Protecting and Restoring Nature: COP15 and Beyond

Debate between Ruth Jones and Kerry McCarthy

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.

Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Ruth Jones and Kerry McCarthy

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Ruth Jones]

Q Just to be clear, did you say this piece of work will take two to three years to take place?

Professor Henderson: That is our expectation.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q Continuing on the animal front, we know that some animals, such as pets, including some of the brachycephalic dogs, are bred to have traits that are not desirable from a health point of view. There is increasing concern about the popularity of pugs, French bulldogs and creatures like that. On the farm animal side, you have poultry that is bred to an immense size and cows where the milk yields are going up year on year—they are bred to produce more than they would naturally.

What do you see as the parameters of that? How will the Bill protect animal welfare? Because of the popularity of those dogs, breeders may make use of the new technology to breed even more extreme examples. Would that be desirable? How can we prevent that from happening? You may have answered that in response to my colleague and said that it needs more time, but how do you see that in terms of the desire for increased yields and increased production on farms? Is there not an argument for not including animals in the Bill while this further research takes place?

Professor Henderson: Scientifically, the application of these technologies to cross to livestock or other animals is identical in terms of the changes it can cause. It can mimic the impact of breeding more efficiently, effectively and rapidly. In the livestock and animal area, this has identified more clearly a problem that was already there and the fact that we know, with respect to animal welfare, there are some negative outcomes that come from traditional breeding processes. If we are able to speed that process up through precision breeding, those negative outcomes may occur more quickly.

The passage of this Bill has pointed to those problems in animal welfare and made them clearer, and made it necessary to deal with them quite explicitly before we can enact legislation about precision breeding for animals. That is not because the science is different but because the existing regulation around animals differs from that needed around crops. That is why the instrument is set up as a secondary instrument, so that there is time to fully consider and deal with the animal welfare processes before that is changed in law.

Cystic Fibrosis: Prescription Charge Exemption

Debate between Ruth Jones and Kerry McCarthy

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is always a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Sharma, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) on securing this debate.

As some Members might know, I have a personal interest in this issue, as my niece Maisie has cystic fibrosis. She was diagnosed when she was just a few weeks old. Actually, it was during that little period after Christmas: it was her mother’s birthday on 28 December and her dad’s birthday on the 30th, and she was taken to hospital because her progress had started to go backwards. One of the welcome developments since she was born is that there is now a heel prick test, so that newborn babies are screened for CF, which prevents people from having to go through a similar situation.

Maisie is one of those who is benefiting from access to the new drugs that have been developed recently, and at 17 she is doing really well. The same is true of one of my constituents, who is just a little older. His dad tells me that it is as if he had never had cystic fibrosis. That is great news and I congratulate all those who have been involved in developing these drugs—Kalydeco, Orkambi and its version for children, Symkevi, and Trikafta—and in making them freely available on the NHS. The former Health Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), was obviously instrumental in that process and I thank him for it. Of course, I also thank the Cystic Fibrosis Trust for spearheading that campaign.

I also want us to remember those for whom these medical advances came too late. My constituent Lee Partridge tragically lost both his daughters to CF: Richelle at the age of 26 in 2015, and Lauren at the age of 19 just a few months later in January 2016. Perhaps if they had been born a decade later, the new drugs would have saved their lives. These medical developments happen so quickly. No sooner had the campaign paid off and Orkambi been approved than Trikafta was suddenly around the corner. I must admit that my sister, Maisie’s mother, did not even realise that there was another campaign to mount because it came so quickly afterwards.

I hope this means that cystic fibrosis will eventually become a condition that people live with to a normal age, rather than being something that they die from. We are here today because while it used to be the case that sufferers rarely survived into adulthood, life expectancy has increased almost fourfold since then and, as we have heard, there are now more adults than children with cystic fibrosis. If that had been the case back in 1968, when the list of exemptions from prescription charges was drawn up, there is no doubt that cystic fibrosis would have been on that list. It seems quite anomalous. We ought to treat conditions like for like, based on need. We cannot live in the past with this fixed state from 1968, which has become pretty meaningless.

Today I have received an answer to a written question requesting the figures for how many adults have to pay for cystic fibrosis prescriptions. I was told that those figures are not collected. We know that about 89% of all prescriptions are dispensed free of charge, but we do not know specifically what that means for adult patients with cystic fibrosis. The Cystic Fibrosis Trust estimates their number to be around 2,500 people in England.

Although the three drugs I have mentioned that target CF at its root cause are free to patients, which is obviously good, many patients often need to pay for additional medication to prevent lung and sinus infections, therapies to aid digestion, antibiotics and so on. Those who live in poorer areas are statistically more likely to contract severe lung infections, meaning that they are more likely to have to pick up the bill for antibiotic prescriptions. Having a lifelong condition incurs all sorts of hidden charges, including the cost of traveling to medical appointments or buying specific foods to cater to dietary needs. We are lucky in Bristol to have both an adult and a child cystic fibrosis unit, but someone living in Milton Keynes, as my niece does, has to travel to Oxford for their treatment. As the cost of living crisis escalates over the coming months, disabled people will face increasing energy bills and food costs, and many will experience the burden of stressful work capability assessments—we know that the Government are bringing in tougher sanctions on jobseekers. Shouldering the cost of a prescription-exempt chronic condition can mean a choice for some people between paying the bills and affording essential meds.

I was recently contacted by Martin, a constituent whose 19-year-old son James has cystic fibrosis. James works part time. Last year, his claim for disability allowance stopped when he reached adulthood, and his personal independence payment application was refused. Martin currently pays for James’s prepaid prescription certificate, but he worries that a change in his own financial situation would mean that he would not be able to foot the bill for his son’s prescription. What is ironic is that Martin himself has insulin-dependent diabetes, which entitles him to free NHS prescriptions. He cannot even begin to understand how he is deemed eligible while his son is not, meaning he does not pay for his own prescriptions but does pay for his son’s.

Martin is not alone in his opinion—96% of people who responded to a Cystic Fibrosis Trust survey described the prescription charges as unfair. It certainly gives rise to the question why CF patients should be treated differently from others with other lifelong conditions that exempt them. I asked the Health Secretary last year whether the Government plan to review the list of conditions exempt from prescription charges. A junior Minister responded to confirm that the Government did not plan to do so.

The former Liberal Democrat Member Bob Russell has been mentioned. I always use Bob Russell as an example of why early-day motions are perhaps not all they are cracked up to be. For years on years—it might have been two decades—Bob queued to be No. 1 on the early-day motion list so he could call for an exemption from prescription charges for cystic fibrosis patients. He always got lots of signatures, because his early-day motion was No.1 and first in the booklet, but we are still here debating the issue. When I am trying to explain to my constituents why my signing an early-day motion will not change the world, Bob is the example I use. It would be lovely if we could move on from having these debates and making the same points over and over again. There is no logical reason for it, other than the point that if the Government reopen the 1968 list they will have to review other conditions as well, because people are living longer due to medical advances. I do not think that is a very moral reason for not doing it.

We get told that patients who are not exempt from prescription charges can apply for a prepaid prescription certificate that costs £2 per week. However, that is £104 per year; everything adds up, and I have already mentioned increasing fuel bills and food prices. That is £104 per year that they should not be paying. Grants are available through charities such as the Cystic Fibrosis Trust to support those in urgent need, but they are in high demand. Between 2020 and 2021, one in 10 people with cystic fibrosis received an emergency grant from the trust; the majority of those grants went towards basic living costs.

There is a serious risk that cystic fibrosis patients who incur prescription charges may avoid taking essential medicines, especially if they are already in financial hardship. People living with chronic conditions in Wales do not have to face the same difficult choice between medication and heating their homes, as all NHS prescriptions are free there.

[Ruth Jones]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Would she agree with me that, for all of us living in Wales, the fact that all of our prescriptions are free means that people do not have to worry about not having the money to take life-saving medication?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ruth Jones and Kerry McCarthy

Thursday 3rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

7. What recent discussions he has had with the Director of Public Prosecutions on ensuring more effective prosecutions of cases involving rape and other sexual offences.

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

10. What recent discussions he has had with the Director of Public Prosecutions on ensuring more effective prosecutions of cases involving rape and other sexual offences.