Simon Hoare
Main Page: Simon Hoare (Conservative - North Dorset)Friday 24th January 2025
(6 days, 17 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Climate and Nature Bill 2024-26 View all Climate and Nature Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
I rise in support of the Bill. As a co-sponsor, I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for not just introducing the Bill but the way in which she introduced it. Echoing the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) on what was a truly outstanding speech.
As a number of people have referenced, we only have temporary hold of our planet, so let’s start with a good old biblical quote, Genesis 3:19:
“for dust you are and to dust you shall return.”
We have only the lightest of steps on our planet, and we need to remind ourselves of that. The arrogance that, as the apex species, we have taken on our shoulders—the idea that we can do anything and some brainbox somewhere will find a way of ameliorating or attenuating it at some point, so it does not matter, should be part of historical political thinking. In that respect, the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) was absolutely correct.
I want to speak to my colleagues and my party and to those who would describe themselves as centre-right in the political spectrum. Conservatives conserve. We are and have been champions of a notion of handing things on to successor generations. That must mean, in today’s parlance, not just physical capital of pounds, shillings and pence and of assets, but natural capital. My party has a proud and innovative track record on these issues. It was Geoffrey Howe’s early 1980s Budget, in response to the issues of acid rain, that, through the carrot and stick policy, sought to make unleaded petrol cheaper than four-star, thereby driving people—another pun, I am afraid—to have catalytic converters. My noble friend John Gummer introduced the landfill tax, and the first hypothecated environmental tax in our country. It was a Conservative Government who introduced the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and a Conservative Government who put through the environment Acts of 1986, 1995 and 2021. The Clean Air Act 1956 was introduced by a Conservative Government. Excellent work was done by former colleagues in this House, such as Michael Gove, Rebecca Pow and others, who took these issues seriously, made the case, and we legislated.
Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)
The right hon. Gentleman outlined articulately how Government legislation can make a positive difference to our environment. Does he agree that as well as a relentless focus on housing targets, we should also have targets for amenities and for nature and green spaces, so that we can achieve lots of objectives and support the aims of the Bill?
Simon Hoare
The hon. Gentleman is right, and I wanted to echo the point raised by the hon. Member for South Cotswolds. I note the word “or”, but I like the word “and”. Indeed, I will share with the House that I am on a particularly stringent January diet. It is slightly working, I think, but there is still a long way to go. Ask any member of my family, and they would say, “Now Simon, would you like custard or cream?” and my eyebrows would shoot up at the word “or”, as I much prefer “and”. The hon. Lady was right: climate and nature are two sides of the same coin, and have a close, interwoven symbiotic relationship.
I say to the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) in response to his intervention, again echoing the hon. Member for Norwich South, that of course we must have growth, but too often the didacts from both sides of the debate say that it is either/or: we can either have a biodiverse natural environment and address climate change, or we can have growth, but we cannot have both. Well, it depends first on what type and kind of policies we pursue when addressing CO2 emissions and the drive to net zero, but also on what type of growth one has. It must be a legitimate anxiety, but I am pretty confident that many people who elected the Labour party into government believed that they would get that fact: that the definition of “growth” needed to be reset in order to meet the challenges that we now face.
The Budget—I shall be charitable—did not quite land as the Chancellor of the Exchequer hoped or expected, and some of the economic indicators are not pointing in the direction that any Government would like to see. I hope it will not fall on deaf ears—the two Ministers on the Front Bench have a long and respected track record in addressing these issues when they sat on the Opposition Benches, which I hope they will continue now that they sit on the Treasury Bench. I hope that in order to prove this to people who are anxious about economic growth, and the fact that there does not appear to be very much, it will not be foot-to-the-floor growth of any type, anywhere, in order just to nudge the figures. It has to be the right kind of growth, and sustainability has to be at its heart.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich asked: is this Bill perfect? No, and I do not think that the hon. Member for South Cotswolds would claim perfection. My right hon. Friend said that he had never seen a private Member’s Bill that was perfect and beyond amendment; I have to say to him that in my nearly 10 years in this place, I have yet to see a Government Bill that could be described as perfect and without the possibility of improvement by amendment.
I say to my right hon. and hon. Friends: let us not sacrifice the good in pursuit of the excellent. We have to make progress. Are many of the issues addressed by the Bill difficult? Yes, but what do we all usually say to our children? “Things which are difficult are usually much more worthwhile seeking to attain than the easy, low-hanging fruit.” Will the Bill come with costs? Let us be frank: we must all be conscious that we have come through or are coming through a cost of living crisis, and inflation has eroded people’s ability to spend and fuel costs are high. But to those who simplistically say, “Well, we can’t afford to do this; now is not the right time in the economic cycle,” I say, with the greatest of politeness: if not now, when? I do not believe that we can afford not to do this. Failure to do so would be the longest suicide note in history for our species.
On our coastline, there are places that are built below sea level—one thinks of Canvey Island—so this is not just something that is happening elsewhere, about which we should be slightly anxious but not at all concerned. Rising sea levels and other changes will affect us here at home as well. We need to be careful in our consideration of that. For those who claim a driving concern about the need to control immigration, I say in all sincerity that I do not believe that one can divorce from that addressing the changes to our planet that climate change is introducing, as it will be a major spur for fellow members of our species to pack up their belongings, meagre or otherwise, and try to find a place of safety for themselves and their families, where they are able to grow a bit of food and sustain their lifestyles, meagre as they may be.
To those who say, “Hang on a moment, our emissions are not too bad, and we’ve got to look to China and everybody else,” I say: pollution does not respect international boundaries. It moves on the tides and the winds. We have lulled ourselves into a false sense of security, because, in essence, we have exported the production of many of our commodities—needed, desired and wanted—overseas. We have said, “Look, our manufacturing emissions have gone down,” but the production of those products is still creating emissions elsewhere. There are some noble aims in the Bill that we should think about.
Edward Morello
I thank my Dorset neighbour for giving way. As always, I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he says, not least on the cost of inaction being far greater than the cost of action. He makes many good points about the fact that we have outsourced our carbon emissions to places far away, but does he agree that we often fail to sell the opportunities around tackling climate change, especially for British businesses, such as those provided by tidal and wave technologies? We should celebrate those opportunities. The Government talk about growth; there is so much opportunity for growth in this sector, and we should do more.
Simon Hoare
This is getting rather worrying, because I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Either he is doing harm to his political career or I am doing harm to what might be left of mine. I shall leave it to my hon. Friend the shadow Deputy Chief Whip to jot that down in his little red book.
I find UK manufacturing really strange in this respect, because the trajectory of policy for the past several years has been very clear. We are not trying to make our petrol combustion engines go faster; we are trying to make electric vehicles more reliable, less costly, travel further and so on. Why has UK plc manufacturing not grabbed hold of that as a fourth industrial revolution and led the way, in the way that our forefathers did at the start of the first industrial revolution? We have to look to private equity and others to invest.
I was pleased to see an investment in a solar farm in my constituency. I visited the site to see where it was all going to go and how it was going to plug in, and I asked, “If you broke down a solar panel, where did the component parts come from?” Not a single component had been manufactured in the United Kingdom. They had come from about 12 different countries; the only thing that we had done was assemble them. I say to our entrepreneurs and our leaders of industry and commerce that we are better than that. We are not just assemblers; we are makers and innovators. We are an island race that has worked on free trade and exporting values, ideas and products across the surface of the globe. This is a time for us to lead in the export of actual hard power, and drive forward an international alliance on these important issues.
Simon Hoare
Dorset is well represented this morning. I will of course give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch.
Sir Christopher Chope
My hon. Friend has not mentioned China specifically, but China is still intent on increasing its CO2 emissions until at least 2030. As a result, it is able to compete unfairly with what would be UK enterprise if we had not put a stranglehold on it with all these regulatory restrictions. How does he expect to deal with the issue of China?
Simon Hoare
Let me respond to my hon. Friend by quoting one of his great political heroes, the noble Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton: just because we cannot do good everywhere, that does not mean we cannot do a little bit of good here. I understand the point that my hon. Friend makes. Of course we have to be conscious of cost differentials, production costs and all the rest of it, but I say to him respectfully that if the rest of the world does something that is to the good, and one or two countries decide not to, or go at a slower pace or on a different path, I do not believe we should just stop, shrug, throw it up in the air and say, “Oh, well, if not everybody’s doing it, why the hell should we?” We led the abolition of slavery. Nobody else was doing it. We did it because we thought it was right. We introduced factory Acts. Nobody else was doing it. We did it because we thought it was right. We introduced votes for women. [Interruption.] Not me personally! I am not as old as my hon. Friend; I have just had a hard life.
We have led. It is what the United Kingdom does. We are not a nation that follows; we are a nation that sculps, leads, forms, challenges, cajoles and encourages.
Daisy Cooper
I rarely need much encouragement. The hon. Member is making an impassioned speech about the fact that this country has led, and it can continue to lead in this area. He talked about hard power. Does he agree with me and my Liberal Democrat colleagues that if our country is to be better than just assembling parts, we need urgently to rip up the red tape that is stopping so many of our home-grown manufacturers building the climate technology of the future because of the trade barriers that exist with our EU neighbours?
Simon Hoare
The hon. Lady is pushing at an open door. There is much merit in the trade and co-operation agreement that we have with the European Union. That should never have been seen as an event; it should be an evolutionary process, responding to events in a pragmatic and sensible way while always maintaining the integrity of the result of the Brexit referendum. She and I were on the same side in that debate. We lost, and we now have to play the hand of cards that we have been dealt.
I have received emails describing me as a “dangerous radical” and a Stalinist. I have been called many things in my time, but a Stalinist dangerous radical was new to me. My North Dorset constituency is about 440 square miles, of which only 12% is built upon; the rest is open farmland, hill land, ancient woodland and so on.
I had hoped that I might have been able to finish my speech by now, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I am just getting into the romantic prose. I notice that the clock stands at 10.59 am, and I understand that you want the statement to be given at 11 am. I am now in “Just a Minute”, talking down the clock without hesitation, repetition or deviation—
Proceedings interrupted (Standing Order No. 11(4)).