what worked well and what did not, and will not ask communities what works for them. Every Tory MP who votes against our motion will be doing something very simple: refusing to listen and learn the lessons of the flooding and refusing to improve their response to flooding in a calm and independent manner. Those under water communities, many of which are represented by Conservative MPs, will wonder what happened to their Members of Parliament. When given an opportunity to get the voice of those communities heard, they will have decided to turn against that—that is not leadership.

[Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)]

The hon. Member talked about the role of insurance companies. I chair the all-party group on insurance and financial services and work quite closely with Flood Re. Since it was launched in 2016, Flood Re has been a great example of the Government and the insurance industry working together: 300,000 more properties have now been insured and four out of five properties with previous flood claims can now get insurance at half the price it was before. I am sure he will welcome that fact. It is a great example of the Government working with the industry to help solve this problem.

[Luke Pollard]

Flood Re has resulted in some improvements—the hon. Gentleman is right about that—but it does not insure homes or provide cover for homes built since 2009, and he will know that it does not include support for small businesses, so there are huge holes in the scheme that need to be filled. We need a scheme that works. At the moment, Flood Re is not delivering as was originally intended for all affected communities. The Government are carrying out a review of the Flood Re scheme, and I urge Ministers to encourage it to report quickly, because we need the Flood Re scheme to work properly to ensure that there are no gaps in it.

The reason that we are calling for a review today is that the flood waters will, we hope, soon subside and the camera crews will pack up, but as the media agenda moves on, the damage, disruption and destruction of the floods will remain for those communities that have been affected. It will take many months for those communities to recover, but we know from past floods that it will actually take many years for the damage to be undone, for payments to be received and for the mitigations to be put in place. That is why a lessons learned review is so important.

We know that the Prime Minister was missing during the floods, but he now has an opportunity to create a lessons learned review to learn the lessons of what has happened. However, he has decided against doing that. We know that the Conservatives’ political choice to implement a programme of brutal austerity over the past 10 years has made the fight against the climate crisis so much harder. The Environment Agency has again and again asked for extra money—£1 billion a year just to mitigate the impacts of floods and defend our communities. We need long-term structural change if we are to combat future floods, including restoring nature in uplands, ending the rotational burning of peatlands, implementing proper catchment area management strategies and building proper flood defences where appropriate. All these changes need genuine funding and a long-term plan.

But it is not just the Environment Agency that has been cut; our local councils have too, and our fire and rescue services. There is a regional disparity in the cuts for fire and rescue services as well. Across England, 23% of our firefighters have been lost in Tory cuts since 2010, but West Yorkshire, where some of the most severe flooding has happened, has lost over a third of its firefighters in austerity cuts. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) has raised this issue directly with Ministers before, but I would like to invite the Secretary of State to look again at whether fire and rescue services need a statutory duty around flooding, as they have in Scotland and Wales.

It is also important that we look at the effect of the flooding on our farmers. That includes considering short-term actions such as a derogation of crop diversification and a reinstatement of the farming recovery fund to mitigate the damage that flooding has caused. The Secretary of State came unstuck at the NFU conference and answered concerns about the three-crop rule very poorly, but there is now a genuine opportunity to help farmers by using the powers that he already has to support them. In the long term, we need to ensure that our farmland is used sensibly to prevent flooding and to restore the ability to keep more water upstream.

We also need to recognise the need for change on match-funding. I have raised this matter before. Poorer communities should not be asked to match the same as wealthier communities, because we know that in that situation the wealthier communities have their flood defences funded and the poor ones do not. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) has raised this in relation to her city time and again, but she has still not had a satisfactory answer. The Budget next week is an opportunity for Ministers to fund flood defences properly. I would like to see the Budget used as a climate budget to recognise the true scale of the climate crisis and have funding directed accordingly. I suspect we will not have that, but I hope there will be some mention of flooding. I hope that funding will be directed at those communities that are currently under water and that a long-term plan is put in place in relation to this.

We have our criticisms of the Government, and the Prime Minister in particular, for failing to act with the seriousness that the climate emergency requires, but setting that aside, we have before us in this motion a modest proposal to learn the lessons of the three storms and to conduct an independent review into what happened. We owe it to those communities that are currently under water, those that have been flooded and those that are repairing the damage from the storms to listen to them and to do everything in our power to learn the lessons to ensure that it does not happen again.

I say to every Tory MP whose communities are under water and who votes against this modest ask that I wish them well on their return to their flooded communities. I wish them well in explaining why a review into the lessons learned will not be happening and why they voted against it. I wish them well in explaining to the people whose homes and businesses were flooded why they are denying them a voice. I wish them well in that, because they have the chance today to vote for such an independent review, and for those flooded communities, that will be a very modest ask as they scrub their floors to clean up the sewage that has come through the pipes, as they repair their homes and as they work out how to restore the stock in their businesses that have been so damaged. For them, this is a modest ask, and it is something that should be supported by everyone in this House. I hope that Tory MPs will reflect on this before they back the Government’s amendment to not learn the lessons of the flooding incidents. I hope that, as a Parliament, we can come together on this. I hope that the warm words that will be no doubt come from the Secretary of State at the Dispatch Box in a moment can be added to with the action that is so desperately needed. I commend this Labour motion to the House.

Environment Bill

Luke Pollard Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 26th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

The climate crisis is the most pressing issue facing our planet. The actions we take in the next few years will determine whether we can address the climate emergency or whether we pass on to our children the rotten inheritance of living on a dying planet. It is therefore with great responsibility that we debate this Bill.

The Government are calling this a “landmark Bill” and “world-leading legislation,” but I fear that is not quite right. The Secretary of State should be more honest, because this still seems like a draft Bill—a Bill that is not quite there. This is an okay Bill, but by no means the groundbreaking legislation we have been promised.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Does he share my concern and disappointment that the Secretary of State did not mention part 8? Part 8 refers to the potential for divergence from the incredibly important regulations on the chemical industry that affect our entire manufacturing sector, not just the chemical industry itself. Does he share my concern that part 8 has the ability to diverge, with serious consequences for most of our economy?

[Luke Pollard]

The details on regression and non-regression are an important part of this Bill. We need to make sure we maintain our high standards, because those high standards, especially in the chemical industry, drive jobs and employment right across the country. Any risk of divergence affects the ability of those products to be sold overseas, which affects the ability of jobs to be held back in our country. I am glad my hon. Friend has raised that issue.

Some hon. Members will remember when Parliament adopted Labour’s motion to declare a climate emergency. For me, it presents us with a very simple challenge: now that Parliament has declared a climate emergency, what are we doing differently? It is a challenge to us as individuals and to businesses, but it is especially a challenge to lawmakers, Ministers and regulators.

Because the climate crisis is real, we need bolder, swifter action to decarbonise our economy and to protect vulnerable habitats. We need to recognise that the crisis is not just about carbon, although it is. It is about other greenhouse gases, too, and it is an ecological emergency, with our planet’s animals, birds and insect species in decline and their habitats under threat.

The water we drink, the food we consume and the fish in our seas are all affected by pollutants, from plastics to chemicals. As we have seen from the floods caused by Storms Ciara and Dennis, the climate crisis is also leading to more extreme weather more often and with more severe consequences.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

The National Flood Forum has noted that extreme and flash flooding will be one of the greatest effects of the climate crisis. In my constituency, we have experienced unprecedented flooding, and the River Taff’s levels rose by more than a metre above all previous records. If that is not a wake-up call, I do not know what is. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to act urgently to secure better climate protections, to ensure that all other towns, villages and cities across the world are not impacted in the way my community has been this week?

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Pollard]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention and for all the work that she and her Welsh colleagues have been doing in supporting communities that are under water. We need much firmer action. We need a proper plan for flooding that reverses the austerity cuts made to our flood defences, and that removes the requirement for match funding which favours affluent communities over poorer ones. We also need urgent action from the Government to address the worrying aspects of the legacy of the coal industry in Wales, which could result in a real disaster if action is not taken. I encourage her to carry on campaigning on that.

As my hon. Friend has mentioned, Britain is not unique in the challenges facing us in terms of the climate catastrophe. In many cases, what will happen in the global south will be even more disastrous than what is happening in the UK. That is why action cannot wait.

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware of concerns that the Bill does not focus enough on the UK’s global footprint, so does he agree that the Government should introduce a mandatory due diligence mechanism, which would help to reduce the UK’s global footprint?

[Luke Pollard]

I am grateful for that intervention. It is a good reminder that one way in which we have decarbonised in the past few years has simply been by exporting our carbon; we export not only waste, but the production of the most carbon-intensive products that we use. The hon. Gentleman raises a good point.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Luke Pollard]

I will make some progress before taking further interventions, mindful of the people who are to follow.

As a nation, we need a gold-standard Environment Bill. I agree with the Minister that we need world-leading legislation, but this is not it. This still looks like a draft Bill; there has not been complete pre-legislative scrutiny for the entire Bill, which I think it needs; it lacks coherence as between its different sections; and it lacks the ambition to tackle the climate crisis as a whole with a comprehensive and renewed strategy. Labour will be a critical friend to Ministers during this process. We will be not be opposing the Bill today, but in that spirit we hope that Ministers will look seriously at adopting the measures we will put forward to improve and strengthen it, especially in Committee.

I have a concern about the positioning of the Bill: it has been spun so hard by successive Governments, and Secretaries of State in particular, that it cannot possibly deliver the grand soundbites that it has been set up as doing. That means that the heavy lifting required now to address our decarbonisation efforts and protect our communities may be hampered, because the Bill will not be able to deliver on those lofty promises. I worry that unless we match those grand soundbites with determined action, we will be failing our children and the communities we are here to serve.

In the time left, I want to cover three key areas of concern about the Bill. The first relates to Labour’s belief that non-regression in environmental standards must be a legal requirement. The second relates to how the new Office for Environmental Protection needs to be strengthened, and the third relates to how the ambition of Government press releases needs to be translated into genuine delivery in the Bill. First, on standards and targets, we were promised during the election that the Government would not lower our food standards, despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary, in post-Brexit trade deals. As we have already seen with the debates on the Agriculture Bill, Ministers have chosen to leave the door open for the undercutting of British farm and food standards in post-Brexit trade deals. The new Environment Secretary cannot even guarantee that chlorinated chicken or lactic acid-washed chicken will not be allowed into Britain as a result of the US trade deal. The rough ride he got with the National Farmers Union this morning will just be the start if he does not come to the realisation that many of us on both sides of this House have, that the commitment that he and others have given must be put into law. We cannot allow our standards to be undercut, and that principle of not allowing our standards to be undercut applies to this Bill too. We need to ensure that non-regression on environmental standards with the EU is a floor that we must not go below.

[Geraint Davies]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Luke Pollard]

I am going to make a bit of progress, but I will come back to my hon. Friend in a moment if I can.

We simply cannot allow our environmental standards to be undercut in the same way as our food and animal welfare standards risk being undercut with trade deals. We need to ensure that we have measures approaching dynamic alignment with the European Union so that Britain is not seen as a country with lower standards than our European friends. Lower regulatory standards and lower animal welfare standards, especially on imported food, would see damage to ecosystems and habitats and a downward pressure on regulation in future, which would harm our efforts to decarbonise our economy. I want to see the lofty words said by all the Ministers on the Front Bench and the Prime Minister about non-regression put in the Bill. Where is the legal commitment to non-regression on environmental protections that the British people have asked for? Why is it not clearly in the Bill? If we are to have any hope of tackling the climate emergency in a meaningful way, we need to be aiming towards net zero by 2030, not by 2050.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

On net zero by 2030, does the hon. Gentleman not recognise what the Committee on Climate Change and Baroness Brown recognise, which is that reaching net zero by 2050 will be a huge challenge for this country? Blithely throwing around “2030” as though this is easy is doing a disservice not just this House, but to the people watching.

[Luke Pollard]

I am a big fan of the hon. Gentleman’s Instagram feed and follow it with great passion, and sometimes I feel a bit disappointed by interventions such as that. We cannot afford not to hit net zero by 2030, but the Government are currently on track for 2099. A far-off date many, moons away will not deal with the climate emergency and will not protect our habitats that need protecting. That drive needs to be there, though we know that for some sectors achieving net zero target by 2030 will be very challenging, and for some achieving it by 2050 will be very challenging, with agriculture being one of those sectors. The NFU’s plan to hit net zero by 2040 is very challenging. If sectors are to deliver net zero by any date, we will need some sectors to go faster and further than others to create carbon headroom, with the requirement that that progress is not double-counted in carbon calculations. Sadly, this supposedly world-leading Environment Bill does not have a single target in it. It contains no duty on Ministers to ensure that Britain decarbonises and stops the climate crisis getting any worse.

Secondly, I turn to the Office for Environmental Protection—the proposed new regulator. I know from previous debates that some Conservative Members are not too keen on the idea of a new Government outfit created in this space, but I agree with Ministers that we need a robust regulator. Sadly, the one being proposed in the Bill is not strong enough in our view. We need it to have teeth, and a remit that is unaffected by Government patronage. It needs to carefully consider the science and to have a bite that would make Ministers think twice about missing their targets. That is what the Office for Environmental Protection should be, but, sadly, that is not what the Bill envisages.

The new regulator does not have true independence from Government. It has no legal powers to hold the Government to account in the way it needs to. Approving its chair via a Government-led Select Committee, on which the Government have a majority, is not sufficient. Given that Ministers have been dragged time and time again through the courts for missing air quality targets, how can we ensure that this regulator would make that a thing of the past and not a repeat prescription?

We need Ministers to do as Members on both sides have suggested today and adopt World Health Organisation targets for air quality and particulates. We need regulators to have teeth to make sure that those targets are enforced, and we need to make sure that the new regulator sits and works in a complementary way in and with what is an already quite congested regulatory space on the environment.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

Prospect the union has written to me expressing its concern that only 100 staff will be employed by the Office for Environmental Protection. Does the shadow Minister share my concerns about this under-resourcing?

[Luke Pollard]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Since 2010 we have seen that quangos and regulators can still exist but their ability to deliver that regulation and the quality of that regulation depends on the resources. If a political lever is being applied by Ministers—as I have said before, I have a lot of time for the current Environment Secretary, but that does not necessarily mean that anyone who follows him would have the same approach—if budgets were to be changed and if political patronage were to be applied in terms of the OEP’s leadership and board, that could affect the outcomes. Resourcing does matter.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Luke Pollard]

I will not take any further interventions, so that I can finish my remarks. [Interruption.] I say that, but that would have been a good time for one. I come to the section of my speech about water, unless someone would like to intervene briefly. [Laughter.]

[Bim Afolami]

I do so in the spirit of kindness, but there is a serious point here. Luton airport is in the constituency next to mine, and one concern that many of my constituents have as a result is about air quality. All of our constituencies will have separate issues. What is the hon. Gentleman’s view as to how we can use this Bill to apply to specific instances at specific times—for example, to deal with poor air quality around Luton airport?

[Luke Pollard]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman and will like more of his Instagram posts as a reward for that kind intervention. We do need to address air quality around airports and transport modes in particular, but the ability to do that is predicated on the data, which is why my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) made the point that he did earlier. It is important to make sure that we take action based on reliable evidence, which means that we need the right testing stations. At the moment there are far too few air-quality monitoring stations. We need to go forward by embracing having monitoring stations on more schools, more GP surgeries and in more areas with a greater level of public dwelling. That is how we should address the issue. For airports in particular, it is about surface access and making sure that people can get to airports more easily.

I have been coughing and spluttering for a while, so I will rush through the rest of my speech so that I do not take up anyone else’s time. As Conservative Members have said, the part of the Bill that deals with water does not go far enough to deal with some of the issues relating to water poverty, or do anything to address per capita consumption or meaningful water labelling or to solve the challenge of where we are going to get the water that we need for the homes we need to build in future. For the Bill to be genuinely world leading, I would have hoped that the Government would adopt some of the current groundbreaking ideas in water policy, such as water neutrality, which is the idea that for every new home that we build we will not provide any more water resources—they will be offset by water efficiency in our existing housing stock. There are some really grand opportunities and fantastic water innovations, which is why we need the Bill to go further on water efficiency in our homes, actions on leaks and investment in water-efficient technologies. We also need a war on leaky loos, as that is important.

I would like the Government to look at a commitment whereby the water industry moves to using 100% renewable energy within the next five years. Ministers already have the power to do that, given the regulatory powers of Ofwat and DEFRA.

Finally, the Secretary of State has already mentioned that the Bill includes a section on trees that will allow trees to be chopped down in a different way. The Bill does not include any new powers to plant trees. That seems to be an omission: I imagine Members from all parties will look at the Bill and say, “Surely that’s not right.” Given that the Government are missing their tree-planting target by 71% already, further powers to chop down trees do not seem to be the priority. We need to look into not only how to plant more trees but at different types of biodiversity and habitats, and make sure that carbon is sequestered in the right way. That is really important, because if we are to address the loss of species, both in the UK and globally, we need to take action.

COP26 provides us with a global platform to showcase the very best of our global thinking, our action and our legislation. Currently, the Bill does not deliver the groundbreaking global platform that we need to take into COP26. I hope that Ministers will take seriously the concerns that I have raised and that my Opposition colleagues will address when they speak later, because there is a real desire on both sides of the House to improve the legislation and make it as genuinely world leading as the Secretary of State aspires for it to be. To that end, I invite the Secretary of State to work with us to improve the legislation; simply voting down every amendment so that we keep a clean sheet will not deliver that. I hope that he will take that challenge in the spirit in which it is meant so that we can work together to improve the legislation. The climate crisis needs to be addressed and it will not be sufficiently addressed if we allow the Bill to pass unaltered.

Flooding

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I would like to thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement and welcome him to his role. I have a lot of time for my fellow west country MP. I regard him as decent and competent, and I look forward to working with him. To be fair, this is a much better statement than the one the Government made only a few weeks ago about Storm Ciara, but not enough is being done. Simply explaining what has happened does not stop it happening again.

On behalf of the Opposition, I want to send my condolences to the families who have seen loved ones die as a result of Storms Ciara and Dennis. I would also like to thank the emergency services, the Environment Agency, local councils, volunteers and those who have worked tirelessly to protect homes and businesses, rescue people and animals from rising waters and fallen trees and reinforce flood defences.

It is because I have so much time for the Secretary of State that I am disappointed by the slow and pedestrian approach we have seen from Ministers since the flooding hit. Where was the Prime Minister? Where was he? Why was a Cobra meeting not convened? Why was there no national leadership from this Government? Why have the Welsh Government and communities in Wales not received the same extra support as those in England?

During the general election, the Prime Minister reluctantly visited flood-hit communities to win votes—he was out with his mop, pushing water around shops. But now that he has his majority, he is nowhere to be seen; he is missing in action. He was taking a break in a mansion in Kent instead of giving our nation the leadership that those communities under water genuinely deserve.

We know that the climate crisis means that we will see more extreme weather more often, and the consequences will be felt most by the communities that are most vulnerable. Since Parliament has declared a climate emergency, it is clear that the Government need to do things differently, but they are not yet, and I say to the Environment Secretary that that needs to change. I want the Government to wake up to the reality that more extreme weather will happen more often. It is not a one-off incident—these are not freak accidents. This is the world in which we live, and we need to have a proper plan for flooding that will address the causes and help the communities that are under water.

That plan needs to match the scale of the crisis, with proper funding, reversing austerity cuts and ensuring that funding is available to those areas that suffer the most—a new plan not bound by match funding rules that discriminate against poorer areas compared with more affluent ones. It must look at catchment management; upstream solutions, to ensure that we hold more water upstream; tree planting and hitting tree planting targets; a new role for our farmers and water companies; and banning burning on peatlands. It must resource our emergency services fairly, and importantly, the councils that carry the highest flood risk should be adequately recognised in the local government spending review. In short, we need a plan that recognises the climate crisis, and we must act before it is too late.

We need to move away from building homes on floodplains. Banning building on floodplains makes sense, but it depends on our definition of a floodplain. Most of London is in a floodplain, so let us be clear about the immediate need to ban building on vulnerable floodplains, where rising waters are a genuine risk. Will the Government continue to allow house building on vulnerable floodplains, against the advice of experts? What extra steps will the Government take to listen to the communities that have been devastated by two successive storms? Will the Government allow homes built after 2009—especially those on floodplains—to be covered under the Flood Re reinsurance scheme, since they are not at the moment? We cannot build flood defences with austerity or Government press releases, so by what date will the Government have reversed the austerity cuts to flood defence schemes that Conservative Members so enthusiastically voted for in the past?

I wish the Environment Secretary a very long and prosperous stay in his new job, but I offer him this one piece of advice. Every time homes flood, every time the Prime Minister is missing in action and every time Government press releases outweigh Government action, I will ask him to act. Today, therefore, I ask the Environment Secretary for a new plan for flooding, a new approach to reverse austerity cuts to flood defence schemes, and a proper investigation into these floods, which carries the confidence of communities currently under water, so that lessons can be learned and homes protected from the inevitable flooding that will happen again.

[George Eustice]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for his kind words and for welcoming me to the Dispatch Box. There is much he said that I can agree with, and indeed that was contained in my statement, but there are obviously some things that I cannot agree with.

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that, in a Government, we have a Cabinet with Cabinet Ministers who lead on particular issues. When the Prime Minister appointed me a week ago last Thursday, the first thing we discussed was the upcoming Storm Dennis. We discussed how we would approach it, and he made it clear then that he wanted me to lead on this. That is entirely right, and it is entirely right as well that a statement such as this one on these issues should be led by me as the Secretary of State.

The hon. Gentleman asked why we did not stand up Cobra. The reason is that we stood up the national flood response centre, which is also hosted by the Cabinet Office. It is a similar mechanism to Cobra, but dedicated to flood response, engaging all the relevant authorities necessary to address a flood incident.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the devolved Administrations, including Wales. Flood response is a devolved matter, but I can tell him that on the day the flood events took place, DEFRA and the Environment Agency were immediately offering mutual aid to the Welsh Government, should they need it. We offered what help they would need in order to respond.

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point about the fact that extreme weather events are becoming more common. Indeed they are, and that is why we are committing an additional £4 billion over the next five years. I also agree with him that we need to be looking at nature-based solutions—natural dams and floodplains, and tree planting upland to try to hold water upland so that it does not get into our urban areas.

On the issue of building on floodplains, the Environment Agency is already a statutory consultee, and in the overwhelming majority of cases local government follows the recommendations of the Environment Agency. Sometimes that will involve not building in areas where there are floodplains, but an outright ban on building on all floodplains would prevent the expansion of the majority of our lowland towns and cities. In some cases, the advice of the Environment Agency will be that it is okay to build on them, provided it is an appropriate development and designed in a way that manages flood risk.