Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Rory Stewart and Greg Knight

Tuesday 12th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

As the right hon. Gentleman is aware, this is something that we are continuing to look at very carefully and we are continuing to learn both from what has happened in Scotland and the evidence that suggests, on the basis of a study of 130 different characteristics in 300,000 separate offenders, that people are more likely to reoffend with a short custodial sentence and therefore that tens of thousands more crimes are committed every year by the wrong use of a custodial sentence.

[Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

In seeking to reduce costs, will the Minister give a pledge not to cut corners? He is seeking to build a new prison in my constituency at Full Sutton, but the traffic assessment that has taken place is, I believe, deeply flawed. Will he look at that again? Even if it means extra cost, if he deems it is warranted, will he order a new traffic assessment please?

[Rory Stewart]

I absolutely undertake to look again at the traffic assessment and to sit down with my right hon. Friend to examine it in more detail together.

Low Emission Zones

Debate between Rory Stewart and Greg Knight

Wednesday 25th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rory Stewart)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship eventually, Mrs Moon. As your husband was a distinguished ecologist and created the local government network of ecologists, I am pleased that it should be an environmental subject that I have the privilege of presenting in front of you. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Ben Howlett) for securing this debate and thank others for their contributions, which I will try to wrap together, to consider what is a surprisingly tricky, important and evolving subject.

The first question is one of science, about which the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) made several points in a couple of interventions. One of which was about the chemistry of diesel engines and their nitrogen dioxide content. I think that she was getting at the fact that diesel burns at a different temperature to petrol, producing more nitrogen dioxide. She also pointed out that some emissions may come from technically low emission vehicles. Nitrogen dioxide is our major concern today, but we are also concerned about particulate matter, and, as others mentioned in the debate, sources of emissions extend to other things apart from vehicles, including non-road mobile machinery, such as construction machinery, and domestic boilers. The sources extend right across the spectrum of vehicles, including buses, taxis, heavy goods vehicles, light goods vehicles and cars.

The hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith), the shadow Minister, also focused on science and modelling. The modelling that we undertake in Britain is sophisticated, taking nearly three months to run, and European Union-accredited. It is unbelievably complicated, involving the overlaying of emissions and the balance of the fleet. For example, when my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) is driving through his area, his vehicle will have an impact on emissions in a particular place, and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned emissions from planes, which need to be put into a totally different part of the model due to atmospheric dispersion. The model therefore includes sources of emissions, a climate model, including how the wind moves things around, and the road network, and out of that we attempt to calculate nationally the number of micrograms per cubic metre. As pointed out by the shadow Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Bath, local situations will always arise in which things are being captured that may not be captured by the national model. Equally, the national model will be much better at reliably catching the national picture than can be achieved on a grid basis.

The shadow Minister mentioned Oxford Street, and I absolutely agree that the situation is shocking. It is terrible that the levels, at 120 micrograms per cubic metre, are three times the EU limit. However, I gently challenge the idea that that is the worst in the world. Someone on a visit to Beijing, Delhi or a number of cities in Latin America will find considerably higher levels, but the situation on Oxford Street is indeed shocking. Such levels will have a serious impact on human health, which was raised by the hon. Member for Strangford.

There is also the question of cost: what do we do about the problem, and where do we allocate the costs? We now have a better understanding of the cost to human health, which has two elements. There is the indirect cost to human health. There is the value that we put on our own lives and the fact that people, if they have lung diseases or heart diseases, may die prematurely. The Treasury attaches an economic value to that, which is a slightly bizarre process. There is also the direct cost to the national health service of trying to treat people. The hon. Member for Strangford challenged us to try to integrate much more how we use the NHS budget, public health, how we think about air quality and the measures that might be taken by my Department or the Department for Transport.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Falkirk (John Mc Nally) for his speech. His example—as he said himself, it was perhaps more Dundee than Falkirk—shows how we can learn from the devolved Administrations again and again. In environmental policy, we are already learning from Wales’s approach to recycling and from Scotland, in particular Zero Waste Scotland. Different approaches are often taken across borders. The Dundee example of electric vehicles and potentially electric bicycles is something that we are happy to learn from, and we are happy to exchange ideas across borders.

The fundamental challenge posed by the hon. Member for Bath and the shadow Minister was, “What on earth do we do about this? How do we address these problems?” The shadow Minister put his finger on two problems, one of which was how to get the balance right between the national and the local. He was saying that it is all very well the Department pontificating and saying, “This is where we want to get to,” but the local authorities are given the job of responding to it without resources. The other problem was how to allocate the resources and costs, which was also the challenge of the hon. Member for Strangford.

One way of understanding the dilemma is to look closely at the exact example raised by the hon. Member for Bath. How does the balance work? Bath, fortunately, is modelled not to be in exceedance by 2020. This is a devolved issue, but the cities we are particularly concerned about in England are Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham, Derby, Southampton and London. They are our major concerns and we have a different approach to each city—Bath is a good example. Forty micrograms per cubic metre on average of ambient air quality is an EU-set target, but we want to do better than that, because of the benefits to human health. We would like to reach the target sooner rather than later.

Since Roman times, Bath has been a great symbol of health in this country. It was where Roman tourists and 18th century tourists alike went for their health; it is a world heritage site based on the idea of health. We should certainly have a clean air zone in a place that is seen as a great symbol of health.

The council in Bath has led in a number of ways. This is a good example of the local-national thing. The council already has an extraordinary project on bicycles—Bath’s answer to the Boris bike—which has just launched and has 5,000 bikes in operation. The council has a good approach to electric vehicle charging and has more than 20 electric vehicle charging points, with businesses also building their own charging points. It has invested in hybrid buses. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been proud to co-operate in a small way on the Bath website and on some of the research into moving towards low emission vehicles. Now Bath has come forward with a proposal to have its own low emission zone, which we welcome.

There has to be a national contribution, which I will set out in a moment, but the reason why getting the balance between local and national is vital is that we can see in a single road such as Rossiter Road in Bath an exceedance reduced by 18 micrograms per cubic metre through a single local intervention. It is not sensible for the Department to fantasise that, sitting here in London with a 300-mile screwdriver, we have a solution for 28 cities. Much will be about having active traffic management systems.

One Labour MP, the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), came to me with a brilliant idea about how to resolve diesel pollution issues caused by passenger vessels docking in port. It involved setting up electricity charging points, so that the vessels did not have to run off their diesel engines. He found a solution that involves the local enterprise partnership and the local council. Such solutions can have much more of an impact much more rapidly than our simply mandating things from the centre.

As for cities where we will be in exceedance by 2020, however, we are clear that we will take action. The Government are determined to be in compliance. In 2020, we will be judged on whether we are below 40 micrograms per cubic metre in every city in England, with the exception of London, and we will be in compliance in London by 2025. We will ensure that we put structures in place to support local initiatives.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bath made a final challenge: can we produce a standardised system of low emission zones to be rolled out across the cities? Yes, of course we can. The point of our consultation is to provide four straightforward models of what low emission zones—what we call clean air zones—can look like. The first model deals with buses and taxis; the second with buses, taxis and heavy goods vehicles; the third with buses, taxis, HGVs and light goods vehicles; and the fourth one goes all the way down to cars.

[Sir Greg Knight]

Does the Minister agree with me and the Mayor of London that there is a case for exempting historic vehicles from any restrictions or penalties?

[Rory Stewart]

My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point and one we will have to think about. We have to get the balance with simplicity right, and that is what we are trying to achieve. The request made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bath for a straightforward, simple system was a good one. The objective is for an HGV driver to know that the same rules apply throughout England or, ideally, if we can work with the devolved Administrations, throughout the United Kingdom, so that we do not have different rules in different places. Provided we can achieve simplicity and a national standard, however, I can see a good argument for excluding historic vehicles. In essence, because the low emission zones would be standard, provided that HGV drivers had a Euro 6 diesel engine in their lorry, for example, they would know that they could enter any of the zones anywhere in the country, as such vehicles would be exempt. We do not want to end up with a situation in which any individual business has no idea what is happening when it turns up somewhere.

We have made some progress since the 1970s. The hon. Member for Strangford reminded us about the problems of smog, which were much worse. In the late 1940s, some incidents cost thousands of lives over two or three days. Since then, we have reduced sulphur dioxide by a dramatic 90%, which was an extraordinary achievement, particulate matter by 73% and the nitrogen oxides, NOx, by 62%, but we can still do better and we have a huge opportunity to do so. The Government have put £2 billion into that.

The real game in town is to ensure not only that by 2020 or 2025 we meet the targets, but that by 2050 we are in the lead and that, with the exception of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire and his exotic car, we are predominantly driving electric vehicles. We can see the direction in which we are going: Britain should be in the industrial lead, and we should be the country where such vehicles are manufactured and tested.

Rural Broadband

Debate between Rory Stewart and Greg Knight

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

This is a very oversubscribed subject, and we have only a short time. I am keen for all hon. Members present to intervene. Some 15 hon. Members have been in touch with me about that. I ask them to give me three or four minutes to get under way and then I will try to bring everyone in.

I begin by thanking my hon. Friend the Minister very much. He came up to Nenthead in my constituency on what was a hairy day over the top of the Alston fell. He saw us install the new broadband network and launched our conference. In general, this is a very positive story. It is the beginning of a new story, but a very positive one. I thank also all the MPs here today. Incredible work is being done constituency by constituency. If there is a broader constitutional lesson from all this, it is about the role of Members of Parliament in driving forward superfast broadband.

I say a huge thank you also to the officials. We have had incredible support from Anton Draper in the Department for Communities and Local Government, from Mike Kiely and Robert Sullivan in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, from Alan Cook at Cumbria county council and from communities themselves. This is above all a story about community pressure and Government responding to it. Within the confines of Cumbria, there has been huge pressure from a diverse range of communities. The people and places include Libby Bateman from Kirkby Stephen, Miles Mandelson, who has constructed one of the most exciting superfast networks imaginable in Great Asby, Leith-Lyvennet Broadband and Northern Fells Broadband. They have all been pushing ahead on this issue.

There is a huge need, which I am sure all hon. Members will speak to, particularly for rural areas—for our economies above all. Isolation cripples our economies. As a group of MPs, we tend to have in our constituencies far more self-employed people than any other constituencies in Britain and far more people working from home. Broadband is essential for that, but also for public services such as health and education. It allows my neighbour with Parkinson’s disease, instead of making a four and a half hour round trip to Newcastle general hospital, to have a live video link to the consultant without leaving home. The same is true of distance education and learning.

The challenges, which again are not things I need to talk about at length today, are challenges of topography, scarce population and the amazing shifting sands of technology. Every time I talk to the Minister, a new person has emerged with a new and astonishing solution. I am thinking of point-to-point microwave links; the fact that one Minister is pushing satellite technology; cellular solutions; long-term evolution solutions; and, today, people talking about moving signals down electric wire.

[Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way; I am sorry if I am a minute early according to his guidelines! If there is one message that we all want the Minister to take away from today’s debate, is it not this? Communities that are geographically isolated should not be allowed to become digitally isolated.

[Rory Stewart]

That is a fantastic point. Of course, the complexity of what the Government are dealing with is astonishing. It is not just topography or technology; it includes cost, legal issues such as European state aid regulations, and issues such as the spectrum auction, which I hope to come on to briefly.

May I make a little progress for another minute and a half before I take any more interventions? This project owes an enormous amount to ministerial leadership—not just that of the Minister, but of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—and has seen enormous progress to date. However, it is a revolution in methodology and procurement. People are having to push boundaries on procurement and methodology that would have been unimaginable 11 months previously. People are having to be much more flexible. Instead of going for big, framework, county council solutions, they are having to respond, often parish by parish, to very different technological solutions within a single area of 100 square miles. That involves risk. It involves generous investment by the Government. It involves piloting measures.

What does this mean? For the new policy, it means three lessons. We need to share the lessons from all the pilots much more effectively around the country. I hope that this is the beginning of a series of Westminster Hall debates—if anyone has the patience—in which we can take the lessons further. We need to look much more seriously at finance. Of course, there is great inspiration from the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, when a dedicated bank was set up for communities to electrify rural areas. The green investment bank is a good beginning for our Government in that direction. The big society bank is another good beginning. I would like to see finance facilities available specifically for parishes and communities to be able to move ahead with their own broadband.

The final issue is the rural spectrum auction. We talk a lot about broadband. We must think about mobile coverage. An Ofcom consultation is taking place at the moment. Ofcom is pushing only for 95% coverage for this spectrum. We need to shove it up from that, because 95% coverage will mean that most of the areas represented in this Chamber will not be covered. On those grounds, I will take my second intervention.