Sustainable Seas

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Mary Creagh

Thursday 17th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I begin by thanking the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee and you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to present the Environmental Audit Committee’s report on sustainable seas. I have a copy of it here, and it is our 14th report to this Parliament. We launched our inquiry last April, examining how our oceans can be protected from climate change, overfishing, resource extraction and pollution, and what more the Government should do. Human activities in both coastal and open waters have dramatically increased in recent years. The UN estimates that up to 40% of the world’s oceans are impacted by humans, with dire consequences, including pollution, depleted fisheries and the loss of coastal habitats. We have treated the seas as a sewer—literally—and that has to stop.

Plastic makes up 70% of all the litter in the ocean, with most of it coming from land, being transported by rivers and draining into the sea. If no action is taken to reduce plastic pollution, it will treble in the next 10 years. The amazing “Blue Planet II” programme showed us the consequences: a turtle tangled in a plastic sack; and the death of a newborn whale calf from causes unknown. Plastic litter and chemical pollution are everywhere in the ocean. These plastics are eaten by seabirds and they suffocate coral reefs; they break down into microplastics, which are eaten by sea life, which we then eat, potentially transporting chemicals into our human food chain. The long-term harm from plastic and chemical pollution is unknown because, as the Government’s chief scientific officer told us, we have not looked hard enough.

There is so much more that the Government should do to prevent our waste from reaching the ocean. We could start by not exporting our waste to countries with poor recycling infrastructure. Supporting Indonesia and Malaysia to reduce their plastic while simultaneously exporting the UK’s contaminated plastics to them shows the Government’s lack of a joined-up approach to reducing plastic pollution. The Government published their resources and waste strategy in December. It places much more onus on producers to pay for the cost of clearing up and treating waste, as was recommended in the Environmental Audit Committee’s reports on plastic bottles and coffee cups last year. But we cannot wait until 2042 to phase out avoidable single-use plastics, and the plastic bottle deposit return scheme, which was promised by Ministers in 2017, will not be ready until 2023.

The Government have signed up to the 14th sustainable development goal target to prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution of all kinds by 2025. So here is our plan. We want to see the Government ban single-use plastic packaging that is difficult to recycle; introduce a 25p latte levy on disposable coffee cups, with all coffee cups to be recycled by 2023; and bring forward their deposit return scheme and extended producer responsibility schemes before the end of this Parliament. The Government must also set out how they will create and fund the UK’s domestic recycling industry to end the export of contaminated waste to developing countries.

Climate change is causing a triple whammy of harm from ocean acidification, ocean warming and deoxygenation. This harms the entire food web and disrupts our weather systems. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report showed us that a 2°C rise above pre-industrial levels will significantly harm biodiversity and fish stocks, and will destroy nearly all the coral reefs in the world. If we can keep the temperature rise to 1.5°, we will still lose 90% of coral reefs. Until we did this inquiry, I did not know that the UK has a cold-water reef in the south of England.

That is why we have to redouble our actions to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and meet the Paris agreement on climate change. The Government must set out their plans to achieve that in the first half of this year and set a net-zero emissions target by 2050 at the very latest. Species affected by climate change include krill and plankton; if they are removed from the marine food chain, that could lead to a one-third collapse in the populations of predators such as polar bears, walruses, seals, sea lions, penguins and sea birds.

Britain’s overseas territories and their waters cover an area nearly 30 times the size of the UK, and nearly 90% of the UK’s biodiversity is located in their waters. They have the most unique and biodiverse areas on the planet, and we have a huge responsibility to protect them. We welcome the Government’s December announcement on the creation of a marine protected area for the South Sandwich Islands. We have also discussed with the Minister for Energy and Clean Growth, who is in the Chamber, how the exploitation of minerals from the deep sea could begin in the next decade. The prime sites are around the deep sea hydrothermal vents, but those habitats are unexplored and unique. We heard from scientists that in a very small-scale study they found six hitherto unknown species. This is the great last wilderness left on earth; in fact, it may be where life on earth first began. Mining those sites could have catastrophic impacts—from local extinctions of as yet unmapped ecosystems and species, to the production of sediment plumes, which can travel long distances through the water column, smothering seabed organisms. Our report urges the Government not to pursue licences at active hydrothermal vents in their own jurisdiction and internationally, and to use their experience in regulating marine industries and their influence on the International Seabed Authority to impose a moratorium on exploitation licences in those areas.

We heard how so much of the sea—58% of it—is outside national jurisdictions, has little or no protection and is suffering from the tragedy of the commons: everyone goes there to graze their sheep, but there is nothing left at the end. Everyone goes there to take their piece, but no one is protecting it. We must lead international negotiations. The Government have signed up to the UN’s ambition to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, but that will work only if our Government, alongside other nations, fund the satellite monitoring and enforcement mechanisms for those areas that we want to protect.

The UN is currently negotiating a high seas treaty. We call on the Government to seize this chance and push for a Paris agreement of the seas. Like the climate change agreement, it would contain legally binding targets and regular conferences of the parties to hold Governments to account, and designate marine protected areas and the funding needed to achieve them. We look forward to the publication of the Government’s international ocean strategy later this year. I hope it will include and build on our Committee’s cross-party ambitions.

We are an island nation. We care passionately about our seas and oceans. I commend the report to the House, and commend my Committee colleagues for such an excellent report.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Lady for her statement, and her Committee for its superb report. I hope that other Select Committees will follow her example and make statements directly to the House. Page 48 of the report recommends a 25p coffee cup levy and that all coffee cups should be recycled by 2023. All our constituents can readily identify with that issue. It does not strike me that recycling coffee cups need be that problematic, so why do we need to wait four years for them to be recycled?

[Mary Creagh]

That is an excellent question. The Government’s resources and waste strategy states that they want the industry to work towards voluntary commitments and that they will introduce a deposit return scheme for plastic bottles, but that they are ruling out the latte levy, which we think would influence a very important behaviour change. We need to change the way in which we consume the planet’s resources and bend the curve of our plastic use. In the time between us writing our coffee cup report and last December, despite all the warm words from the coffee cup industry and all the available discounts, the number of coffee cups used went up by 500 million. The target increases every year as more people buy and drink coffee. Industry efforts are not working. The product is difficult to deal with because it has a plastic lining and a paper outer part, and it needs specialist collection and specialist disposal. Some companies are working heroically in trying to tackle the issue, but even if we get to 30 million or 100 million, there are still 3 billion coffee cups in circulation every year.

I agree passionately with the hon. Gentleman that it should not take another four years. The Government need to regulate, but I am afraid that they are reluctant to do so. It is interesting how far ahead of policy the nation and consumers are, and I hope that Ministers are listening.