Debate on the Address

Philip Dunne Excerpts

Tuesday 11th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con) [V]]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. My apologies: my internet crashed a little while ago, so I am grateful to you for letting me participate orally.

I am pleased to be able to contribute to the debate, the day after the Prime Minister has confirmed that the country will move to the next stage in the relaxation of restrictions on Monday after 14 months of covid-dominated disruption to our daily lives, and in the week after a seismic set of mid-term elections showed such strong waves of support for the Government, not just across most of England but with gains in Scotland and Wales and the blue wave, through which I am pleased to welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer) to these Benches.

The focus of the Government’s programme is the delivery of manifesto commitments at the general election 18 months ago, meeting the aspirations of people across every part of Britain, including in rural areas that have so often been left behind. The levelling-up agenda needs to reach beyond Whitehall, and not just to the great urban centres of the north and the midlands but to rural communities everywhere. I was pleased to see the publication before Easter of the rural-proofing policy paper, and I will look for those principles to be applied to the 30 Bills outlined in the Gracious Speech as they pass through this House.

Before I turn to the main thrust of my remarks, I would like briefly to welcome the health and care Bill, which will build on the new ways of working brought in to cope with the pandemic, to improve outcomes for patients by focusing on prevention and closer collaboration within the NHS and with local authorities. On social care, however, we must make progress during this Session to develop a long-term plan and then legislate during this Parliament, as other hon. Members have said. The current funding mechanisms are putting real pressure on the families of those who require residential and domiciliary care, as well as on local authorities, whose budgets are increasingly dominated by the cost of providing care.

I particularly welcome the procurement Bill, as a former Minister with responsibility for procurement in the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Health. It will allow the public sector deliberately to buy British where that makes sense and represents value for money. We could not do that, even for food and drink, when subject to EU procurement rules.

I want to focus my remarks on environmental measures, including the focus on green jobs as the economy recovers, on which the Committee I chair will soon be making recommendations to the Government. The animal welfare provisions are welcome and will deliver on specific manifesto pledges.

I particularly welcome the reintroduction of the vital Environment Bill—a casualty of covid, which prevented its passage in the last Session. It establishes a new overarching regulator for the environment following Brexit. I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has set up the new Office for Environmental Protection in shadow form to start undertaking its work.

The main issue that I wish to welcome is the Government’s announcement that they will introduce three amendments to the Environment Bill to take forward the principal objectives of my private Member’s Bill, the Sewage (Inland Waters) Bill—another casualty of covid, as its Second Reading was deferred five times and it ran out of parliamentary time in the last Session. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), has shown admirable determination to support me and the 135 other Members across the House and the almost 45,000 members of the public who signed a petition to end sewage pollution to address the truly shocking state of our sewage and drainage infrastructure.

The spotlight of data transparency has begun to reveal the state of water quality in our rivers. On 31 March, the Environment Agency published the astonishing admission from water companies, detected by monitoring equipment progressively installed in the past few years at sewage treatment plants and other drainage assets, that raw sewage was discharged into our rivers on more than 400,000 occasions for more than 3 million hours during 2020. Much of that was done within the limits permitted by the Environment Agency. In effect, the water companies have been licensed to spill.

The reasons for that are complex, but they reflect a lack of adequate investment in our drainage infrastructure to keep pace with housing and commercial development since the 1960s. The consequences for the aquatic environment and the species reliant on our waterways are increasingly devastating. I do not have time to go into the causes and effects, but I am genuinely delighted that the Government have adopted the principles of my Bill, and I shall monitor its progress carefully on Report in this House and during its passage through the other place.

I was also pleased to hear the Prime Minister highlight the role of a new infrastructure bank in levelling up investment to modernise the country’s infrastructure. There will be plenty of opportunities to help to fund creaking and leaking sewage and drainage infrastructure, which is very reliant on the legacy of our Victorian forebears. Levelling up needs to accommodate digging down if we are to improve water quality and meet the binding environmental targets. I look forward to scrutinising the implementing legislation for those targets, to which the Government committed today.

While we debate a programme of legislation for the next 12 months, it is understandably difficult to lift our eyes to targets set for at least three Parliaments from now, but the actions taken by the Government now will be crucial to how and whether we can get back on track to meet their ambitious interim target for emissions reduction, announced as our nationally determined contribution for the COP26 conference this November. The draft statutory instrument setting the level of the UK’s sixth carbon budget for the period from 2033 to 2037 was laid shortly before Prorogation and must be put to the House for approval by the end of June. It envisages a 78% reduction in UK total emissions by 2035, compared with the 1990 baseline.

There is no greater environmental protection target than the one the House will shortly be invited to agree. It does not require primary legislation and so was not in the Gracious Speech. The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Kemi Badenoch), recently told the Environmental Audit Committee that the Government cannot spend their way to net zero. I happen to believe that while there is a place for legislation, we cannot rely on legislation to achieve net zero. The strategies and measures to be published by Ministers in this Session ahead of COP26 will be crucial in setting the policies required to deliver climate change targets over several Sessions to come.

We should also look to the net zero review by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer for how he plans to balance as equitably as possible the contribution of households, businesses and public funds to different elements of the transition to net zero. To paraphrase a renowned Finance Minister from another age, the Government’s objective must be to secure the largest possible reduction in emissions with the least hissing.