Net Zero Carbon Emissions: UK’s Progress

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Mary Creagh

Thursday 28th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon). I advise him to keep his mobile phone switched on, given the news that the Fisheries Minister, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), has just resigned. The Government may be looking for a new Fisheries Minister, and it may be the right hon. Gentleman’s lucky day yet again. In the great tradition of reusing and recycling Ministers, I can think of no finer replacement.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I really cannot allow the hon. Lady to get away with that. If she thinks it is a privilege or a delight to be a Fisheries Minister at present, she must be dreaming in ways of which I know she is not capable.

[Mary Creagh]

I wonder whether the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth has resigned so that he does not have to answer the letter that my Committee has just drafted, which asks him about our progress towards becoming a so-called independent coastal state and how the negotiations with various regional fisheries organisations are going.

Let me now turn to the subject of the debate. Securing a sustainable future for the planet and our children is a responsibility that we simply cannot ignore. I welcome the chance to discuss this issue, because we have spent far too long discussing Brexit in the Chamber and not enough time discussing the thumping alarm that is being sounded all around us on our planet.

To achieve net zero, we must reduce our emissions rapidly and at scale in every area of our economy and in every area of our lives. Our Committee has talked about some of the personal changes that we can make, whether that means turning our backs on single-use plastics or considering how we can achieve, for example, a net-zero fashion industry. The report that we published last week took climate change into areas where it may not previously have gone.

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[Mary Creagh]

I totally and passionately agree. We on the Environmental Audit Committee are privileged to have global thought leaders appearing before us and giving us the best available science. It is sometimes rather chilling, however; for example, Professor Jim Skea from the IPCC told us that our assumptions about how quickly we can decarbonise are perhaps over-optimistic and based on new technologies that have not yet been invented, so perhaps the discount rate for future technologies needs to be lower than at present. There are some truly profound moments in our Committee, and I am sure my hon. Friend would be very welcome to join it; we also have a couple of spaces for Conservative Members, so I hope we can get some volunteers following today’s discussion.

We have been leaders in this, and people still look to the UK for both thought leadership and policy action leadership. We provided that under the last Labour Government with the Climate Change Act 2008. A weakness in that Act has become apparent, however: there was no review process. We set up the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the Government—all well and good—but then it is up to the Government to heed that advice or to ignore it, which is less good, and there is no review process, so now if we do need to set this zero net emissions target, we will need to re-legislate, and I will be interested to hear from the Minister about the necessary policy mechanisms.

We have signed up to the 2015 Paris agreement and to the UN sustainable development goals to create a more equitable, sustainable world. Our Government will subject us to a voluntary national review at the UN this year, and I urge all Members of this House to participate in that process. It is about how we end poverty, violence and hunger in every aspect of our communities. Our Committee has looked at the hunger aspect, and I welcome the fact that the Department for Work and Pensions and the Office for National Statistics will now start to measure hunger in our country. Real sustainability comes not just with social justice, but with climate justice as well.

I want to talk about why net zero emissions matter. In October 2018, the UN’s leading scientists—some of whom were British—showed what could happen if we do not get to net zero. Extreme weather is already happening; the warming is already with us, as we are seeing with the tragic events on Saddleworth Moor, the heatwaves in the Artic last year and the fact that we have had the hottest February day on record. The Arctic is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet, and in February 2018 temperatures at the North Pole rose above freezing during the polar nights, which is when the sun has not even started to come up; it was 30° higher than normal. When we talk about an average of 1.5°, that means a 7° rise at the North Pole. That is catastrophic for the melting of the sea ice.

We had a deadly summer last year, and we also had the highest number of excess deaths last year because of the beast from the east; we had 40,000 excess winter deaths in this country. So when we talk about climate, we are also talking about ourselves; we are talking about the fact that we are conducting a vast experiment on the only system on which our life depends. We do not know what we are doing; we do know how to stop it, but there is a kind of collective passivity around the action needed. When we see cities such as Cape Town in South Africa running out of water, and when we see power stations in Australia unable to work because it is too hot, we have to ask ourselves what a 1.5° or even a 2° warmed world will look like.

The IPCC also showed us what the difference is between 1.5° and 2°. At 2° sea levels will be 10 cm higher. That means 10 million more people will be affected by flooding and coastal erosion. That is what the difference between 1.5° and 2° means. At 2°, all coral reefs die. Our children will never see a coral reef at 2°. If we keep the increase to 1.5°, one third of reefs might survive. We have cold water reefs on our shores that we do not know about. We do not value what is beneath the ocean.

Our species are becoming extinct at a rate that has not been seen since the last global mass extinction. We have just been hearing about the insect Armageddon. Our planetary health inquiry found that rates of extinction are between 100 and 1,000 times higher than what is considered to be natural diversity loss. This affects our food systems, because if pollinator populations are devastated, we will have to pollinate our fruit trees by hand, as is already being done in parts of China.

Soil is the only carbon sequestration system that is known to work at scale and for free, yet we keep treating our soil like dirt. [Laughter.] That was my little joke. Soil is the Cinderella ecosystem. We like clean air and clean water, but what we should really like is dirty dirt. The more dirt that is in our soil—I do not mean bad dirt; I mean organic content—the better it is. In Paris, we signed up to increase our soil carbon content by four parts per 1,000, but I have not yet seen any policy to support that, either in the public goods debate around farming or from the Minister. I would be grateful if we heard something about how we will incentivise farmers to achieve that and to incentivise urban guerrilla gardeners such as myself to achieve it in our own homes. If I knew how to do it, believe me I would.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

This is actually a serious interjection, unlike the previous one. I completely agree with the hon. Lady that we have neglected the soil, even though it was clearly identified in the national ecosystem services review, but does she not agree that the move to payment for ecosystem services should enable successive Governments to engage farmers in precisely that kind of activity?

[Mary Creagh]

Indeed it should, but there has to be a baseline measurement, and somebody has to pay for the measurement and the monitoring. The tragedy is that, if we leave the EU, this type of global thought leadership that we are now getting to will be lost and will no longer be able to be transmitted to our friends and colleagues in the EU.

Ivory Bill

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Mary Creagh

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—

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Mary Creagh

Committee: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

rose—

[Mary Creagh]

rose—

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I will give way to both hon. Ladies, but I will just say one last thing in case they were going to make this point. Many people have raised the question of whether all this work will be done in time—I see the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) nodding and I suspect that she will want to raise that point—and I see that if there was doubt about whether it was, that would be a reason for legislating here, as opposed to waiting for a proper new statute. I am delighted to say that we have talked sufficiently to Ministers to be confident that they will be bringing forward both the consultation and the legislation in time to ensure that it is in place before we exit the EU. Of course, I would also want to wait until January to see the consultation to ensure that that engagement is fulfilled, and I am sure that the other place will want to look at what is said in the consultation and to assure itself that the new statute is coming forward before it consented to allow this Bill to proceed without the amendments that are being proposed. I believe that the right way to do this is in separate legislation. It is not about this business of Brexit; it is about trying to get the right answer for the environment. It is much better that we should do that in a fully fledged Bill that will be properly debated and contains all the relevant provisions and powers, which will never shoehorn into this Bill. I genuinely believe that that is the best way forward.

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[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I do not suppose that I will succeed now in persuading the hon. Lady. I do not wholly disapprove of the idea of her and others pursuing aggressive amendment tactics here and in the other place to ensure that the Government continue to respond effectively and rapidly. Once the consultation paper emerges and the Secretary of State has made further statements about this, and once legislative time has been allocated in the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee, assuming it is still called that, we will have that confidence. I would prefer to rest on that, because it would be at the least inelegant and possibly positively damaging to pass one piece of legislation and then introduce another that repealed or amended it. That sounds to me like a recipe for confusion.

Should we become sceptical at a later date about whether the Government will bring separate legislation forward, it would be open to the House of Lords to table amendments in the other place, which would come back to us. I, for one, would want to see those amendments made if the Government did not intend to put something in place before EU exit day. I am currently confident that they will, and that is the only basis on which I will not be voting for the new clause this evening.

[Mary Creagh]

I do not share the right hon. Gentleman’s confidence that all this will be done in time, and I share the concerns of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). We have been waiting two and a half years for a 25-year environment plan, which will be a 22-year plan by the time it is published. We have had promises of legislation on fisheries and the common agricultural policy, and today a draft animal sentience and animal welfare Bill has been published. There is already a legislative logjam in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as a result of the decision to leave the EU, and at the moment there is a reporting gap. Although there may be a new body in the future to do some of the enforcement, I do not believe that it will be up and ready at the point of leaving, when all our reporting obligations, which currently rest with the European Commission, will fall.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

There are quite a lot of bits to unpack in that. If we were to leave without an agreement and hence without a transition period, there would be some merit in her observation, although the gap would be short if the new body had been legislated for by the time we left. If the Government’s plan succeeds and there is a transition period, we will no doubt be bound by the current rules during that period so there would be two full years in which to establish the new body. It is not likely that the hon. Lady’s concern on that front will be realised in practice, although I admit some theoretical possibility of it.

The hon. Lady adduces a legislative logjam in DEFRA. I accept the facts that she presents, but I see them exactly the other way round. We have a Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs who is probably the most powerful one we have had for a long time, for various reasons of which hon. Members on both sides are acutely conscious. He is probably more committed to this agenda than any we have seen in recent times in either Administration—[Interruption.] I am conscious that the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) will inevitably cavil slightly at that, and I respect his record. I genuinely believe that the current Secretary of State is even more devoted to the environment than he was.

An awful lot of DEFRA legislation will inevitably have to be brought to the House before exit. No Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary and no Government could resist it. One cannot exit the EU without solving the problems of the common fisheries policy and the common agricultural policy so there is a natural legislative slot, and this powerful Secretary of State will be more than capable of bringing before the House the relevant statutory provisions. They will not be simple; they will require mature deliberation in both Houses. I am sure we all agree that it is incredibly important that we get the provisions exactly right. We need to make sure that it is a genuinely watertight system, with a set of policies that apply, that the court will enforce and that can be brought to court by an independent body. We need to ensure that the independent body is genuinely and completely independent of the Government, that it can bring Ministers to court, that it is properly funded and staffed and that it looks at the way in which the principles are applied through the policy statement in practice.

I believe that if all that can be done in a proper statute, it would be not just a replication of where we have been, which is now much lauded but was in practice very imperfect, but a huge advance on that. We would have a more comprehensive enforcement of a better environmental legislative framework than any country on earth. That is a goal worth striving for in a proper Act, instead of trying to shoehorn into this Bill a set of new clauses and amendments that are well intentioned but cannot perform the same purpose.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Mary Creagh

Committee: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that intervention. Often the simplest sentences raise the biggest alarm bells, because things can be missed if we blink, and substantial rights are engaged in this. The Brexit Secretary said in his speech to UBS last week that the UK would remain

“in all the EU regulators and agencies”

during the transitional period. That leaves us with a further conundrum, because transitional rights are mentioned in the European Commission’s negotiating paper and it says that the ECJ will continue to be able to decide, presumably on Francovich, during any transitional period. The issue of the transitional period is stretching the elastic limits of the Conservative party and of the Cabinet at the moment in terms of which wing of the party is going to succeed, but from the point of view of economic stability and job stability in this country I certainly want to see a transitional period. This Bill raises questions about the loss of those rights if there should be, as we all hope there will be, a transitional period.

The problem is that those rights start to erode as exit day looms, because the incentive to follow the EU directives will be diminished for the Government as they will be let off the hook, given that there will be no retroactive right to sue under Francovich.

Schedule 1 therefore fails the basic test of fairness. For example, if the Government are in breach of an air quality directive, perish the thought, and people are suffering a substantial loss as a result, only those who start legal proceedings before exit day would be entitled to those damages. My amendment 139 would ensure that the right to sue the state and to obtain a remedy under Francovich is still available for those who have suffered that loss or damage before the UK exits the EU. This would allow the victims of a Government failure to uphold their rights that took place before exit to obtain those damages. It would bring fairness to this process, as well as, crucially, legal continuity and legal certainty. Brexit must not be used as an excuse to abolish citizens’ rights and protections under the law. In the referendum my constituents did not vote to reduce their rights, and I hope the Committee will be able to test the matter this evening.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I have considerable sympathy with the points just made by the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh). Exactly at which point to create which cut-off when dealing with Francovich is a knotty issue, but the idea that people whose rights already exist and who are damaged before exit should be prohibited from pursuing causes that they would have been able pursue now had they had the wit to start them now is pretty offensive to natural justice, and I hope that those on the Treasury Bench will come forward with some adjustment to paragraph 4 of schedule 1.

I mainly wish to dwell on the two other issues that have been raised in this interesting debate, which has been much more of a genuine Committee stage debate than some of the debates, or some parts of them, that we have had in the previous two days’ consideration. The first is on the charter of fundamental rights, where I thought the argument was largely being won by those who argued that it was not productive to have the general principles in that charter brought into UK law, provided that we could satisfy ourselves that case law and statute between them would cover off all the material and substantive rights contained within the charter. I was therefore extremely heartened to hear the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), say that there was going to be a full analysis, which I hope will be sufficient to persuade us all that all the rights are covered off in some other way. If they are, the points that were made about the dangers of judicial activism, which is positively invited by the charter of fundamental rights, would outweigh any advantage to the charter’s incorporation.

Before I come to the main point I want to make about paragraph 3 of schedule 1, I wish to observe, as a slight qualification to some of the things that have been said in Committee, that an element of judicial activism will not only be made possible but actually be required by the Bill, because it refers repeatedly to retained principles and it is impossible for judges to engage in the application of principles without their engaging in judicial activism that goes beyond simply reading the plain face of statutes and the like.

This is all a very grey area. With that in mind, I come to amendment 10, tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), and paragraph 3 of schedule 1. His amendment refers to paragraphs 1 to 3, but in my view it refers mainly to paragraph 3. There is currently a great oddity in the way the Bill is cast. I very much hope that not too long from now my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General will come to the Dispatch Box and resolve this problem, but it is important to set out the nature of the problem.

Clause 5(2) clearly establishes the principle of the supremacy of EU law so far as the past is concerned. It spells it out in awesome terms, by including the

“disapplication or quashing of any enactment or rule of law”—

if that phrase has any meaning—

“passed or made before exit day.”

Clause 6(3)(a), which we discussed on a previous day, makes it entirely clear, at least in relation to the ordinary operation of the lower courts—my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield and I are still discussing with Ministers on the Treasury Bench the vexed question of the Supreme Court—that not only retained case law but

“any retained general principles of EU law”

are to be applied by the courts.

It is therefore a strange state of affairs that if we look at schedule 1, we discover that no court or tribunal will be able do the very things that the combination of clauses 5(2) and 6(3) require. No court or tribunal will be able to apply the general principles of EU law to quash or be supreme over any existing UK law. We can have a Bill that says one thing or we can have a Bill that says the opposite, but we cannot properly have a Bill that says in one part of it one thing and in another part the opposite of that thing, so some change is required. That much is, I think, simply a matter of analytical fact.

My preference, which I hope the Solicitor General is going to reflect in his remarks, is for a change of the kind that has come up in various exchanges this afternoon. It is considerably more modest than the rather uncharacteristically complete, sweeping amendment tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield. I would simply amend paragraph 3(2) of schedule 1 in such a way as to ensure that it refers to general principles of EU law other than retained principles. At that point, it seems to me, rationality would re-enter the scene, because we would then be saying that after exit day a court in the UK could not use later principles developed by the CJEU—or indeed, while we are at it, any charters or other documents produced by the EU—to overrule English statute, which would of course be a natural and proper consequence of our leaving the EU.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Mary Creagh

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 15th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

First, I am confident that this Secretary of State will be here for rather longer than some other Secretaries of State have been recently. I welcome that, because I think he is a very, very fine Environment Secretary. Secondly, I am not saying that it is inconceivable that there could be two pieces of legislation, but I think it rather inelegant to legislate in a slightly awkward way, and then to repeal that legislation in a Bill that would probably start its passage before the passage of this Bill has been completed. I would prefer it to be done properly, although opinions may differ.

[Mary Creagh]

We have had three Environment Secretaries in two years, and we have all been waiting for the famed environment plan for two and a half years. A 25-year environment plan will be a 22-year environment plan by the time it is actually published. What gives the right hon. Gentleman the confidence to assume that an environment Act, which would have to be underpinned by the environment plan, will be in place by the time we leave the EU, especially if we end up leaving without a transitional deal and crashing out in March 2019?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

What gives me the confidence is that I think it is perfectly doable, and I think the Secretary of State intends to do it. I am in a slightly odd position—the Secretary of State has to nod each time I say these things, because I cannot speak for him—but I assure the hon. Lady that I really am very confident about that. Let us proceed for a moment, however, on the assumption that that is indeed going to happen. That gives us a place in which to do things, although of course it does not solve all the problems.

My second point is that, unlike the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion, I think that a national policy statement is an ideal vehicle for the translation of these principles into something much more solid and much more determinate. A national policy statement is not just something that a Minister dreams up and issues like a piece of confetti. It comes before the House of Commons and is subject to resolution by the House of Commons, and it is therefore debated. It is exposed in draft, and it is discussed by the green groups.

There will of course be considerable debate about the exact terms of a national policy statement that seeks to turn those principles into something much more concrete, but I think there is ample scope for turning it into something of which we could be really proud. It would also have a huge advantage over mere principles when the courts came to judge the actions of the state and measure them against it—for that is exactly what would happen. A national policy statement is a policy statement by Ministers. If Ministers do not follow that policy, they are, by hypothesis, acting irrationally and in a Wednesbury unreasonable way, and can therefore be judicially reviewed. When they are judicially reviewed, the courts will look at the policy statement and compare it with their actions. If the policy statement is properly debated, properly exposed and properly expressed, those actions can be measured against it in a very determinate and careful way, and we can end up with a much more solid environmental protection than we would ever have got out of the principles.

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[Caroline Lucas]

rose—

[Mary Creagh]

rose—

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I will give way to both hon. Ladies shortly, but first I want to come to a further point that is an important part of the architecture.

I do not personally believe that even the combination of an environmental protection Bill and an NPS emerging from it and under it would be sufficient. This exactly answers the last point of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion. I accept that it is difficult for campaigners and others to use the vehicle of judicial review, which is why I and some of my hon. Friends have advocated what we have proposed, and why we have agreed with the Secretary of State.

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[Sir Oliver Letwin]

In a word, yes, because this body will be able to take the Government to court, and the courts have the power to injunct, and if the Government fail to observe an injunction, results follow. The body must have that capacity.

I am not envisaging—and I know the Secretary of State is not envisaging—anything remotely like the Environment Agency or Natural England, which are part of the DEFRA family, if I can put it that way. This agency will not be an agency of the state, carrying out the Government’s operational objectives; rather, it will be independent of the Government and will continuously be judging the Government’s actions, taking on board the complaints of others, and using the expertise.

Finally, before I give way again, let me say that I hope the hon. Lady will take some comfort from the fact that ever since I began to propose this with some of my hon. Friends, and started discussing it with the Secretary of State, those who most disagree with her and me about these things have been sticking pins in voodoo images of people like me, because they are afraid that this body might be very effective. I take some comfort from that, and hope the hon. Lady will, too.

[Mary Creagh]

I am interested to hear the right hon. Gentleman develop the ideas around this new body to fill the commission-shaped hole, which was what the Secretary of State described to our Committee, but I want to press the right hon. Gentleman on the point of remedy, because there is no such body. The CCC sets out goals, but does not have any remedy against Government if we fail to meet our targets; it only has the power of its authority in saying that we are missing the fourth carbon budget, or the fifth carbon budget, and so forth.

Secondly, on judicial review, the Ministry of Justice proposed to increase the fees charged to individuals and environmental groups in clear breach of the Aarhus convention, which guarantees access to environmental justice through European law for everybody and caps the costs. The only reason why that proposal was overturned was a judicial review brought by big charities such as the RSPB, not because the Government were aware of the principles.