Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. Earlier this year, the Minister responsible had two roundtables with water companies to make sure that appropriate lessons were learned. In particular, Members of this House from across the divide made it clear that Thames Water in particular needed to pull its socks up.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

4. What recent steps he has taken to increase the level of recycling.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)]

Recycling has been increasing since 2010. Over 70% of packaging has been recycled or recovered, which is ahead of the EU target of 60%, and the figure for plastic packaging, at 45%, is double the EU target. England’s household recycling rate has also continued to increase, but we need to do more. We will be publishing our resources and waste strategy shortly.

[Mary Creagh]

I am sure the whole House will wish to join me in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on the birth of her beautiful baby boy, James, a couple of weeks ago.

Fashion should not cost the earth, but every year 300,000 tonnes of garments are disposed into landfill. Will the Minister ensure that the forthcoming resources and waste strategy includes something to force clothing producers to take account of the end use of the garments that they produce?

Agriculture Bill

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow]

Our Scottish Conservative colleagues provide strong representation for farmers. Farming is very important to Scotland, which is a rural area. The SNP and the Scottish Parliament have really missed an opportunity to get their details down on paper so that they can play a full role in the really exciting future that this Government are creating. If it were not for the Conservative Government and our coming out of Europe—I say this even though I was a remainer—we would not have this great opportunity.

Crucially, the essence of the Bill is to move away from making payments simply for the privilege of owning land, as has been mentioned, and towards the concept of paying for public goods. That is the cornerstone of the Bill, and it is absolutely the right thing to do. The basic idea of receiving money for doing something for the public good has met with universal approval, not just from farmers but from environmentalists and right across the board with everybody I have met in Taunton Deane so far. That is true of improving the quality of our water—currently, only 14% of our rivers are classed as clean, which is absolutely shocking; planting more trees to help to reduce the speed of run-off from the hills to the Somerset levels, which will help to reduce the terrible flooding that we have had over many years; and creating new habitats to improve biodiversity and reverse the catastrophic declines in plant and animal populations that we have witnessed in our own lifetimes, as the 2016 “State of Nature” report clearly sets out.

In many cases, EU agricultural policy has been the driver for those wildlife declines, with the loss of mixed farming—grass is so important to that, as it was on the farm where I grew up—less rotation, fewer hedgerows and increased pesticide use. The increased use of pesticides has reduced the quantity of plants on which foraging insects rely; indeed, we rely on those insects to pollinate our crops. The Bill offers an opportunity for new schemes that emphasise the protection of biodiversity and help to redress those losses. Habitat creation schemes such as the one run on West Sedgemoor by the RSPB, which is producing tasty beef, creating summer water meadows and bringing back the snipe—I am proud to be the RSPB snipe champion—are really working. The Bill offers the opportunity to build on such schemes, which I welcome.

There is, however, one thing that I must ask the Minister. If farmers and environmental groups are already involved in environmental stewardship schemes, will those schemes still operate following the implementation of the Bill? Will they be allowed to run their course, or will they end with those groups then having to apply for new schemes?

The Minister will not be at all surprised to learn that I am now going to mention soil, because I have bent his ear on the subject many times. Half the soils in the east of the country are likely to become unproductive within a decade. That was highlighted in our Environmental Audit Committee report—and I see that the Committee’s Chairperson, the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), is in the Chamber. Soil erosion is a very serious issue, as is the fact that soil has been treated as a growing medium rather than a living habitat for far too long. I therefore welcome the priority that the Bill gives to soil health, and I was pleased that the Minister came to the launch of the Sustainable Soil Alliance in the House. I hope that the work that it is doing to advise on how we could monitor soil erosion or set targets to address it might influence the way in which payments are made.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is a true soil evangelist, but the Government have already signed up to a target in the Paris agreement to increase soil carbon content by four parts per 1,000 every year in order to sequester more carbon into our soil. Does the hon. Lady agree that that is a public good that should be funded and subsidised through the Bill?

[Rebecca Pow]

The hon. Lady raises an important point. As she knows, I am passionate about this issue. We need to have a conversation about all our climate change targets, including the potential net zero target that some people are talking about. The question of targets is very important: how can we pay unless we know what we are paying for? The targets that we set for the climate change commitments have worked well, and a similar model might chime with the 25-year plan and the forthcoming environment Act. I believe that many of the details will go into that Bill rather than this framework Agriculture Bill.

Payments relating to our natural heritage and culture are very welcome. My constituency contains two areas of natural beauty where people are pleading that landscape, and landscape beauty, be included in the Bill.

The Government’s commitment to funding until 2022 and for the transition period demonstrates our ongoing support for the countryside. That is obviously important, given that two thirds of farm incomes in the south-west are currently derived from basic payments. I know the Minister understands that. However, I would like to see a further commitment to future funding. God forbid that we ever change Government, but the production of beef or horticultural crops cannot be switched on like a light bulb, and farmers would like some long-term commitment.

Although the Bill does not directly list food as a public good, it does much to enable the efficient production of food. My local farmers welcome the data-gathering elements in the Bill, although, for the purpose of transparency, they would like supermarkets to be included, as well as the manufacturers and producers along the line—not just the raw-material producers. However, I welcome the data collection, and I stand by the Secretary of State’s commitment to maintaining our high food standards. That is crucial to the future. I look forward to the creation of an overarching environmental standards body—in, I believe, the environment Bill—which will hold people to account.

Let me say penultimately that, much as we love our Welsh farming colleagues—indeed, many of them come to Somerset to trade at our markets, especially Sedgemoor market, and they are very welcome—no one wants an internal competitive market to develop as a result of the flexibility offered to Welsh farmers. I am sure the Minister understands what I mean by that.

In conclusion—and thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to speak—let me say that the Bill heralds the most significant change in our land use for decades, with the finances to underpin it. It is the Conservatives who are leading the way in that regard, for farming and for the environment. I am confident that issues relating to the environment, farming and everything to do with our rural communities will dovetail in the Bill. It is absolutely the right way forward for a sustainable and healthy future. Not one of those elements can survive without the others, and on that note, I give the Bill, and all those who have worked so hard on it, my full support.

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[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

Now we come to the easiest part of the United Kingdom to resolve when it comes to agri-food. I dare not tread into the issue of Brexit. Reference was made earlier to a red line in the Irish Sea, but I assure Members that that will never happen as far as the Democratic Unionist party is concerned. We are part of the United Kingdom, and that is how it will remain.

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I have been involved in the agri-food sector for about 43 years—I know that that is hard to believe—from working as a primary producer to working in retail and production and processing.

I think that we are about to experience dramatic changes throughout the industry. These are exciting times. When I speak to farmers and industry representatives, they acknowledge that. They know that there will probably be some trying times, but they are excited by the opportunities that we will have after we have left the European Union.

I welcome the opportunity to debate a Bill that will have an impact on every farmer and farm business throughout the United Kingdom, whether it keeps sheep on the Antrim hills or grows wheat in East Anglia. Given that the UK is leaving the EU and the common agricultural policy, it is vital that a new domestic British agricultural policy is introduced. I welcome the regional flexibilities that are proposed for the different regions of the UK. I believe that there should be a variation in the new policy for each of those regions, provided that those variations do not produce competition in the internal market.

I note the name of the Bill, and I hope that agriculture will remain the central theme in any future policy. The Prime Minister is on record as saying— on three occasions, I think—when I put questions to her that agriculture would not be a poor cousin or the sacrificial lamb in any negotiations with Europe. We will hold the Prime Minister’s feet to the fire, along with those of the Secretary of State and the farming Minister. Agriculture must remain at the top of the agenda.

In Northern Ireland, we employ some 120,000 or 125,000 people in the agri-food sector. There is huge concern in the industry, and of course in the farming community, about EU casual workers. We need to address that during the Bill’s Committee stage, or perhaps it can be dealt with by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. There is a massive shortage of workers in the agri-food sector. A few weeks ago, along with the Chairman of the Committee, I met representatives of the industry, who emphasised that they were reaching crisis point, because the sector did not have enough workers to deal with production. The Government need to deal with that issue.

Food production that involves sustainable but profitable farming is essential. As has already been mentioned, those who are in the black at the bank can do many things. Given the changes that are coming, we must encourage farm production. It has already been mentioned that the Bill needs to give more emphasis to the incentive for farmers to grow and produce food. The incentive is there, but it needs to be made clearer that farmers will be encouraged to produce good food.

In Northern Ireland we have for many years had the Albert Heijn supermarkets in Holland insisting on coming to buy their meat in Northern Ireland because of how it is reared and because husbandry and animal welfare is maintained. That applies right across the whole of the United Kingdom. Across the whole UK, we produce the best food produce to be found anywhere in the European Union. That is a fact, and our standards and our animal welfare must be maintained. It is vital that we do that.

I have talked about opportunities. I believe there are opportunities, but the Government must take the issue of the workforce in the agri-food sector more seriously. Some companies in Northern Ireland are 60% dependent on people from other countries. We must get that situation right in some shape or form, and hopefully we will resolve it.

I want the Bill to allow for a UK-wide approach on matters that affect the whole UK. My party believes there should be an overarching policy across the UK to deal with such issues as marketing standards and crisis fund management. It is important that we do such things collectively.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of this Bill will depend on the trade policy that is implemented. Let us be clear: trade legislation or a Pacific trade deal that views agriculture as a sacrificial lamb for the importation of lower quality and standards than those in UK production will not be accepted. The British public will not accept that. We have a standard and a reputation not just across the whole European Union, but further afield, such as in South Africa and in those other countries that buy our chicken product because we cannot market it anywhere else. Our standard must be maintained. I am sure the farming Minister is aware of that—he has been told about it often enough when he has given evidence to the EFRA Committee.

[Mary Creagh]

As the granddaughter of a Fermanagh cattle farmer, I agree with the hon. Gentleman wholeheartedly about the fantastic standards and great tradition of farming in Northern Ireland. Does he agree that it is imperative for the future of farming and agriculture across the UK that the Government avoid a no-deal Brexit, which would put World Trade Organisation tariffs of 30% on our lamb and beef and drive most of the beef and cattle and lamb producers in this country out of business? That must be avoided at all costs.

[David Simpson]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but the Prime Minister has said that we have to get the right deal—that is important. I do not think that anyone here wants to go towards WTO, but we must get the right deal. I spoke to the lamb industry a few weeks ago, and, if we go to WTO for that industry—the Minister will know this because he has been told often enough—and tariffs of 14% or 15% are introduced, that would decimate the Northern Ireland lamb industry overnight, given that we export 90% of our lamb. Having said that, we need to get the right deal. Unfortunately, however, the EU keeps sticking in its heels at present, which is nonsense, especially in terms of the border of Northern Ireland, the movement of cattle and so forth, free trade within Northern Ireland, and the soft or hard border. That is all nonsense, because the situation will remain as it is and has been for many years. There is no reason to change that. No one wants to see us going towards WTO, but we must get the right deal. If the right deal is not there, we will have major problems with our industry and employment, and the sector will be decimated. We therefore have to get the right deal and I know the Minister is well aware of that.

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[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

I start by drawing the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. This is a historic moment for British agriculture, and I warmly welcome certainty and clarity for the sector regarding the shape of future agreements that the Bill provides. Certainty is as vital for agriculture as it is for any other business sector. That is highlighted by the proposals for a seven-year transition period, beginning in 2021, between CAP and the new policy, which will provide farmers with much-needed time to refashion their business models and plan for the future. The transition period is longer than predicted, which must be welcomed, and demonstrates the Government’s commitment to the progressive evolution of the sector rather than the cliff-edge revolution that was once discussed.

I also welcome the phasing out and delinking of basic payments, including lump-sum payments, to assist farmers in diversification or exiting the market, including through funding retirement, thereby supporting new entrants to the sector. Proposals to encourage new blood into agriculture should be promoted enthusiastically.

[Mary Creagh]

While we may welcome payments that enable farmers to exit farming, does the hon. Gentleman agree that there should be protections for the taxpayer in the statutory instruments that flow from this Bill? We cannot have a farmer taking seven years’ payments up front to retire and then signing the farm over to his son or daughter the next day, thereby double claiming on the same land for the next seven years.

[Julian Sturdy]

I accept that fair point, but my reading is that land belonging to those who take their retirement money up front and leave the sector—land that we hope would go to a new entrant—would not be entitled to any payments. However, the devil will be in the detail.

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[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the thoughtful speeches of the right hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) and my hon. Friends the Members for High Peak (Ruth George) and for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck). We have heard quite a lot in general about the sunlit uplands of Brexit, and about a rosy bucolic Brexit Britain, but much of the debate has missed out the red meat—questions such as what the quantum of funding will be, what powers the Secretary of State will have, and what outcomes we are seeking to achieve.

Two years ago, the Environmental Audit Committee warned that UK farmers faced a triple whammy from Brexit: first, the loss of subsidies; secondly, the potential for tariffs on exports; and, thirdly, the threat of being undercut by cheap imports from countries with lower standards in food safety, animal welfare and environmental standards. Today, I want to talk about my two concerns with this Bill. First, it gives Ministers the power to spend taxpayers’ money with no accountability. I can think of no other area of public policy where we would be discussing the expenditure of £20 billion to £25 billion of public money without demanding some very detailed answers. The second area of concern is the lack of ambitious targets for the restoration and recovery of nature, which need to be linked to those payments.

We know that the CAP has shaped and underpinned British farming for the past 40 years. Each of us is only one or two generations from people who grew up and managed land. Basic payments from the CAP make up between a third and a half of the average farmer’s income, and 60% of profits for average farms and 90% of profits for grazing livestock farms. They are a very, very important part of the farm business.

The CAP currently has a seven-year budget cycle, which provider farmers with the long-term certainty that they need about what they will receive, and allows them to plan and invest. We have heard from Ministers that they will match current levels of EU funding until 2022, but farmers are asking, “What next?” and the Bill provides very few answers. It fails to say how much funding there will be, whether funding security will be guaranteed and who will administer the money. Its vague list of purposes risks policy inconsistency.

My Committee has called for an agricultural policy with clear goals, but the Bill says that payments can be made for anything from

“mitigating or adapting to climate change”,

which is obviously very welcome, to restoring or enhancing

“cultural heritage or natural heritage”—

I am not entirely sure what that means or how we measure it—through to

“improving the productivity of…an agricultural…activity”.

That leaves open the possibility of taxpayers incentivising intensive farming, and incentivising and paying for activities that harm the environment. We must not get into a policy pickle with the Bill.

Budgets could also be subject to the dead hand of the Treasury coming in halfway through, as we have seen with the abolition of various other environmental initiatives in other parts of the economy, so where is the Government’s accountability to farmers, the public and this place?

I am concerned that there is no obligation for people in receipt of so-called delinked payments to continue farming. Clause 7 gives the Secretary of State powers to make a lump-sum payment. As I said in an intervention, it would be possible for a farmer to quit farming and pass their farm on to their children, and for their children then to receive financial assistance under the new scheme. This sort of double accounting must not be allowed.

Clause 2 states:

“Financial assistance may be given by way of grant, loan, guarantee or in any other form.”

What “any other form” are we talking about? If we cannot define it on the face of the Bill, what are we signing up to? This is the beginning of an administrative nightmare. We know that problems at the Rural Payments Agency have brought down fines under both the Labour Government and this Government. Subject to conditions, as the Secretary of State considers appropriate, we need to ensure that this money is spent responsibly and well.

I will conclude by mentioning the lack of environmental targets. We need to stop and reverse the decline in species and soil health, which we will hear a lot about in the new environment Bill. That Bill will contain the targets; this Bill contains the money. Having two Bills risks policy incoherence, so we should start with the targets and design an agricultural policy around them, if we are to meet our international obligations on soil carbon content and reversing species loss in this country.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bradshaw]

Commiserations on the tennis, Mr Speaker.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

And the football.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s belated recognition that we cannot have frictionless exports to the European Union for our fish and agriculture products if we are not in a single market, as the Chequers agreement recognises. Will he explain why his fellow hard-Brexiteers do not seem to grasp that simple truth? Do they just not care about our fish and agricultural exports?

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[Dr Coffey]

Indeed. I give credit to the Welsh Government for their progress, as I have at the EU Environment Council in the past, and I assure the hon. Lady that we have been looking carefully at what they are doing.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

It is vital that we recycle more of our plastic waste here at home and create jobs and growth in every nation and region of this great country. I welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to my Committee yesterday to recycle half of England’s 35 million asthma inhalers by 2020, not only because of the damaging plastic but because of the damaging fluorinated gases—greenhouse gases—that they release into the atmosphere. Will the Minister enshrine the principle of extended producer responsibility into law through the waste strategy so that more producers are responsible for the waste they produce?

[Dr Coffey]

Extended producer responsibility is already part of the legal framework that exists today. I assure the hon. Lady that EPR and the PRN—packaging recovery note—are being very carefully looked at, but she will have to wait until later in the year.

Improving Air Quality

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman not find it extraordinary that the US Department of Justice and the state of California have brought a case against Volkswagen, which has had to pay out more than $4 billion in the United States, with six people having been indicted, yet the UK Government are being brought to the European Court of Justice for our complete inertia in tackling this criminality?

[Neil Parish]

The hon. Lady, a fellow Select Committee Chair, raises a very good point. What I cannot understand is that although the money is not exactly free, it is money we could get from a source separate from British taxpayers, or wherever, to help to clean up a situation created by these vehicles. I urge the Minister today to come forward with ideas about how we can get some money from the car industry, especially Volkswagen; as the hon. Lady says, the Americans seem to be somewhat more effective at that job than we are.

The “polluter pays” fund would mean that the Government could have more money available to improve public transport and speed up the roll-out of infrastructure needed for low-emission vehicles. The emissions scandal showed us that all the manufacturers were prepared to put profit above everything else, including our health, but the Government are shying away from making them pay.

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[Andrew Selous]

I am grateful to my parliamentary neighbour for giving us that personal example of how he was affected.

I am afraid that the bad news does not stop there. Professor Holgate also told us that even in buses and taxis, for which researchers have done similar measurements, people are two to three times worse off than if they were walking on the street. Of course, we absolutely need to encourage more bus travel, hopefully in clean buses—perhaps electric or hydrogen-powered—but we have to look at how we travel around our big cities, particularly as we arrive in major towns, the traffic slows down and we all get stuck in it. If people knew the facts and were aware, there would be a demand: when people stood for the local council or for Parliament, they would be asked, “What are you going to do to help to make this issue better in my local area when you get on to the council?”, or “What is Parliament going to do about it?”

[Mary Creagh]

I passionately agree with the excellent points that the hon. Gentleman is making, but does he agree that we need fundamentally to rethink how we think of traffic? When people say that they are stuck in traffic, they are traffic—they are part of the congestion. When I cycle to work in the mornings, I am not stuck in traffic because I am part of a cycling stream that is going around the people who are stuck in their vehicles. If we want cities where people can move and breathe, we need fundamentally to rethink what traffic looks like.

[Andrew Selous]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady. In another guise, I co-chair the all-party group on cycling, so I absolutely get the importance of cycling and walking. They are not just good for our health and do not just cut congestion and pollution, but are good for our mental health, helping us to socialise and build community. There are so many reasons why what the hon. Lady said is absolutely right.

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[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will endeavour to stick to the time limit.

I join my colleagues in thanking the Liaison and Backbench Business Committees for granting us this debate. As we have heard, air pollution causes an estimated 40,000 early deaths each year. That is as much as is caused by alcohol. As the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) said in his speech—and it is a pleasure to follow on from him—we go to our GP surgery and we find out about obesity and tackling drug and alcohol problems, but there is no advice on air pollution, despite successive reports from different Committees. The Environmental Audit Committee, the predecessor Committee, looked at this issue back in 2011 and it was seen as almost a cranky thing to be considering—a bit weird, a bit strange and a bit eco-warriorish. The fact that we are now debating this on the Floor of the House shows the long period of education—both of the public and of parliamentarians—that has taken place in the seven years since then. We are now waking up to a public health emergency.

One hundred and seventy eight of those early deaths are in Wakefield. I urge Members to go up to the Upper Waiting Hall and look at the quality of the air in their constituencies. We are in the middle of a hot spell. It has not, as yet, been defined as a heatwave. People might think that it is a heatwave, but we have had the Met Office in. We are looking at heatwaves at the moment, so everything that the Environmental Audit Committee looks at suddenly becomes a big, interesting thing. The link between heatwaves and air pollution is very strong. One early piece of evidence that we have seen is that we will experience more excess deaths in future as our country and our planet warm, so this is something that we need to start thinking about.

We have heard about how the Government have failed successively in various air pollution plans to get this right. We should have met our targets back in 2010, and we have millions of people now living with illegally high levels of air pollution, and we are back into the realms of plan A, plan B and plan C. It is a bit like Samuel Beckett said, “Fail again. Fail better.” The only reason why the Government are acting is because of European Union law, and now we are set to leave the EU. The Government are only accepting a post-Brexit watchdog because Parliament has demanded it. Again, that is something that my Committee is looking at. It is of absolutely prime importance that we have not just the air quality standards, but some enforcement mechanism after we leave.

Our Committees asked the National Audit Office—my Committee likes to audit things and we like to see the measurement, the numbers, the costs and the benefits—to investigate performance on air pollution. It found that 85% of air quality zones did not meet the EU’s nitrogen dioxide limits in 2016, and those zones are forecast to be in breach for another eight years—till 2026.

We talk a lot about transport. Transport is responsible for the concentration of nitrogen dioxide, but the NAO discovered in its forensic work that wood-burning stoves are responsible for 42% of all emissions across the country, and that agriculture is responsible for 80% of ammonia emissions. We must not focus only on urban transport; that is where the concentrations are, but we must also look at wood-burning stoves. I was very disappointed to hear the comments of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury about banning “wood-burning Goves”—wood-burning stoves. We cannot afford to joke about this issue. We can act in a regulatory manner; it is possible to have low-emission stoves. We have to act in order to ensure that people are not buying something for their home that is going to sit there, belching out this stuff in the winter for the next 20 years. The cost of the health impacts of air pollution is £20 billion a year, which puts into context the costs of acting on this issue. The Government have until October to try again.

The main victims of air pollution are drivers and passengers. I went on Radio 5 Live to say this, and there was slight annoyance from some of the people who were phoning in. They were asking, “Why has no one told us to shut our air vents when we are sitting in our vehicles?” Professor Stephen Holgate told our inquiry how the placement of exhausts and ventilation systems means that

“you just vent the freshest, most toxic pollutants—the fumes coming right out of the tailpipe—straight into the car, to your child sitting in the back seat.”

For those of us who have pushed babies in buggies to school, they are also at tailpipe level. That means that the youngest, most vulnerable members of our communities—the ones with smaller lungs—are the ones breathing in the most of this stuff. As a community, we really need to think about this.

We have been looking at what happens with air quality targets if we leave the EU. Domestic legislation is not as strong and not taken as seriously as EU law, because EU law has the threat of fines behind it. The four Committees welcomed proposals to bring forward an environmental watchdog, but we said that it must have the powers

“to force the Government to act, otherwise action on air quality will be further weakened.”

The Government brought forward their proposals, but mentioned an advisory notice, which is effectively a watchdog with no teeth. Parliament has now stepped in. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act requires the Government to bring forward a Bill in the next six months to create a body with enforcement powers. Next month, my Committee will publish a report recommending what that body should look like.

We have come a long way, even since our inquiry earlier this year. Back then, the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), told us that no legislation was necessary. But we recommended that the right to clean air be put into law. I am glad that the Government now accept the need for legislation as part of a clean air strategy to meet our EU obligations.

We also need to ensure that we are looking at how we can phase out petrol and diesel cars, and we need the Government to be joined up on this issue. During our inquiry, we sat there with four Ministers in front of us, and it was a bit like a children’s party game—pass the parcel. The Department for Communities and Local Government passed it on to the Department for Transport, which passed it on to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—the DEFRA Minister was the star of the show—and the Department of Health. The issue was being passed around. The people responsible for designing the cities were not talking to the people designing the transportation system, who were not talking to the people responsible for air quality, who were not talking to the public health people. This is not acceptable. We cannot allow air pollution to keep falling through the policy cracks and gaps in this way.

We now hear that the Government’s plans to phase out petrol and diesel cars are being downgraded to a “mission”. Well, saints protect us from Governments on a mission. Norway is going to phase out the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025. India, the Netherlands, Germany and Scotland all plan to do so earlier than the UK. We are missing a trick here. If we are not in the vanguard when it comes to acting on this issue, we are going to lose the global environmental race. The fourth industrial revolution has already started. It is taking place at technological speed—at the speed of the tech revolution. Things are going to start speeding up very quickly.

Buses are the Cinderella in all this. Only one quarter of buses in west Yorkshire meet the Euro 5 standard. I am sure that it is very similar in south Yorkshire, Madam Deputy Speaker. When the National Audit Office looked at the cost-benefit analysis, it found that a clean bus fund—a fund to clean up buses, heavy goods vehicles and taxis—would cost the public purse £170 million, but it would cost the public nothing. As the largest purchaser of goods and services in the country, the Government should really look to act on this issue.

When we audited the Ministry of Justice—a big Department with lots of prisons, probations, courts and estate to look after—we found that it had just three electric vehicles, even though it is responsible for a quarter of Government spend on goods and services. Greening Government commitments mean nothing if the Government are not acting as well. Why does the NHS not have an electric car fleet? We spend £110 billion or £120 billion of public money on the health service every year, yet we are allowing our nurses and doctors out in the community to drive polluting vehicles. It is just not on. We have to lead by example.

Will the Minister tell us when he is going to bring forward the commitments to label cars more clearly? People buy cars every day of the week, but they are buying a pig in a poke. They might be looking at the taxation side of their purchase, but they do not know about the emissions side. It costs nothing to introduce those labelling standards. When can we expect to see them?

Finally, we have heard a lot about electric vehicles and low-emission vehicles. I travel to work in this place every day on an ultra-low emission vehicle. It is called a bicycle. It emits no carbon apart from my breath, which is sometimes a little heavier and laboured when it is a bit hot. Every day, I cycle past the measurement on the embankment, which reads, for example, “6,000 cyclists today” or “10,000 cyclists today”. It was perhaps a bit lower when we had the “beast from the east”, although I still cycled in through the snow—very, very slowly. Blackfriars bridge now carries more cyclists than cars each day.

As someone who hails from Coventry, where James Starley invented the bicycle in 1868, I think that we need to start going back to the future. We need to look at electric bicycles and at how we design cities that are not for cars. Coventry was rebuilt after the war for cars, not for people, but we need to design cities where people can move and breathe, and where we can make short journeys around through active travel, and save the health service and ourselves a lot of pain, a lot of hassle and a lot of money.

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[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

It is my view that the House is discussing the biggest public health scandal that Britain faces. As we have heard, air pollution is the second biggest avoidable killer after smoking. Unlike smoking, it is not avoidable for most people—most people do not choose where they live or the air they breathe, and that is particularly the case for children. In most cases, it is invisible, so the level of public and political consciousness about this is not as high as it should be, given the tens of thousands of unnecessary premature deaths a year and all the illnesses that air pollution causes.

We have heard that the cost to business and the NHS is £20 billion a year. Incidentally, the Treasury Minister who appeared before our joint Committee inquiry—the then Exchequer Secretary, the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones)—was not aware of that figure, which I thought was appalling. For a Treasury Minister not to be aware of the cost to the public purse of a major health emergency was, in my view, astonishing.

[Mary Creagh]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that that is a bit of a running theme with the Treasury, which is very keen to look at the money that it controls, but not very keen to look at how costs are externalised on to other services such as the health service?

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[Mr Bradshaw]

I completely agree. One of my frustrations is that some of the more radical measures, such as congestion charging or workplace carpark charging, have an impact on many people who drive into my city from the rural areas. The politics of a county authority championing those sorts of policy are really hard. I am pleased that progress is being made in Oxford between a Labour city council and a Conservative-run county council. That is a model to take forward, but it is very difficult in two-tier local authority areas.

It is clear to me and to the experts that the draft strategy as it stands will not ensure that we meet our legal requirements, let alone the stricter World Health Organisation air quality recommendations. As we say in our report, we badly need mandated clean air zones—I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government do not just introduce those—and we need practical and real help for individuals and businesses to move to cleaner forms of transport. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who chairs the Environmental Audit Committee, rightly said, we need a massive modal shift in transport in our towns and cities. Most short journeys in towns and cities that are conducted by car could perfectly easily be done by most able-bodied people by bicycle or foot. As she said, the electric bicycle will revolutionise the way we move around towns and cities.

[Mary Creagh]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. When I was in Warsaw the other day, I went to a hire a bike. I accidentally hired an electric bike. I can tell him: when the weather is hot and the hills are hard, that is the only way to go.

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[Dr Whitford]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. My understanding is that 50% of journeys in Copenhagen are now made by bicycle. But this does require investment in infrastructure.

The hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) mentioned a new tunnel at Silvertown. The Clyde tunnel was finished in 1963 and it consists of two circular tunnels, with the road deck about a third of the way up and room for cyclists, pedestrians and ventilation underneath. That was back in the ’60s. We need to make sure we are not investing in hugely expensive tunnels that go against active transport.

It is about health in all policies. Decisions are made in silos, even in this place. We make decisions on different days that counteract each other, which is frustrating. If we had physical health and mental wellbeing as an overarching principle like human rights, people sitting in our town halls and here would focus not on cars, on how they drive and how they park—that is the focus in our towns and cities at the moment—but on people. We would design safe, segregated cycle routes, and we would have much wider pavements on which children could ride their scooters, and on which people with prams or wheelchairs would not be crowded out—people would not need to step into the roadway to pass them. When we have such glorious and, in Scotland, very unusual sunny weather, it would also create an environment in which cafés could be outside. People would walk around their town centres and meet their neighbours, which would contribute to a sense of belonging and community. I would love to see health and wellbeing as the driving force in every decision made by town halls, national Government and Westminster on how we design our towns and cities.

[Mary Creagh]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dr Whitford]

I have finished, I am afraid. Sorry.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend has given me something else to worry about on my Committee—I thought it was just nanoplastics we had to be worried about. Does he agree that, whether we are discussing plastics in the ocean or pollution in the air, we have to stop treating our environment—our rivers and our air—as one great big garbage dump, because we are conducting a massive experiment on ourselves and on the planet, and we do not know where it is going to end?

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend is exactly right and we need to talk about that much more. When we get into the detail of what is being said on not just plastics, but particles and air quality—the air we breathe and the things we throw away—we see that more and more education can produce better results.

In today’s debate, we have heard far too many examples of young people being exposed to harmful levels of particulate matter, as well as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and low level ozone. Our young people deserve better than breathing poor air, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) is right to say that breathing clean air should be a human right. Exposure to PM_2.5 should not exceed 10 micrograms per cubic metre of air, according to the World Health Organisation, but in my Plymouth constituency the figure is 12 micrograms. In Saltash, just over the river, it is 11— the annual mean is 18 and 15 respectively.

Prince Rock Primary School, on my patch, knows all about that, as it is located on a busy road. We have heard from many other hon. Members about schools close to busy roads that are affected by poor air quality. Does the Minister have a similar school in his constituency? How many other Members have schools in areas of illegal air quality? The air quality close to our schools does matter. It matters to our young people. What is being done to educate teachers, children and parents about the risk of air pollution? As my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) mentioned, turning engines off while idling can help, and walking or cycling to school can make a positive difference. These things all add up, but if initiatives such as the daily mile are through areas with poor air quality, the effect and positive contribution of that work can be limited. All our children deserve to breathe clean air.

The Government must not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. That is why what we have heard today about the VW emissions scandal should concern us all. The failure to ban diesel and petrol engines early enough was also mentioned by a number of hon. Members. Britain must wean itself off dirty diesel for cars and trains. As the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) highlighted, the British Heart Foundation has found that even short-term inhalation of elevated concentrations of particulate matter increases the risk of heart attack occurring in just 24 hours, but the UK’s current legal limits for particulate matter are much less stringent than those of the World Health Organisation.

The flagship measure in the Government’s July 2017 air quality report was a pledge to ban new sales of conventional diesel and petrol cars by 2040. That is 22 years and more than four full-term Parliaments away. I wager not many of us will be in the House in 2040, such was the long-grassing of the commitment to finally get that introduced. However, it did not go far enough because hybrid sales would still be ignored. The Government have said themselves that

“almost all new cars and vans sold need to be near-zero emission at the tailpipe by 2040”

if they are to hit their air quality targets.

The Government’s lacklustre pledge was criticised by Mayors such as Sadiq Khan and Andy Street. We are in the slow lane when Britain should be leading. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South highlighted so expertly, the plan for the UK to ban petrol, diesel and most hybrid cars by 2040 has been watered down, with Ministers now referring to it as a “mission”, and the much trumpeted “Road to Zero” strategy has been plagued with delays. Perhaps the Minister could explain what a “mission” is. It is not quite a commitment, less than a pledge, certainly not legally binding, perhaps more than a hope and a prayer, but not quite a plan. A mission simply is not good enough.

The Secretary of State for Transport has cancelled rail electrification, something rightly criticised in the recent Transport Committee report. Without rail electrification projects, Britain’s railways are still going to run on dirty diesel for many, many years to come.

We have heard today that the Government far too often work in silos. It is simply not good enough for DEFRA to push out press releases on air quality while the Department for Transport is busy pushing back commitments on diesel engines and cancelling electrification schemes. It does not have to be like this. Members have highlighted the urgent need for a clean air Act, and I am proud to say that Labour would introduce one. We will act on air pollution and deliver clean air for the many, not just the few. That really matters because, as the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire said, this is about social justice. The links are there for all to see between poverty and poor air quality, and between the injustices of poorer communities breathing in poor-quality air and the shame that far too little has been done to help them.

The fact that the poorest communities are hit by the worst air pollution should shame this Government and shame our society. This issue goes right to the heart of inequality: if someone is poorer, the air that they breathe is of a lower standard than the air breathed by someone richer. That should be simply unacceptable in 2018. We need to be bold and tackle this invisible threat head on. Communities throughout the UK are suffering now, and if we do not deal with this, we will leave future generations with poorer health, poorer outcomes and more pollution to deal with. That is simply not acceptable.

The Committee on Climate Change reported today, 10 years after the Climate Change Act was delivered by a Labour Government, and it has delivered a damning verdict on this Government’s record. On air quality specifically, it doubles down on the point that we are not doing enough to modernise our transport sector, particularly the car industry. The report finds that the UK is on track to miss its legally binding carbon budgets in 2025 and 2030, due to lack of progress on cutting emissions from buildings and transport in particular. Lord Deben has said that the Government’s pledge to end the sale of pure petrol and diesel cars by 2040 is not ambitious enough, and he believes it is essential that we move the target closer to 2030, as do the Opposition.

We are not short of soundbites or press releases from DEFRA about air quality, but I say to the Minister that it is not the presentation that is at fault; it is the content, the substance, the plans, the action, the funding and the urgency. We all know what needs to be done, so I encourage him and his Department to get on with it.

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[David Rutley]

We are listening. We have seriously considered the points that have been made, and this is an ambitious target. It is very much ahead of what is going on in other parts of the world. There are only six other countries that are ahead of us in proposing those targets.

[Mary Creagh]

A third of Norway’s vehicle fleet are electric vehicles—actual cars and not the bicycles that I was joking about earlier. It plans to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025. This is a country that was founded on the oil and gas industry and a country whose sovereign wealth fund is now withdrawing from all oil and gas investments. Why can we not show similar leadership in this country?

[David Rutley]

I understand the hon. Lady’s point. We are taking forward a very strong commitment. As I have said, only six other countries—

[Mary Creagh]

rose—

[David Rutley]

If the hon. Lady will let me, I would like to answer her question. Only six other countries in the world are moving more quickly than the UK on ending petrol and diesel, and the UK is moving faster than almost every other country in the EU, as well as many other countries such as the US and Australia.

The £3.5 billion investment also includes £1.2 billion of available funding for the first ever statutory cycling and walking investment strategy. I know that that has been raised by a number of Members who have talked about what we can do to improve the take-up of cycling and walking. I think that, perhaps, there has been an over representation of the cycling lobby today. As a former member of the mountaineering all-party parliamentary group, the pinnacle of APPGs, we need to speak up for walkers as well. I know that the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) fully agrees with me on that important point.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Rutley]

I was just trying to explain what this new primary legislation would include. Perhaps I could progress so that my hon. Friend can see what this will lead to.

The new legislation will be underpinned by new England-wide powers to control major sources of pollution, plus new local powers to take action in areas with air pollution problems. For example, in our clean air strategy consultation we are seeking views on giving local authorities new powers to control emissions from domestic combustion, biomass and non-road mobile machinery.

[Mary Creagh]

What does the Minister think about wood-burning stoves?

[David Rutley]

A number of Members have mentioned the importance of tackling particulate matter. We need to look at all avenues, including wood-burning stoves. The Government have introduced programmes that help people to become more aware of the right wood to burn—that is, wood with a lower moisture content. We need to take this sort of approach to raise people’s awareness, so that they can see what needs to be done to help reduce particulate matter.

I am conscious of the time available. Perhaps I could highlight some of the local issues that have been mentioned. The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth made some important points about anti-idling campaigns, and I recognise the good work that has been done in that area by Westminster City Council. There has been a lot of talk about electric bikes and what we must do to make people more aware of where they can and cannot use those cycles. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) was absolutely right to say that we need to look not only at emissions, but at tyres and brakes, because of the resulting particulate matter.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 7th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. The Chilterns are blessed not only as an area of outstanding natural beauty, but with distinguished representatives in this House of all parties and none. One of the things I will seek to do is to work with the new reviewer of designated landscapes, Julian Glover, who is a distinguished writer and thinker, to ensure that the right protection and support are there not only for our existing national parks, but for our AONBs.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State says that this new watchdog must have enforcement powers, but the watchdog he has proposed is completely toothless. It will be able to issue only advisory notices, not enforcement notices, and has no power to fine the Government. That has rightly been rejected by the other place. We expect an amendment from their lordships to come to this place next week. Will he table an amendment to his toothless watchdog, or should I do so?

[Michael Gove]

I am always grateful to the hon. Lady for all her suggestions, amendments and thoughts. We are consulting. We are asking the public exactly how many and what type of teeth this watchdog should have, but we are saying that the watchdog should start with enforcement powers, which include advisory notices. It is then open for discussion as to what additional powers the watchdog might have.

It is also the case that Back-Bench Conservative colleagues have tabled amendments, and we are considering those amendments. The hon. Lady makes a good point that the House of Lords made a case in good faith for how the watchdog could be strengthened, and I always listen to the other place with respect.

Ivory Bill

Mary Creagh Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 4th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

rose—

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

rose—

[Michael Gove]

I should be delighted to give way to my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare).

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Gove]

It is always a pleasure to be on the same page as my right hon. Friend. I am also happy to give way to the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh).

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I certainly welcome the introduction of this Bill, but would he care to comment on the actions of his friend President Trump, whose Administration in March lifted the US’s ban on importing body parts of elephants shot by trophy-hunters? Will the right hon. Gentleman take the opportunity now to condemn without reservation the reversal of that Obama-era regulation?

[Michael Gove]

I absolutely will, because it is incumbent on all of us across the globe to take action. The specific request from African nations could not be clearer, so it is incumbent on us in the United Kingdom, countries in the far east—which often constitute the biggest market for ivory—and also countries like the United States, which has a distinguished global leadership role, to take action; it is incumbent on all of us to play our part as well.

I think there is an appreciation across the House of the importance of the elephant as a species. I mentioned earlier that it is a keystone species: if it were not for the elephant we would not have the means by which we maintain balance in the savannahs and grasslands of Africa. That is in the nature of the role the elephant plays, by the way in which it feeds and—without wanting to go into too much detail in the House—the way in which it excretes. It is important that we make sure that the elephant survives, because without it savannah and grassland would not survive, and without it we would not have species like zebra or like antelope, and without them we would not have the magnificent predators—the charismatic megafauna, the lions and others which feed on those creatures. So by removing the elephant we would not just see one of the most iconic, beautiful and awe-inspiring species with which we share this planet disappear; we would also unloose upon Africa a cascade effect of environmental degradation and damage that I think none of us could possibly countenance.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Gove]

I absolutely take that point on board. We want to ensure that individuals with sufficient expertise from organisations such as the Victoria and Albert Museum are in a position to provide a guarantee of the provenance and significance of the work. It is in no way our intention simply to say that something should be exempt either because of its apparent antiquity or because someone happens to consider it to be of aesthetic merit; we want to ensure that an academically rigorous process is undertaken to ensure that an item’s provenance can be guaranteed and that its aesthetic merit and its dating can be put beyond doubt.

[Mary Creagh]

Will the Secretary of State comment on the National Wildlife Crime Unit, which is key to tackling the illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife body parts? It is funded by DEFRA and the Home Office to the tune of £136,000 each a year—a paltry £272,000 a year in total. Will the unit’s funding be increased given the potential for free trade deals—if and when Brexit happens—and the danger that the UK could become a back door for body parts from third countries under the guise of free trade?

[Michael Gove]

It is no part of this Government’s intention—I hope that this will be the same for any future Government—to use any trade deals to erode or undermine appropriate protections for animal welfare and environmental standards. I cannot see how any Government would want to weaken the protections that we intend to place on the statute book through this legislation to end this abhorrent trade.

The hon. Lady rightly pays tribute to the work of the NWCU, and in the run-up to the illegal wildlife trade summit this October we will be looking not just to ensure that we can continue to staff the unit and support the officers who work in this field adequately, but to ensure that we go even further. As several Members have already acknowledged, this legislation, important as it will be, is not enough in itself to ensure that we can effectively counter the poachers and to ensure that the precipitous decline in elephant numbers is at last halted and reversed. The global leadership that I hope other nations will join us in showing at the October summit is critical to maintaining momentum in dealing with this trade. The commitment of not just our armed services, but the rangers referred to by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and others is also critical. It is also important that we continue generously and effectively to fund international development work in African nations to ensure that people can move towards a sustainable economic future so that the temptation that some may have to connive with or work alongside poachers is removed as well.

In contemplating our ambition to ensure that the African elephant survives and that Africa flourishes, it is critical to recognise that the legislation is not enough on its own. However, without this legislation, we will fail to provide the required leadership on the global stage, we will fail to play our part in ensuring that we close down this wicked trade, and we will fail to acknowledge that the United Kingdom has had its position as a global hub for trade and a centre of excellence in the arts and antiques market used and abused in the past by those who want to continue criminal activity. The responsibility to legislate, with appropriate considerations for exemptions and enforcement, but at pace and with determination, falls on theHouse at this time, which is why I commend the Bill to the House.

Plastic Bottles and Coffee Cups

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the First and Second Reports of the Environmental Audit Committee, Plastic Bottles: Turning Back the Plastic Tide, HC 339, and Disposable Packaging: Coffee Cups, HC 657; and urges the Government to accept their recommendations as part of its Resources and Waste Strategy.

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, the Liaison Committee and the Backbench Business Committee for granting time in the House to debate the Environmental Audit Committee reports. I thank my Committee colleagues, too, some of whom are present, for their work on our inquiry last year.

Today, I want to talk about the scale of the plastic pandemic, the solutions we proposed, the importance of the EU circular economy package and how we make producers responsible for their packaging. May I begin, however, by welcoming the announcement on Tuesday that Parliament will phase out most single-use plastics on our estate and introduce a 25p “latte levy”? I thank you, Mr Speaker, and the Chair of the Administration Committee for your support in making this happen. [Interruption.] Creagh’s law; very good.

We are in the middle of a global pandemic. Plastic is everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the depths of the ocean to the north pole. Plastic has been found in every species of animal in the Arctic, from plankton to polar bears. Research by Dr Erik van Sebille at Imperial College London shows that most of the UK’s marine plastic pollution ends up in the Arctic, so the UK has a particular responsibility to clean up our act and protect the Arctic.

In 2015, the UK signed up to the United Nations global goals for sustainable development, including goal 12, “sustainable consumption and production” and goal 14 on protecting our oceans. The UK led in the development of those goals, but unfortunately the Government sometimes seem to think they are something for other countries, not the UK.

Our planet has only one ocean, wrapped around it like a cloak, and plastic bottles make up one third of all plastic pollution in the sea. They break down into micro-plastics, which harm marine wildlife that eat them. After my Committee’s ground-breaking work on rinse-off microbeads, which led the Government to ban their manufacture and sale, we examined single-use plastics, focusing on plastic bottles and coffee cups.

Single-use plastics take five seconds to make, five minutes to use and 500 years to biodegrade, so when we throw them away there is no such place as “away.”

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. Has she or her Committee come to a conclusion as why the Government are seemingly so resistant to oxo-biodegradable plastic technology, which was invented by Professor Scott at Aston University in the 1970s? Does she agree that the Government have no strategy to deal with plastic which escapes into the environment already?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

I have seen evidence on oxo-biodegradable and I know there are a couple of possible additives to plastics. The research on how and how fast it breaks down is not conclusive. I know it can break down in proper professional composting machines, but the evidence on what happens out in the ocean is not that clear and we do not want an end-of-pipe solution to this problem; we want something at the beginning that is sustainable.

There is a live argument on this and it is going on at EU level between the plant-based plastics manufacturers of the south and those such as us in the north who have a more petrochemical-based approach. I am not a scientist, but I know the jury is out and that scientists have looked at this. It is important that we develop the correct policy and do not just look at what happens at the end of the pipe.

In the UK, we recycle just 57% of our plastic bottles overall; the figure for water bottles is higher. We estimate that 700,000 plastic bottles are littered every day. That litter spoils our streets, threatens our wildlife and ruins our beaches. We are paying for this clean-up through our council tax. Keep Britain Tidy estimates that English councils spend £1 billion a year cleaning up after fly-tippers and litterbugs. We recommended introducing a deposit return scheme to boost recycling rates and create a clear stream of recycled plastic for manufacturers. When the Environment Secretary gave evidence to my Committee in April, he told us that we would not see that product return scheme until 2020, but better late than never and we welcome his commitment. We must also create a market for that recovered plastic, which is why we recommended that Ministers set a target for 50% of recycled plastic to be present in new bottles. I am pleased that Coca-Cola has committed to do that.

We use 2.5 billion coffee cups a year, enough to stretch around the planet five and a half times. Before our inquiry, I—along with most other people—thought that coffee cups were recycled, but they are not. Their plastic coating, which is thinner than a human hair, means that most of them end up landfilled or incinerated. The coffee shop industry has told us that disposable coffee cups are recyclable, but “recyclable” does not mean “recycled”. Paper mills do not want them, and plastics reprocessers do not want them. Just one in every 400 is recycled, which is just 0.25%. There are just three recycling plants in England that can recycle them. Moreover, if someone puts their coffee cup in a recycling bin, in a coffee shop or on the go, it will not be recycled and it could contaminate the other papers and plastics in the bin.

[Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech, with which I wholly agree. It seems to me that the principle that the polluter should pay is an important one, and that there should be incentives for individuals to do some of the tidying up as well. I remember as a child scuttling around on Saturdays collecting bottles and returning them to the local shop or off-licence to get the returned deposit. Those sorts of deposit scheme help to incentivise human behaviour. Does she agree with the “polluter pays” principle and that incentives are important?

[Mary Creagh]

I emphatically agree. I remember the happy days of collecting those bottles. In doing that, we can create an army of litter pickers out in the streets. I was out in Norway with NATO last week, visiting the Arctic, and there is a full deposit return scheme there. One of the people we talked to told us that his son had made £580 in the holidays last summer by going on a little mission out on the streets every day. I also noticed, when I was at the airport disposing of my single-use plastic bottle in the throwaway scheme, that the deposit would be collected by the Red Cross in Norway. There is an opportunity here for charities to partner alongside the deposit return scheme and to find a valuable new income stream.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I am going slightly off the point here, but the hon. Lady mentioned airports. Does she agree that one thing that is little understood is that people are allowed to take their refillable containers to the airport? There are often places to refill them there, but people do not seem to be aware of that fact.

[Mary Creagh]

I agree with the hon. Lady. I know that Heathrow has introduced refill stations just the other side of the security gates, but the problem is that people are usually already in the queue for security before they remember that they have a full bottle of water. Most people cannot drink half a litre of water straight off. Airports could look at how to dispose of those liquids while encouraging people to keep the bottles. That would result in more reuse. That is a challenge for the airports and the transport industry to think about today.

Reducing and reusing are always better than recycling, and the 5p plastic bag charge reduced plastic bag sales by 83% in the first year, so we know that charges change consumer behaviour. My Committee recommended a 25p latte levy on disposable coffee cups to encourage people to bring their own cups. We want that levy to fund new “binfrastructure”. That is terrible; I am trying not to murder the English language, but I think I have just stuck a nail in there. The Chancellor is consulting on a single-use plastics tax, and I look forward to reading the responses. The consultation closes tomorrow.

Industry is stepping up to this; it knows that it cannot go on with business as usual. Costa has introduced a recycling scheme that aims to recycle half a billion cups by 2020. Unfortunately, only 14 million cups were recycled last year, but that was a good start. Starbucks is trialling a 5p latte levy in 35 central London cafés, and reusable cup usage has more than doubled in the first six weeks, which is very encouraging. The truth is, however, that we need both. We need the latte levy and we need recycling schemes if we are to tackle this problem.

[Colin Clark (Gordon) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech. I am also a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, and she is a wonderful campaigning Chair. It is a great honour to serve with her.

The hon. Lady is talking about recycling, and I was recently at a circular economy discussion at which WasteAid said that 2 billion people lived without waste collection and that 3 billion lived without proper waste recycling or reuse. One of the big things we discussed was the use of plastic bottles in the developing world where glass bottles used to be used. Does she think it would be better if glass bottles were used in the developing world?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution to the Committee, of which he is a fantastic, excellent and constructive member. He provides challenge as well as co-operation, which is how we get to a good place and find cross-party agreement.

I remember visiting Juba in South Sudan in 2012 and noticing that there was very little water there for people, and that all the aid workers and visitors were using plastic bottles. There was no waste infrastructure whatever. This is a really important problem, because we know that huge amounts of waste are thrown into rivers in Africa, India and the far east. We need to get that waste out of the rivers. How do we do that? We pay people to do it. It is not just kids in the UK who will collect 5p or 10p plastic bottles; people will do the right thing, but they need a cash incentive to do it. The United Nations has an opportunity to achieve that through the international climate fund. We all tend to think about that in relation to green energy and clean energy, but we need to look at how some of these climate funds are allocated and spent at supranational level, and at how our own UK aid budget could be used to help to set up systems to keep plastic out of the oceans. As I said earlier, there is only one ocean and we need to do more to protect it.

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I recently went to Bangladesh, and along the whole beach the plastic litter was waist-high. The amount was huge. I have spoken to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development about this. Does the hon. Lady agree that it would be a good idea to spend some of our aid money on paying people to clear up the mess? It is, after all, going into the same ocean that we use and that everyone else uses. That would help people to clean up their environment, which would also help their tourism, because people will go to a clean beach but not a filthy beach.

[Mary Creagh]

I agree with the hon. Lady. She makes an excellent point. Bangladesh is absolutely at the forefront of climate change, and much of our aid budget is going there to make homes more resilient, but resilience in communities is also about giving people a good, clean, safe environment to live in and ensuring that the poor have decent incomes.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for all the work she does on environmental issues, both here at home and internationally. This is not just about beaches in Bangladesh. We have seen footage of beaches in Brighton, for example, being polluted by bottles. Does she agree that local authorities need more support? There is some excellent practice, but it is patchy. Perhaps the Government could consider introducing citizens grant schemes to encourage people to take part actively around the country and to work with local authorities and corporates to clean up our beaches as well as our streets.

[Mary Creagh]

I thank my hon. Friend for her suggestion. We actually made that point in our report on marine protected areas and said that there should be a coastal communities fund to help to develop tourism and to enable communities to take ownership of the amazing nature that surrounds them. We do not have tropical rainforests in the UK, but we do have some of the world’s best breeding sites for birds and all sorts of Ramsar wetland sites. Bringing communities closer to nature where they live can only be a good thing. I also want to pay tribute to Sky Ocean Rescue for its work in bringing to a wider audience the good activities that are going on not only globally but locally, including those literally outside our own door to clean up the Thames.

We want the Government to send a clear message to industry that all single-use coffee cups should be recycled by 2023, and that if that does not happen, they should simply be banned and we should move to a system of reusable cups only. Consumers want to do the right thing, and they deserve to know that companies are doing it too.

We have also looked at the UK’s packaging system, which we think needs a fundamental redesign. Producers of packaging should ensure that their waste is dealt with according to the waste hierarchy: reduce, reuse, recycle. How do we make that happen? At the moment, businesses that produce or use packaging have to show that they have recycled it by purchasing a packaging recovery note—a PRN—from an accredited recycler or exporter. We have heard evidence, however, that that system is a blunt instrument that does not reward design for recyclability and that does not penalise the production of packaging that is difficult and costly to recycle. We therefore recommend that the Government should reform the PRN system. They should introduce a fee structure that reduces the cost of sustainable coffee cups and raises the cost of cups that are hard to recycle.

The landfill tax and the PRN system have been the twin pillars of UK recycling for the past 20 years. Most of our waste went to landfill 20 years ago, but we now recycle almost half of it. However, recycling rates are stalling, and recycling needs a shot in the arm to bring it back to life.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is a wonderful advocate for recycling. Does she accept—if she does not, she should have a look at the parliamentary questions that I have asked—that the biggest problem is that recycling is flatlining because waste is being incinerated? That must be dangerous at a time of air pollution.

[Mary Creagh]

Well, most of the waste that we recycle is actually exported, and the recent China waste ban brought that home to people who thought that everything was somehow recycled in the UK. The situation was certainly brought home to the Members who visited Bywaters, the House’s recycling company, and heard about the difficulties it was experiencing—although some of those difficulties have been alleviated. However, my hon. Friend’s question was about incineration. I have visited an incinerator, and it is obviously better to get the calorific heat value from waste instead of landfilling it, because we will have to dig it up in 10 or 20 years’ time and incinerate it anyway, such is the pressure on land use in this country. However, we must ensure that the waste hierarchy is respected, because that is where problems arise. People tell me that they are reopening landfill sites and sending more waste for incineration.

Going back to the PRN system, the Committee could not see where the £100 million a year that the system raises actually goes, so we have asked the National Audit Office to examine the system to follow the money and tell us where it goes.

Turning to the EU circular economy package, it provides for a much more stringent extended producer responsibility scheme. At the moment, the UK has just three schemes, covering electrical goods and cars, whereas France has 14 schemes, covering furniture, tyres, mattresses and infectious healthcare waste. A mattress recycling scheme would create jobs in the heavy woollen industry in Wakefield, Ossett and Dewsbury. We need producers to be accountable for their products beyond the factory gates. Cigarette butts and chewing gum are the most frequently littered items in the country, so why are tobacco companies and sweet manufacturers not paying for the cost of their clean-up? Because it has always been that way. We need to work out how the “polluter pays” principle applies to cigarette merchants and to the chewing gum brigade. Such a move could save cash-strapped councils millions, and the money would go directly to them because they clear up the litter and do the gum-busting. Perhaps they could present the gum manufacturers with the goo that they steam-clean off the streets.

The Environment Secretary told us that he will commit to the EU’s proposed target to recycle 65% of household waste by 2035, but what will happen to that target after Brexit? Who will enforce it? The new environmental oversight body will be able to issue advisory notices, but not fines. It will not be able to take legal action, and it will not be ready for March 2019. Brexit will weaken our waste system. There was an interesting debate in the other place yesterday about whether people would still be able to bring cases to the European Court of Justice during the transitional period, and the Lords Minister was not entirely clear about whether that could happen. We will be watching developments very carefully.

We have achieved a great deal. We have got the Government working with Water UK to roll out a network of water refill points, and supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl and Waitrose are launching a voluntary pledge to cut plastic packaging. The Treasury’s consultation on a single-use tax closes tomorrow, Departments have agreed to end the sale of single-use plastics, and Parliament is going to lead the way as well. A lot has been done, but there is a lot still to do.

We must prevent waste from entering our environment, and that will bring social, economic and environmental benefits. People are happier if the streets and parks are litter-free, our economy works better if we make smart use of limited resources, and our wildlife is protected if we keep plastic out of the sea. When people win, the economy wins and the environment wins. I look forward to a good debate and to hearing about the exciting work that colleagues have been doing in their local areas.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The plastic bottles and coffee cups inquiry was my first large-scale inquiry as a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, and I thank the Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), for supporting me and the other new members of the Committee. It was a pleasure to listen to the evidence to what has proved such an influential inquiry. We have influenced the House and soon, I hope, we will influence Government policy.

Sometimes, sitting in a Committee listening to evidence, something quietly dawns on you, and this happened to me when we heard from the #OneLess campaign. I asked its project manager, Fiona Llewellyn:

“Do you think that there is scope to look at the licences of take-aways and fast food places so they have to provide access to tap water because that’s the area where you see a lot of littering and food on the go”?

She replied:

“One of the reasons we have plastic packaged water is that it is convenient to have on the go, so if we can overcome some of the barriers to convenience for refilling that would be a wonderful step in the right direction to this wider problem of plastic pollution and what you suggest would be very welcome”.

That is a type of planning law that we could implement immediately to reduce the use of single-use plastic bottles.

The inquiry heard a whole load of evidence. The major measure identified was the deposit return scheme, to which many Members have alluded. Hon. Members might think that all manufacturers are opposed to the deposit return scheme because it is a cost to their business, but many major companies are supportive. That includes Coca-Cola, which I believe is the world’s largest drinks company. The company set out its support for the scheme in its evidence to the Committee. It actually had a number of recommendations for us, including that we should just have a single scheme, that the scheme should be managed by a not-for-profit organisation and, most amazingly, that the costs should be covered by producers and retailers. That has not come from the Committee, a lobby group or even the Government; that is from one of the world’s largest companies and largest producers of plastic bottles. We should listen to Coca-Cola, which we might have expected to be on the other side of the debate.

During the inquiry, China announced that it would no longer accept plastic waste imports, so we had a separate session on Chinese plastic waste. The Chinese waste ban raises questions such as, where will all these plastic bottles go? We do not have the reprocessing capacity. We also looked at packaging recovery notes, concentrating on packaging export recovery notes. These are the licences needed to export plastic waste abroad. Clearly we are not having any for China because of the waste ban, but with PERNs to export waste, for example, to Vietnam, it is difficult to get a clear audit trail showing what happens to the plastic. We had evidence from Zero Waste Vietnam, which asked, “Why can’t European countries recycle their own plastic materials? Why are we having to have to have shiploads of plastic materials that we are not able to recycle?”

[Mary Creagh]

There is some anxiety over the word “shiploads”.

[Alex Sobel]

For the record, I did say shiploads—boatloads of materials. Zero Waste Vietnam is a very proper organisation; it would not resort to any foul language. In that case, a local organisation presented us with evidence that the plastic that we are exporting may not actually be recycled. That is the point of these export recovery notes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

I warmly thank the Minister for his remarks. In respect of the disposable coffee cup ban, let me say to him that the target must not only be realistic and achievable, but must be set on just the right side of impossible if industry is to make the changes that all of us in the House want to see. I welcomed his warm words, but I exhort him to act quickly. As other Members have said, the waste and resources strategy is now overdue, and is slipping back.

We have heard some excellent contributions from Members who said that they were thinking globally but acting locally. The right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) spoke of the Putney plastics pledge. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) talked about the great work of City to Sea and Surfers Against Sewage. The hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) told us about her difficulties in giving up plastic for Lent; we also heard her reflections on the London marathon.

From my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones), we heard about the difficulties experienced by the Japanese in banning single-use chopsticks. The hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) told us that we could look forward to a green stationery catalogue, which is a genuine innovation in this place. The hon. Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) observed that 40 years ago our colleague Ann Taylor, who now sits in the other place, was reflecting on plastics use. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) explained how Wales came to have the third highest recycling rate in the world. I look forward to my invitation from my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) to I Am Döner, where I hope we will be able to pump out some sauce—which he certainly did in his speech. The hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) talked about the fantastic work of Sunnyside Primary School.

We know what we must do. Our report tells us how we are to get there. It points the way. It explains how we can create jobs, stimulate a circular rather than a linear economy, and do the right thing with a higher recycling rate. We want to see the polluter pay, and I want to see the gum and cigarette butt producers play their part in that. Waste has been a Cinderella industry for too long. We are taking it into the limelight where it belongs, to create green jobs in every nation and every region of this country.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the First and Second Reports of the Environmental Audit Committee, Plastic Bottles: Turning Back the Plastic Tide, HC 339, and Disposable Packaging: Coffee Cups, HC 657; and urges the Government to accept their recommendations as part of its Resources and Waste Strategy.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The Chairman of the Select Committee and I share a commitment to making sure that the food and drink sector can become an even more important part of our economy in the future. As well as the consultation on the future of food, farming and the environment, which the “Health and Harmony” Command Paper initiated, there is ongoing work to develop a sector deal as part of the broader industrial strategy, on which the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy leads.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Last week, the Secretary of State told my Committee that the agriculture Bill is no longer urgent as we have agreed a transition period with the EU. Farmers are the bedrock of Britain’s food industry, but if the European Communities Act 1972 is repealed in March 2019, what is the legal basis on which he will continue to make farm payments? Will it be through extending article 50 or through the transition Bill, taking us straight back into the EU for the transition period?

[Michael Gove]

Through the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill.

Leaving the EU: Fisheries Management

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes two very important points. Yes, it is not just the case that the fishing industry benefits by being outside the CFP; our marine environment also benefits. She also makes a very important point about the Scottish Government. They want to keep us in the common fisheries policy and deny Scottish fishermen the opportunities of leaving the CFP. In that position, their protestations ring hollow this afternoon.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

The paradox is that Conservative Fisheries Ministers have been very successful in the common fisheries policy in negotiating more sustainable catches. In the Secretary of State’s 25-year environment plan, he talks about all fish stocks being recovered to and maintained at levels that can produce the maximum sustainable yield, which is an exact replica of the EU common fisheries policy. However, in that plan, he neglects to mention the linked application of the precautionary principle to fisheries management. Can he reassure the House that in the future fisheries Bill, there will be no return to the bad old days of days at sea or fishing effort?

[Michael Gove]

A number of very important points were raised in that question. First, yes, previous Fisheries Ministers in this Government—in particular, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon)—have done an outstanding job on improving the common fisheries policy and in making a bad situation better. Secondly, the hon. Lady is absolutely right that in the 25-year environment plan, there is an absolute commitment to ensuring that we follow the science, so that we have the best approach towards making sure that fish stocks are healthy and sustainable in future.

On the broader point about the precautionary principle, it is clear that during the time that we have been in the European Union, although a number of things have worked against the environmental interests of this country and our marine environment, the precautionary principle properly applied can be a very powerful tool to ensure that our environment is protected and enhanced. We will be saying more in due course about the environmental principles that have evolved during our time in the EU and the means by which we will hold the Government to account to keep in line with those principles.

Air Quality

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. Dudley is one of the areas that has been named. I have already been in conversation with Andy Street, the Mayor for the west midlands. He is very ambitious on the plans to make these improvements and I look forward to meeting the leader of Dudley Council next week to discuss further specific issues.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

If the UK leaves the EU, the Commission and the European Court of Justice lose their role in monitoring and enforcing air pollution standards. Back in November, the Environment Secretary told my Committee—the Environmental Audit Committee —that he would consult on a new body to fill that governance gap very early in the new year. When will we see that consultation? Will that body be in place before exit day? Will it have higher environmental standards, which is what the Environment Secretary says he wants, lower standards, which is what the Brexit brigade wants, or full regulatory alignment with the EU, which is what the Prime Minister has promised her EU colleagues?

[Dr Coffey]

The good news is that the House has put legislation in place—we brought this forward—on the targets for 2020 and 2030 on the key pollutants. This Government have already acted and laid the legislation. I am pleased that the House endorsed that approach.

The consultation will be forthcoming soon. I am conscious that people are eager to see it, but, in the meantime, we are not relying on the EU to help with air quality. The hon. Lady will be aware of many measures that we are undertaking, including the new bypass in her constituency, which I and my officials believe will be the solution to improving air quality for the people of Wakefield.