Protecting and Restoring Nature: COP15 and Beyond

Ruth Jones Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

I rise today in place of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), who is on an Inter-Parliamentary Union visit to Kosovo and hence is not able to be in the Chamber today. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon), the shadow Secretary of State, is visiting Yorkshire, so I am afraid the House is stuck with me. I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing this debate and for her speech. I have enjoyed listening to all the powerful, interesting, educational and unifying calls for action among the speeches we have heard here.

When we were notified last week that this motion would be considered by the House, many of us were concerned that we would be Minister-less, but our fears have thankfully been calmed, because the people’s business must go on despite a caretaker Government and its outgoing Prime Minister. We are also relieved to find the Secretary of State safe in his caretaker position at DEFRA. I welcome the Minister formally to his place; I look forward to his completing his eight-week job interview, and I hope he will be able to stay on.

I place on record my genuine thanks to the hon. Members for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) and for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) following their resignations from the Front Bench last week. We did not always agree, but we developed a respectful working relationship, and more than once we joked that we saw more of each other than we did of our spouses, children and loved ones, due to the constant flow of DEFRA-related business in the House.

It has been a very quiet week here in Westminster, with not a lot going on at all. As such, I was grateful to be able to use this time to reflect on the critical work required to preserve our planet and protect our environment. I am very clear that we need the upcoming COP15 summit to do more than just contribute to global warming through lots of hot air; we need it to deliver for the planet’s wildlife and for its people. It will be no surprise to the House that I am here to reiterate Labour’s approach to the environment, which has always been driven by those twin priorities. We on the Labour Benches believe that those priorities are even more important now, because in a time of such cost of living desperation, both internationally and here at home, we cannot deliver for one without the other. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) for his stark example of GDP versus biodiversity with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Delivering for the natural world requires social and economic justice. That is something that the Leader of Opposition recognises, and I hope the Minister will recognise it too. The approach of protecting a few isolated green spaces and relying on markets is failing and gets us nowhere near far enough, and certainly not fast enough, as the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) highlighted earlier.

In any case, we are seeing protections eroded because commercial demands for land are insatiable and some in this House have the wrong spending priorities. Time and again, across the world and at home, we see the most disadvantaged communities suffering the worst impacts of environmental degradation: their homes flooded and swept away in deadly landslides, their fields and livestock left parched by drought, their homes left draughty, cold and damp through lack of insulation while fossil fuel-dependent energy bills soar, their children’s health blighted by fossil fuel-generated air pollution, sewage pumped into their local rivers and over playing fields, and their neighbourhoods devoid of the green space and nature that lockdown surely taught us are so essential for human mental and physical wellbeing.

The United Kingdom has been among the most nature-depleted countries for decades. The Natural History Museum’s biodiversity intactness index revealed that the world has crashed through the “safe limit for humanity” level of for biodiversity loss, and saw the UK’s 53% score place it in the bottom 10% of countries.

That is well below China, and humiliatingly we are last in the G7—so much for global Britain. In practice it means that even some of our most iconic and much loved animals are being added to the growing list of endangered species. Eleven of the 47 mammals native to Great Britain are at imminent risk of extinction, including the red squirrel, wildcat, water vole, dormouse and hedgehog. I pay tribute to the Members who have declared their animal championing pedigrees, such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). A further five native mammals have a realistic possibility of becoming threatened with extension in the near future, including the mountain hare.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I was under instruction, had I been able to make a speech, to mention that I am parliamentary species champion for the swift and to make a plea for us to protect and to increase their habitats by ensuring that there are swift bricks in every new building. I have got that on the record.

[Ruth Jones]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the great work she does on biodiversity and as a swift champion. I will add that to my list of champions in the House. We know that puffins are projected to decline across Britain and Ireland by up to 90% within 30 years, and they are among 14 seabird species regarded as being at risk of negative climate change impacts. The shadow Minister for the natural environment, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West recently visited RSPB Bempton Cliffs, renowned for its puffins, but was not able to find a single one.

Ministers, notably Lord Goldsmith, often pat themselves on the back claiming they are doing all they can to advance the environmental agenda, but the fact of the matter is that our nature teeters on a cliff edge. I hope when the new Prime Minister takes office on 6 September that she or he will set out clearly how they will pull nature back from the brink. Under this caretaker Prime Minister, we all see a Tory Government consistently making the wrong choices, failing to engage with stake- holders properly, delaying action and ducking the urgent challenges facing us all.

Rather than setting the international agenda on biodiversity and leading the debate, the Budget last year—delivered as world leaders began to arrive for COP26—did not even mention climate change. The former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) found time to give a tax break for domestic flights and fell woefully short on the investment needed to deliver green jobs and a fair transition. It does not bode well for how he would approach the top job.

The Conservatives’ Environment Act 2021, which was well known as the “missing in action” Bill as it worked its way through the House, set a target on species abundance, and the Minister will recall that DEFRA Ministers were forced to concede that action was needed. Sadly, they only went as far as promising to halt the decline in species by 2030. Just halting the decline is not good enough—our ambition should be nature-positive here at home and in our work with colleagues on the world stage through COP15.

In 2020, the Government managed to deliver less than half their target of 5,000 hectares of new trees in England, and we had empty words from Lord Goldsmith that they would do better. The planned spending on tree planting is dwarfed by subsidies to Drax to ship and burn wood pellets from around the world, particularly from the US, with a lack of due diligence to make sure it is not from virgin forest. Meanwhile, the Government are doing far too little to protect the trees we do have. Deforestation is increasing across the planet and our consumption in Britain is driving deforestation abroad, which impacts here and across the world. Here, I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central for his dogged tree-planting over the past 30 years.

In the Environment Act 2021, the Government’s due diligence measures cover only illegal deforestation. Why are we agreeing trade deals with countries such as Brazil, Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia while they continue to destroy rainforests? Just yesterday, we saw reports that deforestation of the Amazon is at its highest level for six years. The right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell highlighted that in his speech earlier. We must remember that human rights are always threatened when rainforest deforestation happens, and the best stewards of those rainforests are the indigenous people who have cared for them for thousands of years and for whom they are home. Funding men with guns to guard empty rainforest is not a sustainable or ethical policy, but sadly it appears to be one that this Prime Minister and DEFRA have pursued up until now.

Action has been inadequate across DEFRA policy for far too long. Water companies have continued to be allowed to pump sewage into rivers, and that has only hastened the decline of endangered species. After the Government finally got an ivory ban on the statute book in 2018, their dither and delay meant that it did not actually come into force until years after many other countries had acted. They have failed to deliver promised wildlife protection legislation to ban trophy hunting and fur imports. Last week I had a very good meeting with former President of Botswana Ian Khama, who, although out of office, is a really doughty and dogged campaigner for the rights of animals. Obviously he backs a global ban on trophy hunting.

Meanwhile at home, thousands and thousands of badgers continue to be killed. The Government have also authorised bee-killing neonic pesticides and have failed to act to stop illegal hunting or effectively limit peat extraction and moorland burning, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) outlined in her speech. Of course, I cannot forget foxhunting. The killing of any animal will have an impact on our natural world and biodiversity, and hunting is no different. We have so many more priorities; I urge the Government to clean our waters, clean our air and protect our green spaces as a starter for 10.

Labour will deliver the change that we all want to see. Action at home must showcase for the world how a positive nature policy can practically be delivered across Government. The shadow Chancellor has committed a Labour Government to a robust net zero and nature-positive test for every policy. That will be backed with a £28 billion a year investment to meet the challenge of the climate and nature emergency, create certainty for business, and provide leadership as we seize all the opportunities before our United Kingdom.

Earlier this week I attended the online meeting with Patrick Vallance. Nobody who was there could have failed to leave fired up and ready to do whatever is necessary to protect our planet and preserve our environment. We can address both the cost of living crisis and the climate crisis. I say to the Government: if they cannot do both, they should get out of the way because we will. The truth is that, when we want them to, Government can and do make real change to the lives of people and our environment, too. The clock is ticking on the Prime Minister’s time in office, and it is ticking on our mission to save our planet, too. Now is the time for transformational change for our people and our planet. I wish COP15 well and hope that all those round the table will heed the warnings, wake up and smell the coffee, and get back to work.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I welcome the new Minister to his position.