Debate on the Address

My Lords, I return to the local government brief with a mixture of pleasure, déjà vu and terror after an absence of six years. The Government live in Whitehall and they believe in politics and legislation. Local authority members live in communities and have to make difficult decisions that directly affect their communities. The Government think that new management structures are more efficient. Most local authority members whom I know feel disassociated from the decisions taken in their authorities. The Government think that structural reform is the way to progress. We must be the only country in the world that has spent 40 years arguing about the structure of its local administration. Local authorities see that as unsettling and as an intellectual distraction from their proper function, which is the provision of services. The Government nowadays pay the majority of local government costs and think that the funding that they provide is generous. Local authorities have to make difficult budgetary reductions, year in and year out. These are two different worlds or, perhaps, the obverse and the reverse of the same coin. My noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach could be said to have recorded a similar situation with regard to the rural community, particularly in relation to agriculture. Defra lives in one world, while the countryside and rural communities live in a different world. I acknowledge that the two are interdependent, but sometimes it seems that ne’er the twain shall meet. One of the most remarkable things is that local authority members and their employees, and farmers and rural industries, all deserve our praise, because they work to make a success of their communities, despite government, not because of government. Four major Bills announced in the gracious Speech have formed the theme for our debate today. If a common theme runs through the debate and the Bills, it is how we should carry our communities forward, improve them and, most important, keep them secure for the foreseeable future—that is a long time nowadays, when we begin to consider the issue of global warming. That is the first and vital point that we all need to keep in the back of our minds, whatever our differences of perception about particular approaches. I shall try to pick up the Bills, so to speak, one by one. Housing was the first. The debate was begun in a concentrated way by the noble Lord, Lord Best, who has enormous expertise in dealing with the problems of the private rented sector and how to improve it. The issue of housing is insoluble without the provision of houses. The Government have rightly focused on the need to build a large number of houses in the coming decades. The Government are taking some credit—and I give them some credit—for raising the annual housing construction rate, but we should remind ourselves that it is only about five years ago when it sunk to a level that was seen only in the 1920s, apart from the war years. I remember that, when I first went into local government, the annual building rate was 360,000 per annum, which is more than double the present annual rate. These things can be done; it is a question first of the determination to do it and then of the provision of resources, finance, land and so on. There are many obstacles to all these things. The quality of housing is also significant. We need to take note of what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, said, particularly when she referred to the excellent and somewhat historical development, which we forget too often, of the garden cities. We are in an age of land hunger. We have heard in some important speeches the theme that we are moving from an era of food surplus to an era of food shortage. In that transfer, there are serious implications for our communities, but it means that we have to make much better use of our land for housing. The sort of densities in Letchworth, which I agree is a wonderful place, are not justifiable in the age in which we now live. Housing design was mentioned. We must find a way of designing high-density housing that is still attractive and in which people still want to live. That is not an easy conundrum. When you are building a lot of houses, you are also building communities. When building communities, you need recreation space, circulation space, retail space and space to work. Although you may target 30 or 40 houses per hectare, or 50 or 70 houses per hectare on residential land, a community needs much more than that; you cannot begin to approach such densities except perhaps in very tightly developed city centres. The key issue, which we need to recognise, is that there is no solution to housing without houses. We have to build them and we have to find a way of doing so. This, of course, has an impact on the Planning Reform Bill, which will be looked at closely, in part because some changes will be brought in that will tend to remove the influence of local communities over what is happening in planning. We will have to ensure that we maintain local interest in development when the pressures for development move away. That applies in particular to the major infrastructure projects, which will be dealt with, first, by a government policy statement so that they have that approval, and then by a commission, which will have to decide whether what the government policy says is appropriate. It will probably be very difficult for the national planning commission to resist the blandishments of the Government who created it. However, that remains to be seen; I do not doubt that this issue will be a fruitful source of debate when we come to consider these matters. The biggest Bill of all is the Climate Change Bill, which has a number of aspects that we need to keep in the back of our minds. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, got it pretty well right when he talked about hyperbolic discounting. I always thought that ““hyperbolic”” was something that you used to disinfect the loo but obviously I am not correctly informed. The noble Countess, Lady Mar, and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, talked about food security, and the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, also spoke strongly on that theme. These are fundamental issues not just for our immediate future but for the future of mankind and they will unquestionably come back to this House time and again. However, if we do not take the essential actions that will be required to get our appetite for fossil fuels under control, we shall find ourselves in very deep trouble, because we know that the world is changing. All the signs that I see in the infinite number of reports on what is happening to the global climate are that the situation is getting worse. In four years, I have not seen any good news on the climate front. I am becoming concerned about the way in which the climate change debate is going. Everyone insists on looking at the problem from where we are now. I entirely agree that that is logical but we need to think very seriously about where we are going. The Government have a target of a 60 per cent reduction in the 1990 figure for carbon dioxide by 2050. My own party and a number of other commentators talk about an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. I was very pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, speak along those lines and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, may well have said the same thing. We need to think very seriously about what sort of community we will be when we have reduced our emissions by 80 per cent. Therefore, I start my consideration of the problem from there. There are three issues that we need to think about. The first is that any solution has to work with the grain of the community and its development. If we try to force people to do things that they do not want to do, it will be very difficult. The second factor to bear in mind is that this is an international problem. It looks as though the global population will rise by 50 per cent by 2050 and all those people have to be served and have to be able to live a useful life. The third factor is that there are one or two industries for which there is no apparent alternative to fossil fuels. Aviation is obvious; shipping is possibly another. One that is not often talked about but is fundamental is the smelting industry—the basis of all society’s raw materials. Those three industries are essential for the growth of transport of people and goods and, when one considers the construction necessary to house them, to provide industry, employment and all these other things, one sees that it is likely that these industries alone will use up virtually all the carbon allocation available by 2050. We must consider whether we can contemplate a society where everything else is done without using fossil fuels. I suggest that they can be done in that way, and we should take heart from this. Four major energy sources are available that do not produce carbon dioxide. What I call the hydroelectric sector includes waves, ocean currents and tidal barrages; I am glad that my noble friend Lord Crickhowell mentioned the tidal stream system being brought forward. Then, of course, there is hydroelectric itself. Solar power, including photoelectricity, is possibly the greatest of all four potential sources of energy; after all, all our energy, even fossil fuels, is the product of solar power. Then there is wind and, finally, nuclear. A combination will be required. All those sources of energy produce electricity. We must consider a society entirely based on electricity. We should remember that the all-electric household and office are already at zero emissions; you do not need to do anything to reduce their carbon footprint because they do not produce any carbon, provided—and this is the key—that their energy source does not produce carbon. We have the sources, and we could do it. One problem that we face is that huge sums of money are spent annually on research and development by existing industrial systems that are dependent on fossil fuels when we must stop using them. That money could be devoted to research and development on the already existing industries and technologies that would enable us to have entirely electric railways and road transport either on batteries or on fuel cells running on hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced using green energy through hydrolysis and so on. There is plenty of energy. We can get wind turbines. Actually, I do not like wind farms, but wind turbines need to be widely dispersed across the country, feeding local communities. We can go to small combined heat and power plants and have biofuel plants on the edges of communities. Our major power stations—even our nuclear power stations, in an ideal world—will also be sited on the edge of communities, so that all the waste heat that they produce can be used. One appalling thing about how we do things today is that our electricity generation is grossly inefficient in its energy performance. It produces huge quantities of waste heat that are not picked up and used at all. My noble friend Lord Crickhowell produced a considerable blast on behalf of the Severn estuary. I remind him that if we fail, and mankind fails, the Severn estuary as we know it will be destroyed anyway. A barrage may be preferable if it makes an adequate contribution to getting our appetite for energy under control. I do not believe that we will succeed if we simply try to restrict everybody’s energy use. Of course all reasonable economies must come forward, and they will, because there will always be an incentive, as there has been for the past 30 years, for people to be more energy efficient. We have to find out how we develop—and it can be done—so that people can continue to lead the lives that they wish to lead, not the lives that we might wish to dictate because of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. I hope that that is a message of hope for the future. I believe in technology and I believe that we can find solutions to these things, but we will not do so if we try to force people in directions that they do not want to go.