My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is doing such spectacularly fine work personally and through Peers for the Planet, of which I am also a member. I rise to move Amendment 4 and to speak to Amendment 10, and I shall also speak in favour of all the others in this group.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, referred to the important report released yesterday by Onward on green jobs. I have scratched out a lot of what I was going to say about that, as the noble Baroness covered it comprehensively, but it is worth restating the conclusion that she highlighted: net zero, the Government’s legally binding target, is not deliverable without a massive increase in relevant skills.
Speaking second in this very large group, with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, having outlined the detailed structure of her amendments and with others yet to explain theirs, in the interests of time I will speak generally to express support for all these amendments, many of which I have attached my name to. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for their work, which I have stepped behind to support. I note particularly Amendments 3, 9 and 25, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which have attracted broad cross-party and non-party support, including from the government Benches, and to which I would have attached my name had there been space. Then I will get to the detail of Amendments 4 and 10, which appear in my name.
All these amendments, in different ways and in different sections of the Bill, seek to mainstream attention to the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis in the skills agenda in every community. I am using the word “mainstream” because where we are today is reminding me very much of the mid-1990s, when I was working in international development. There was a great debate then, when bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF had discovered the importance of women to societies and even—shock-horror—economies. The great debate was whether to separate women’s programmes or whether women’s issues, concerns and rights should be put into every programme. It feels like, in terms of the environment, we are somewhere in that stage of debate now. We have got to a situation where recent Finance Bills, after lots of hard work in your Lordships’ House, have finally included at least the climate emergency. But I am afraid that the lack in this Bill of that, of biodiversity and of our busting of planetary boundaries in multiple directions is a demonstration that the Government still really do not get it, which is particularly disturbing for the chair of COP 26.
So I was thinking about this group and wondering how I might help the Government to understand, and how to build that understanding into action. I thought about that magic phrase “the economy” and how often we hear from the Government that everything needs to be done for “the economy”. I want to suggest to Ministers and civil servants that, every time they hear themselves saying that phrase or thinking that thought, they put “the environment” in front of it, acknowledging that the economy is a complete subset of the environment and that every single element and every penny is dependent on the air we breathe, the ground we rest on and the soil and water that produce our food. When we
are thinking about local economies, we need to be thinking about local environments. To complete the set, we need an understanding that communities—people individually and collectively—and their well-being are the foundation of our economies. This is systems thinking expressed in concrete terms.
When will we know whether we have succeeded? It will be when we no longer have large groups of amendments like this merely introducing climate and other environment goals into Bills. When we move on to strengthening what the Government have proposed, then we will know that some progress has been made.
I have been talking in abstract terms but, thinking briefly about the practicalities of the skills needed, food growing is one obvious and much underconsidered area for climate mitigation and adaptation, looking to the urgent issue of food security. On home energy efficiency, I have referred previously in your Lordships’ House to how the building industry is frantically wondering where it will find the skilled staff that it will need should the Government finally manage to sort out the funding in this crucial area. Engineering, particularly for public transport schemes, is another huge area of shortage.
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I turn now to my specific amendments. Amendment 4 adds “and biodiversity” to the already excellent Amendment 3; this is not in any way a criticism of it but a friendly strengthening amendment, reflecting, I am pleased to say, the way that many other amendments in this group already include biodiversity with climate.
On Amendment 10, in my name, I am not confident that the way it is currently worded is the best way, referring to specific regulations; what I am talking about is particularly broader. I chose that wording to stress the way in which the Bill needs to fit with other expressed government aims. In the Grand Committee debate on the regulations referred to in this amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said that
“ecodesign policies have also included resource efficiency measures, which seek to make products more repairable and recyclable, thereby reducing their use of material resources.”
He went on to say:
“A wider range of spare parts and helpful information will be made available to professional repairers, which will facilitate even more complex repairs to be carried out by people with the right skills to do it safely.”—[Official Report, 8/6/21; cols. GC 264-65.]
Yet I doubt that there is anyone in the House today who has not had personal experience of how hard it is to find and secure the services of such a professional repairer. One recent case study I know of concerned someone who sought, from a fairly high-end manufacturer, a repairer for a washing machine. The first available appointment was 10 weeks after the call.
What we are talking about here are fairly obvious environmental measures, so you might say they are covered by the other amendments in this group. But we need a specific focus on the need for repair skills, something that has essentially almost entirely disappeared from our communities. We should see, as we have seen happening in some communities in some places, local repair shops practically on every street corner, so that people could go to them and get things fixed. But that would require a huge injection of skills. I would very
much welcome further discussion on the best ways to structure an amendment such as this. A clear direction of the need to build repair skills needs, I believe, to be a distinct part of this Bill. I beg to move.