Whirlpool Tumble Dryers: Product Recall

Viscount Younger of Leckie Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, surely the Minister has just answered his own question—

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, the time for Back-Bench questions is up. I beg to move that the House do now adjourn.

House adjourned at 6.29 pm.

UK Net Zero Emissions Target

Viscount Younger of Leckie Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, when we passed the original Climate Change Act in 2008, the UK was the first country to pass a legally binding target for reducing our climate-damaging emissions. I am glad that in setting that example we triggered action from other countries; Sweden and New Zealand have now also legislated. Now that we are taking this bolder step to remove all our domestic emissions, we will see others follow. In the past few weeks, both Chile and Japan have committed to moving to net zero targets. I commend the Government and everyone who has contributed to getting to this position. The UK is taking the morally correct path. We are showing leadership at a time when the world is completely distracted by the rise of nationalism and populism. We are saying that there are more important issues that unify us as citizens of this sole planet that we share. We must take every step to ensure that this is not just a paper target but is backed up by policy. We have decades of examples of how we have done this; we are not starting with a blank sheet of paper. We have shown that we can decarbonise fastest among all OECD countries without it affecting our growth or economic development. We are a shining of beacon of hope in fairly dark times. I sincerely hope we will take our message to the UN in September, to Washington and Beijing, and that we will see others stepping up and increasing their ambition. It is easier and cheaper to do this than it has ever been. The technologies are there, the political will is growing and the children are out on the streets demanding that we do more. I am delighted that the Government are showing such leadership. Now we need to take it to Parliaments all around the world.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, before the Minister replies, I suggest that questions be kept succinct and short to enable as many Peers as possible to speak in the time available.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I shall try to keep my answers short. I accept what the noble Baroness said: in 2008 we were the first country to legislate and we are now bringing forward tighter proposals to take us to net zero by 2050. I think the French have just brought forward legislation on this. Let us see if we can pass ours before the French.

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Viscount Younger of Leckie Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Rooker for introducing this debate at a time when we are coming to understand that the timetable for dealing with carbon emissions is much shorter than our generation had hoped. The science underpinning our understanding of carbon emissions and the consequences for the planet is not in doubt. Like my noble friend, in preparation for the debate I read Mrs Thatcher’s speech to the 1989 United Nations conference. She was of course one of our very few Prime Ministers with a scientific background. She spoke then of the,

“vast … amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere”,

and the destruction at the same time,

“on a vast scale of tropical forests which are uniquely able to remove carbon dioxide from the air”.

It caused surprise at the time but everything she was concerned about in that speech has been borne out by accurate measurement and the evidence of our own eyes.

It is also now clear that we are not moving fast enough to check the growth of carbon gas emissions and that our faith in our ability to find solutions quickly is misplaced. It was nearly 20 years after that speech that a Labour Government were able to bring forward the Climate Change Act 2008, which provided a target of reducing emissions by at least 80% below the 1990 figures by 2050. That target now looks much too leisurely, and the IPCC report of 2018, commissioned by the 195 signatories to the Paris climate agreement, tells us that we simply do not have until 2050.

Despite much good work by the Committee on Climate Change and much effort to reduce emissions from transport and power generation, not enough has happened. There have been welcome efforts to reduce demand for water and heating, but the hoped-for technological solutions to avert or swiftly mitigate the increase in emissions have not been successful. Nuclear power generation has brought with it unsolved problems of disposal of nuclear waste. Wind and hydrogeneration are making a useful contribution, but neither can be rapidly accelerated, and wave power is not proven. Neither have technological efforts to mitigate emissions been successful. There is at the moment no effective method of carbon-emission storage. The proposed investment of £1 billion in 2015 in finding a solution was cancelled a year after it was proposed.

One approach has, however, been a success, and ironically does not depend on technological innovation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Prime Minister spoke of using tropical forests as carbon sinks to mitigate the growth of emissions. In the intervening years, we have realised that we can enlist nature, both as a global community and, significantly, within our own borders. I speak with the benefit of being briefed by my daughter, who works for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. The combined expertise at CCI, a collaboration of conservation academics and biodiversity organisations, continues to prove that the restoration and recovery of nature—forests, yes, but also peatlands, wetlands, coastal systems and uplands—creates effective carbon sinks, as well as contributing amenities for us all.

One of the most measurable projects recently undertaken is the Great Fen, a large area of the Fens in Cambridgeshire, which used to be increasingly exhausted low-productivity farming land, but has now been rewatered. The process just involved turning off the pumps that have kept that land as farmland since the Dutch engineers installed them in the 17th and 18th centuries. A lot of careful water engineering created the Great Fen. This is now both a lovely park, which provides a wild place to visit for the growing populations of Peterborough and Cambridge, and, critically, a substantial carbon sink. My noble friend Lady Young, alas, is not here today, but she chaired the organisation that brought this about, and I wish she were here.

Several working projects are now managed by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, including Summit to Sea in mid-Wales and the Cairngorms Connect project in Scotland. The primary focus of these projects is the restoration and recovery of critical ecosystems, but we can expect carbon sequestration, hydroecological changes including flood management, air quality changes and collateral community renewal as added value. Nature-based solutions, in short, are the low-hanging fruit in efforts to counter damaging carbon emissions and mitigate the effects we are already experiencing from climate change.

A report published in 2018 by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that it is possible, using natural solutions, to contribute 37% of the reduction in emissions necessary to keep the increase in global warming below 2% by 2030. It would not be difficult to expand this work; it can be done largely as a matter of water engineering. But the Great Fen was partly funded by philanthropy, and Summit to Sea and the Cairngorms projects are largely funded by private individuals and the Arcadia Fund set up by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. However, enabling more developments of this sort to contribute to alleviating emissions cannot be achieved by even the most generous private philanthropy. Government money and the will to push through development will be needed to use to the full our natural assets of wetlands and land exhausted by intensive farming and deforestation. This is an area that cannot be left to the market.

Money for measurement and cost-benefit analysis of this area would also be well spent. Good work is happening in several places on researching the precise costs and measuring the benefits of this sort of expansion. Centralising this research could present the Government with a wide choice of projects, with the costs and benefits set out, so that decisions could be made and action taken quickly on which proposals to support. I hope that, in winding up the debate, the Minister will agree on the importance of developing projects that use nature and our land, and can be developed quickly.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, we started off so well, but some speeches have tipped well over six minutes, which makes timing for this debate tight now. I ask Peers to conclude their remarks when the clock reaches six minutes.

Deregulation: Public Services and Health and Safety

Viscount Younger of Leckie Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB)]

I apologise to the House for not having put my name down and missing the opportunity to contribute to this debate. However, I would like to make two comments. First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, stated, I chaired the Better Regulation—

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

There was an agreement that the noble Lord might wish to make an intervention at some point during the closing speech, but not at the very beginning. If he wishes to, he will be able to do so, but it should be short and during the closing speech.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I have forgotten where I had got to. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, raised a rather existential question at the beginning of her speech when she asked, “What kind of state do we want to live in?”. Many noble Lords on the other side may be thinking about that at the moment, as noble Lords on our side may also be. I heard the Mayor of London on “Newsnight” last night talking about London and the tale of two cities: the invisible people as well as the visible people. This awful tragedy at Grenfell goes far beyond the narrow issues we have been talking about today. It asks all of us what kind of state we want to live in. However, I take issue with one point the noble Baroness made, when she said that we were ideologically opposed to regulation. As someone who was chairman of the Care Quality Commission for several years and has been quite heavily involved in education for many years, I can tell the noble Baroness that we are not ideologically opposed to regulation; I will address that issue later on in my speech.

I will go further than that and say that regulation is essential to any civilised society. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred back to Lord Shaftesbury. I had hoped that Lord Shaftesbury was a Tory, but I note that as it happens, he was a Whig. However, many former Conservative Prime Ministers throughout the Victorian age were at the forefront of bringing regulation into the factories, to chimneys and the like. So let us be absolutely clear that regulation has a long and proud history and that it is an important and crucial part of improving people’s lives. That does not mean, as a number of noble Lords said, that all regulation is perfect, or that some regulations have gone beyond their sell-by date. All regulation needs to be kept under constant review.

We have heard a number of examples from the environmental field, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Smith, and there has been no question that regulation has achieved hugely beneficial things. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, mentioned beaches and water quality, as well as air quality and the like. There is no question that regulations have had a huge impact to the good in that area. However, the noble Baroness is concerned within the context of Brexit about some of the principles that underlie some of that EU regulation. For example, she mentioned the principle that the polluter pays. There is nothing to stop us incorporating that as a principle in our future environmental legislation here, and in a post-Brexit world we can carry on many of the good things that have come out of Europe, of which there are many. The noble Baroness mentioned pollution in the inner Thames. The Thames tideway project will remove 60 million litres of raw sewage out of the Thames, and we can do that both in or outside Europe.