Treasury and Work and Pensions

I had intended to concentrate on the work and pensions aspects of the Queen’s Speech but, before doing so, I would like to make a few comments on the economic aspects. I noted that the Chancellor mentioned a cost of £5 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and he repeated, in a slightly different form, the assurance made by the Prime Minister some weeks ago that troops in the field would get whatever equipment they required. The problem is that troops from my constituency, from 45 Commando, are currently operating in Afghanistan and there have been reports that they are not getting all the equipment they require. There is a disconnect between what is being said in this country and what is happening on the ground. Whatever we may feel about individual operations, we would all agree that troops fighting those operations should get the equipment they need. The Government need to look seriously at this and make sure that these troops and others get the equipment they require. On climate change, I was interested in what the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) said and agreed with much of it. Like the hon. Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Austin), I took part in the campaign ably organised by Friends of the Earth for a climate change Bill in the Queen’s Speech. I, too, was pleased to see that such a Bill was included, although one got the impression that it was stuck in at the last minute because of the huge build-up of support for it. It has not been particularly well thought out; indeed we have yet to see the detail of the Bill. The only thing that the Prime Minister has said so far about it is that there will not be annual targets because they are not practical. I disagree; it is important that we look at annual targets because they give a measure of how we are progressing on climate change. It is not beyond the wit of parliamentary draftsmen to build in a fail-safe mechanism for unforeseen circumstances, which we all accept can occur in any one year, that balances them out overall. The most depressing thing about the debate on the proposed Bill is that it seems to have centred so far entirely on the question of taxation: what will be taxed, how it will be taxed and who will be taxed more. Tackling climate change must go much wider than that; it must encompass all areas of Government. If we get bogged down in arguments about taxation only, the people out there who are very concerned about climate change and want to do their bit will be turned off. There are very difficult issues, but we must look at other ways of tackling climate change, and not just through taxation. For example, there are many ways we can look at how government works. In many areas of rural Scotland—I am sure that the same applies in rural England—services have been centralised, which means that people have to travel much more and emissions increase. This has gone on for some years in hospitals, schools and other areas. If the Government are serious about tackling climate change, we must look at reversing that process and making sure that services are near the people who wish to use them, which will reduce the amount of carbon that is required.