Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) and to pay public tribute to the role that he played as an Environment Minister. He made a significant contribution in generating today’s debate, and I share entirely his concern that the Queen’s Speech does not include a marine Bill. The Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs made a clear recommendation, which the Government accepted, that such a Bill was required to deal with a vast range of issues connected with the exploitation of the marine environment, both near-shore and offshore. I share the hon. Gentleman’s aspiration that the Government should at least publish a draft Bill in this Session. I am delighted that there is a Minister from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the Chamber again. Although I want to focus on climate change and the work that the Select Committee has undertaken, it is important to put on the record the fact that just under a year ago, the Treasury and DEFRA—I think, however, that the Treasury’s input was greater than DEFRA’s—published a document on the Government’s vision of the reform of the common agricultural policy. In nearly 12 months since that important document appeared, two things have occurred. First, the European Union has started to debate the subject, and secondly, there has been an ominous silence in the House about that important document. I hope that in the next 12 months or even sooner, the Minister might prevail upon the Leader of the House to have a debate on the subject. The contents of the document are vital if we are to examine issues such as food security, sustainability and some of the environmental challenges that a new form of agriculture for the 21st century will present. There has also been no debate in Government time on the debacle that is the Rural Payments Agency. We have had a number of statements, some a little more reassuring latterly than formerly, but it will probably have to wait until the Select Committee produces its report on that in the early part of next year before we can have a debate on what has gone wrong. In the debate today hon. Members have commented on the problem of waste. The Government are embarking on the development of a new waste strategy, but sadly there has been no debate in Government time on what we want done about waste and the sustainability issues that it raises. As the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs plays an ever more central role in policy matters in this Parliament, I for one would like to see that Department punching at or above its weight in getting more time for us to discuss these matters. I welcome the climate change Bill. It contents touch on a certain amount of the work that the Select Committee has done in a series of three reports on climate change issues—one on bioenergy, on which we published our findings, the second on the citizens agenda, which dealt with the question how more of our constituents and businesses can become more closely involved in that endeavour, and the third one which will start early next year on Kyoto 2012 and what comes next. There could not be more important topics than those. In the Government’s publicity about the climate change Bill, we discover that next March we are to receive an energy White Paper. At the very time when we are talking about climate change in a national, European and international context and trying to resolve the many challenges that prevent us from finding the international consensus on the way forward that the hon. Member for Scunthorpe so correctly outlined in his remarks, I found it singularly disappointing that the Government’s response is a further White Paper on energy, following in less than nine months since the last White Paper on energy. Will the Minister change the title and its content and produce a White Paper on climate change, so that the House may consider all the factors that affect the subject in formulating our policy and putting in context the important work on which the climate change Bill will embark? One of the issues about which the climate change Bill has caused most debate are targets. Over the weekend I settled down to watch David Attenborough’s two films once again on planet. As we come to the end of the second one, in which there are shots of the underground flooded, London under goodness knows how many metres of water and large parts of the United Kingdom disappearing, there is a note of hope and optimism. At the end the film shows what the pathway could be to enable us to stabilise our emissions by 2050. Sector by sector—transport, industry, heat, power generation, personal energy consumption—it shows what can be done to achieve that. If we are to have a debate about targets, we need to be a little more sophisticated. We need to think about each sector of our economy, look at what can be done and at what speed we can travel in those individual sectors, and try and set targets that are meaningful. In certain cases, some of which are described as the low hanging fruits, such as the dash for gas in the generation of electricity, the gains have been accumulated. It may be much more difficult to make a great deal of progress in the energy generating sector, whereas in transport there is an enormous opportunity for progress, just as there is in respect of energy efficiency and energy saving in the home and in business. Let us be a bit more sophisticated. I would say to right hon. and hon. Members on both Front Benches that I hope that our deliberations on the Bill will not become a party political knockabout, because the public will not tolerate something as important as this involving comments such as, ““My target’s better than your target”” or ““My idea’s better than yours””. Let us by all means have a debate about ideas, but let us genuinely build a consensus on these matters, as my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench have tried to do. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are some way behind our target of a 60 per cent. reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. From the 1990 baseline, that works out at a reduction of roughly 1 per cent. a year, but we have dropped behind, and we shall now have to make savings of 1.9 per cent. each year. This is where target setting is useful, because it helps us to recognise when we are slowing down and where we might need to put in more effort. I hope that we shall recognise that our debates on these matters are not only about how we generate our electricity. The one third of our emissions that come from heat, and the one third that come from transport must not be forgotten. In our bio-energy report, we have identified the tremendous opportunity for renewables in the generation of heat. Every hectare of land on which a bio-crop is grown will provide the largest carbon dioxide return in terms of the use of biomass. We have also discovered that 1.5 million tonnes of wood are thrown away in this country each year. Simply mobilising the resources that we have will make a tremendous impact on heat generation alone. We must also examine the resources that we use to influence policy in this area. The Stern report suggests that we can afford to do something, but in the very year in which that report has appeared, Government funding for the Energy Saving Trust has dropped. For example, the Department for Transport’s contribution has gone down from £22 million to just under £10 million a year. If the Government are serious about bottoming up activity to ensure that our communities play their part in dealing with climate change in the context of the Bill, they must also be serious about the resources that they put into bodies such as the Energy Saving Trust and the Carbon Trust. I have started an initiative in my constituency called Fylde Low Energy. I set out with the target of making the borough of Fylde the most energy efficient in the country. The first problem that I encountered when trying to mobilise 35,000 households to play an active part was one of finding the resources to employ an organiser to bring together the enormous body of interesting ideas that are already out there. Such ideas have been pioneered by local authorities such as Woking, which has shown what can be done in relation to the local authority estate, although it has not yet reached out as widely into businesses and communities. Fylde Low Energy has had tremendous support from the Government office for the north-west, the Environment Agency, the regional development agencies, local authorities and local businesses, and some organisations have put money into the pot. However, when I look at what the Government are spending on these issues and I see how quickly the resources of the climate challenge fund were gobbled up, I have to say to the Minister that if he really wants our citizens fully to engage in the kind of initiative that I hope to pioneer in my constituency, a little more pump-priming funding would be enormously important. There is much that Members of Parliament can do in this regard. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Scunthorpe and other hon. Members who have been working with the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment, but let us go wider than GLOBE. Let us look at what each one of us can do, with the right direction. For example, we could write to Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives on Capitol hill and ask them why, in this new political climate, they are not doing anything to bring the United States firmly on board. Whether we like it or not, if the United States, India and China were involved in some kind of global framework, we might make some progress. Half the Select Committee went to China recently, and the other half went to America. Anyone who has spent time with Mr. Harlan Watson, the United States negotiator on Kyoto—who finds it difficult to admit that there is even something called a climate—will understand the difficulty that the United States is having in moving forward. There is deep scepticism in its politics. Perhaps it needs to feel the heat, if that is the right term, from those of us here in Europe who are concerned and who have a track record of doing something about climate change. We should challenge it, as fellow democrats, about what it is doing. Let us use our contacts in the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and, indeed, the Commonwealth Heads of Government, who are soon to meet; in the Queen’s Speech, Her Majesty said that she was looking forward to going there. Why not ask them to make climate change the theme of their gathering this year and use the mechanisms that we have at our disposal to influence heads of state and fellow parliamentarians? Climate change is the global issue, and we must use the global mechanisms available to us. I want to conclude with one or two observations about taxation. As a former Treasury Minister, I was most interested to hear the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith) giving advice on being careful about taxation. I do not think that he did that when he was in the Treasury, but a sinner that repenteth is better than someone who continues on the same course. Let me focus specifically on aviation, because much has been made of the possibility of some form of aviation tax. When the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee undertook its work on bioenergy, we discovered that in South Africa synthetic kerosene was being manufactured by the so-called Fischer-Tropsch process. Half of all aviation fuel in South Africa comes from that process. The same process, without, as in South Africa, using coal as a raw material to manufacture synthetic kerosene, can be used to take any cellulose raw material and convert it into bio-aviation fuel. Where is the Government’s support for that? Surely aircraft in the future should fly on the most environmentally benign fuel possible. Let us use our resources to develop that, and not merely leave it to Sir Richard Branson to invest his £1.6 billion. I applaud what he has done, but where is the European response on aviation fuel? Green aviation fuel exists. In the United States, a company called Syntroleum has already produced a synthetic aviation fuel from natural gas for the US air force. A B-52 bomber is undergoing tests to prove that such cleaner aviation fuels are a reality. If that can be done in the United States, we in Europe should be pursuing it as vigorously as we can. The question of climate change unites people in the United Kingdom. We need to unite all the energies of our people, our businesses and our legislature; if we are able to do that, we can make meaningful sense of the climate change Bill. A White Paper that brings these policies together would be a singular contribution to debate on the subject.