Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), who argued very well for his community. I recently said in this Chamber that I wanted to be able to look the next generation of Debbonaires in the eye when they are 18 and say that I had fulfilled my promise for us to stop climate change—for us to be the generation of policy makers who halted it and even managed to reverse it—but we are not going to do that unless we stop taking new fossil fuel sources out of the ground and invest instead in renewables.

Bristol has declared a climate change emergency. Local communities in my constituency are taking part in many different initiatives to do their bit, but local communities can do only so much, and we need national leadership. I really would like the Government to consider following Bristol’s lead and that of many other local councils around the country and declare a national climate and environment emergency, as Labour did earlier today, and take the policy actions that are needed. That includes stopping fracking.

In 2015, the Government declared that there would be no fracking in national parks and sites of special scientific interest, but I sat on a Delegated Legislation Committee—oh goodness, the thrill of those DLs—in which Government Members were suddenly shocked to realise that my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) was pointing out that the Committee was about to pass a regulation allowing fracking under national parks and SSSIs in certain circumstances. The most that they were able to muster was an abstention, but we voted against it. That was not what we were led to believe when the Infrastructure Act 2015 passed through Parliament. The public and Members were led to believe that there would be no permitted fracking under national parks and SSSIs. As well as the argument about climate change, there is an argument about protecting the countryside.

Most of all for me, however, the argument is about climate change. I want this to be the generation of politicians who declared that national and international climate emergency and put it into every single one of our policies, making sure that with every single decision we take, we think about how it will either contribute to or mitigate climate change. The young people I met outside in Parliament Square three weeks ago and in my constituency on other climate strike demonstrations and in schools want us to do that. They want us to stop fracking and to invest in carbon-neutral technologies. They want us to be the world leader that I know we can be, and I urge the Government to follow their lead.