argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Free Trade Agreement: Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway — House of Lords, 2021-10-14
Topic: Foreign Trade
David Hugh Alexander Hannay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, speaking as a member of your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee, whose report we are debating, I welcome these three agreements. That may surprise the Minister, who has taken a certain amount of criticism on some of the other debates that we have had on trade agreements, but I do. It is important to avoid the legal and, potentially, practical hiatus in our trading relationship with those three countries that would have followed from our ceasing to be covered by the EEA at the beginning of 2021, this year. Now, as a result of those agreements, that will not happen, which is certainly good news However, I have to say to the Government that they would get more credit on an occasion like this if they did not claim, as official spokesmen have done, that these agreements were in some way a massive break- through, a first new-era post-Brexit set of free trade agreements. That is the sort of hyperbole that I am afraid, since it is not true, tends to discredit what is actually a perfectly well-done job. These are nothing of the sort. We have actually been in a free trade area relationship with these countries for many decades, since before we joined the European Community when we were part of EFTA with them. I have to admit—to my shame, because there is the problem of ageism—that I was part of the negotiations for the free trade agreement with Norway and the other members of EFTA when we joined the European Community.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
Rosel Boycott (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I am very happy to support this amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, I joined up a little too late. Biodiversity is all too often seen as the poor relation of climate change and somehow less important. It is not. It is just as important and life threatening as any weather patterns, droughts or floods—and they are indeed all connected. So what is it? In essence, it is the variety of life on earth and all its interconnectedness. But it is also the product of millions of years of learning—of trial and error—by all the creatures, flora and fauna on earth to arrive at a system where this planet flourishes and where we can exist on it. Everything is in its place and everything is doing its bit—sometimes large, sometimes microscopic—and it keeps our planet in the healthy state that we want to preserve I have heard what we are doing now described as "burning the library of earth". To take something really complex that we have made, let us think of an aeroplane going to New York, carrying 600 people. Out falls one rivet—not too bad. Out come two—maybe not a big deal. But suppose 10, 20 or 30 come out; at some point that aeroplane is going to come crashing down to earth—and that is what we are doing now with the complex world of our biodiversity. We do not know quite when we will pass the tipping point, but we are clearly very nearly there I have a few examples relating to the insect world, which is endlessly dismissed, but—as Einstein, apparently, famously said—the planet would survive without us, but it would not survive without insects. They are essentially the unseen rivers that keep the planet functioning, yet we have not managed to identify them all—and yet we are cutting down their environments. As I said, no one knows how close to the edge we are, but in China they are pollinating apples and pears by hand. In Bengal they are doing the same for squash plants. In Brazil it is passionfruit, and it is blueberries in Canada. Even the French beans in Kenya are now having to be mechanically pollinated because we have trashed the insects Clearly, many parts of the world—and, indeed, under the oceans; we have the temerity to think that we should destroy the ocean bed like we have destroyed the land above—have a huge value: trillions of dollars, or around double the world’s current GDP. In Europe alone it costs the 3% of GDP that we get from our natural services I thoroughly support the amendment. This is an emergency. That message needs to come from the Prime Minister and it needs to be made clear to everyone that we have only one planet and that we have to protect it. Biodiversity is extraordinary and amazing. It is up to all of us in this House to ensure that this becomes part of the Bill.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
John Krebs (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, in supporting the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I draw attention to a particular feature that has been mentioned but perhaps could be made more explicit. It is a feature of both the climate emergency and the biodiversity emergency: the discontinuities that will arise as a result of incremental change. My noble friend Lady Boycott alluded to this in talking about the rivets in an aeroplane: it does not matter, perhaps, if one, two or three rivets fall out, but when more than a critical number fall off there is a discontinuity and the plane falls out of the sky. This is true, as we know from the IPCC and others, of the climate emergency. We hear over and over of the notion of dangerous climate change, whereby if we exceed a certain boundary then we will tip into a new world in which life becomes intolerable and many regions of the planet are uninhabitable for the human species. That is equally true of the biodiversity emergency I am an academic ecologist, and so I will refer back to the scientific literature. Back in 1969, an American ecologist, Robert T Paine of the University of Washington, drew attention to the notion of keystone species. He was studying a species of starfish that lives in the intertidal zone of the north-western United States—Washington state. If this species of starfish disappears then the whole ecosystem flips to a new state, because the starfish is the keystone species that maintains the equilibrium of the intertidal ecosystem. The same will be true in many other situations It is not just the number of rivets that fall out of the plane that is important; it is particular, key rivets. The sad thing is that, if we lose some of these keystone species, we will be among the ones that suffer, because we will suddenly find that the systems we rely on to produce food, purify our water and provide other ecosystem services will simply not exist any more. A genuine emergency is created by crossing these thresholds: once we have crossed them, it will be too late.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I support this amendment very strongly. I speak as the chair of the Adaptation Committee of the Committee on Climate Change. In June this year, we gave our advice to the Government on climate risks faced by the UK, and three of our eight urgent priorities are to do with the impacts of the changing climate on our soils—so it is not just those historic and current farming practices but the fact that our soils now have to put up with droughts, floods, high temperatures and wildfires. Of course, these are unfortunately only going to get worse. This means that we are giving them a very hard time—yet we are expecting them to sequester carbon and support the 30,000 to 50,000 hectares of trees that we need to be planting per annum to meet net zero, and we are expecting them to support increased food productivity to make room for planting those trees. We are expecting a lot from our soils; they need the support of this amendment.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
Charles Courtenay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I should note, for the record and for the whole of Report, my interest as a Devon farmer. For many years, we have been adding organic matter to our porous red sandstone soils to increase sequestration, combat run-off, build resilience to drought, decrease the need for chemical fertilisers and provide Teignbridge District Council with somewhere to put all the garden waste In Committee, we debated a number of potentially priority areas in Clause 1(3). I am glad that this one in particular has returned, and I will strongly support it. I would have added my name to it if it had not been so eminently oversubscribed. I am less keen on Amendment 3, the light-pollution amendment, which pales in comparison and importance to this one The prior debate on these amendments only explained how important this is. In Committee, the Minister confirmed that our understanding of soils is "not as complete as it should be."—[Official Report, 21/6/21; col. 95.] He begged for more time to gather the necessary data. There is simply no more time to do so: our soils are in a crisis and have only a few harvests left, as we have heard from a number of noble Lords. If it is not a priority, how will we ever gather that data? How will Defra be instructed to gather it? The absence of data is seriously damaging the debate on environmental matters, and it is encouraging a number of extremes Take the debate on grass-fed meat and dairy. It is a topic close to the hearts of all Devon farmers. We all agree on the negative impact of indoor lot-fed meat and dairy consuming grain and soya in terrible welfare conditions, but no one knows the net environmental impact of beef and sheep fed on the ancient green pastures of the West Country because the data and the science are not there and everybody has an argument. This was confirmed to me just last week in discussions with an eminent environmental scientist at Exeter University. We really need that data, and this amendment needs to be made to encourage Defra to collect it.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
Charles Courtenay (Crossbench, Unknown): Does the Minister accept that under Clause 1(2) we need to set only a single metric? Is he saying that there is not a single metric that Defra can set that would impact soil? Is that correct?
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
John Krebs (Crossbench, Unknown): I thank the Minister very much for allowing me to intervene briefly. I want to wind back a few moments in his response to this debate, in which he said, as I heard it, that we will not be able to achieve the biodiversity target without improving soil health. I want to clarify what was meant by that. Does it mean that, in the indicator species that will be part of the biodiversity target and halting species decline—the billion bacteria to which my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington referred, as well as the tens of thousands of protozoa and fungi in a single teaspoon of soil—they will be part of the species abundance target and therefore soil health will be folded into that objective?
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
Rupert Carington (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, there is very little that I can add to the speeches of the two noble Lords who have spoken already, but I will make one small point. The opportunity to prevent species’ decline and improve our environment is certainly presented by this Bill, and this amendment would assist. Addressing light pollution offers a simple solution for the species that we are trying to enhance and protect. We should bear in mind, however, that the pollution that we are trying to address does not linger when the source is dealt with—it is an easy win. It also has the added advantage of reducing carbon gases, so these two are major issues that are worth considering in relation to this amendment.
Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-06
Topic: Environment
Ewen Cameron (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 7 at the end of July, before the Government’s Amendment 6 was tabled and was public knowledge, because I think species abundance really matters. I am one of those, perhaps because I am a countryman, who gets worried about the state of our biodiversity. I worry that the CBD and COP 15 are almost never heard of in the press and in public, compared with COP 26—because COP 15 matters as much, if not more, to the future of our planet as COP 26 on climate change, although I realise completely that they are inextricably linked. In many ways, I am very glad that COP 15 has now been delayed until next spring, because the extra time might enable us to get better commitments from the rest of the world. To my way of thinking, government Amendment 6 is as good a way as any of throwing down the gauntlet to the rest of the world: "Copy that", we are saying. Hopefully, with the extra time now available before COP 15 meets, it might encourage some countries to respond in similar vein. I am always eternally optimistic I give the Government credit, first, for introducing Clause 3 in Committee and now for giving it the greater commitment of Amendment 6. I realise that, in government terms, setting a target of this nature is quite a bold step. After all, 2030 is not so far off and, in spite of all the new habitats we hope to create before 2030, from ELMS, net gain, conservation covenants, local nature recovery strategies, et cetera, no one can really predict how nature will respond to these incentives and whether we will get our habitat creation exactly right first time. I suspect not, but it is great that the Government have given it such a priority and, as I say, challenged the rest of the world to follow their example. So I thank the Minister, whose personal hand I detect here, and the Defra team involved.
Security of Ministers’ Offices and Communications — House of Lords, 2021-06-29
Topic: Government Operations
Frederick Butler (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, the use by Ministers of private means of communication is dangerous on all sorts of grounds, and Ministers need good advice about that. Following on from the question of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is there a review of ministerial private use of the internet, so that departments can identify which parts of such correspondence are subject to FOI so that they can deal with FOI requests?
Social Care Reform — House of Lords, 2021-06-29
Topic: Social Welfare
Jane Susan Campbell (Crossbench, Unknown): Can the Minister assure the House that any proposals on the funding of social care will ensure that working-age disabled people who use care services can access the support that they need to live a full and independent life in the community and that the funding will be sufficient to ensure that they no longer have to pay for it, avoiding inequitable and unfair financial hardship?
Social Care Reform — House of Lords, 2021-06-29
Topic: Social Welfare
Sheila Clare Hollins (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, further to my noble friend Lady Campbell’s question, will the Minister commit to mentioning working-age disabled adults every time social care reform is discussed? The needs of older people living in care homes are important, of course, but that is an easier focus for improvement. The real challenge is to improve care and support for disabled adults living in their own homes, including people with learning disabilities and autistic people.
Republic of Cameroon: Economic Partnership Agreement — House of Lords, 2021-06-29
Topic: Foreign Trade
John Kerr (Crossbench, Unknown): While I sympathise with the spirit of the Motion to Regret, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, like the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, I cannot support it because our imports from Cameroon are so marginal that to impose any restriction on them would penalise some people in a very poor country without having any effect at all on the policies of their Government. EU sanctions might make a difference; on our own, we cannot. Trade flows with Ghana and Cameroon are marginal for us, but the point I draw to the House’s attention is seriously significant to British business because it is common to all these so-called rollover agreements. It is addressed in paragraphs 11 and 22 of the report that we are looking at today and concerns asymmetrical rules of origin, which seem to me to be one of the principal respects in which the new agreements are worse for British business than the situation before Brexit Take Cameroon as an example. It imports five times as much from France and more from Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy than it does from this country. Given integrated EU supply chains, there will have been UK content in these imports from the EU, but because our new TCA with the EU does not permit diagonal cumulation, such content will now disqualify such goods from the EU’s preferential trade arrangements, such as those with Cameroon. So, continental businesses will tend to look elsewhere for their components. It is asymmetrical: Cameroon’s exports to us will, under this agreement, still satisfy our rules of origin, however many European components they contain. More seriously, the same asymmetry applies in agreements with major trading partners such as Japan. Under the trade and co-operation agreement, not only will UK-assembled goods—motor vehicles, for example—not have tariff-free access to the continental market; those assembled here will not qualify for the EU’s preferential deals with third countries if their third-country content, in the first case, or their third-country and UK content in the second case, exceed rather low thresholds. That is bound to have serious economic effects in this country The problem was addressed at some length in chapter 3 of the EU Committee’s 24th report, of 25 March, Beyond Brexit: Trade in Goods, but I have not seen any government response and the Minister did not address the issue in the letter he kindly sent us yesterday. I would be grateful if he could now tell us what impact assessment the Government have made of the omission of diagonal cumulation under the TCA and its effects on future third-country trade. Perhaps he could also tell us when the House and the country can expect to see such an assessment.
Republic of Cameroon: Economic Partnership Agreement — House of Lords, 2021-06-29
Topic: International Affairs
John Anderson (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, the seriousness of the situation in Cameroon urgently demands a road to peace. Any form of general instability, upsurges in violence or atrocities in Africa’s central belt, now stretching into northern Mozambique, could create a correlation between abuses by separatists and government forces, which are accused of killing with impunity, and African jihadist terrorist groups turning Cameroon into a fertile recruiting ground While western inertia is worrying, positive engagement between the UN special representative and the Government of Cameroon is of course helpful. Judging by the UN Security Council’s briefing on 7 June, both Russia and China have reiterated their position that this is an internal matter, expressing confidence that Yaoundé can manage. The record suggests otherwise Encouragingly, however, the US now appears to be leading on pressurising for peace. Although predominantly francophone, Cameroon is an equal member of the Commonwealth, but it was the anglo content that was the driver for admittance. The Commonwealth ASG recently underlined to us a recognition that it wants to do more but is hindered by the Covid situation. Will the Minister encourage the Commonwealth to follow through on this matter of the utmost urgency, updating us today on this and the latest considerations of the OAU Government should also place the anomalies of Cameroon high on the list of French bilateral considerations and address the perception of having largely ignored the situation over a long period. London and Paris—which has more influence on Yaoundé than we do—must rub their minds together to bring urgent resolutions to these atrocities. Franco-Cameroonian relations run deep, with multifaceted security co-operation. However, as with the FCDO, little is heard from the Quai d’Orsay, although it responds to debates in the Assemblée Nationale, setting out sizable budgetary allocations to include security and decentralisation Today is the opportunity to be informed of the strategy of the UK Government. We owe it to anglo Cameroon, which was let down from the start. The French Foreign Minister recently noted that a whole generation has been sacrificed, that targeted sanctions of asset freezes and travel bans for both sides should be advanced and that an unstable Cameroon is bad for the whole region. I would add to the mix any sanctions that might focus on the development of Cameroon’s offshore gas deposits, particularly the use of LNG facilities in Equatorial Guinea During a recent parliamentary Session, the French Government addressed the anglophone crisis, with one deputy accusing the Government of supporting the dictatorial regime of President Biya. He is quoted as saying: "The French postcolonial denial is very worrying and these old methods of Francafrique lead us into the wall vis-à-vis Africa and Europe" He added that it is very worrying for France to remain silent about pertinent issues in Africa, and intimated that the UK has the same historical responsibility.
Republic of Cameroon: Economic Partnership Agreement — House of Lords, 2021-06-29
Topic: Foreign Trade
David Hugh Alexander Hannay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, the two trade agreements we are debating today are with two very different countries: Ghana, a flourishing democracy with a robust and growing economy, and Cameroon—[Inaudible]—racked. Noble Lords have spoken so eloquently. They need, therefore, to be considered separately I believe we should give our full and unqualified backing to the agreement with Ghana, but I would be grateful if the Minister would give the House a progress report on the preparatory work his department has in hand for a full, new-style free trade agreement with Ghana and other African countries, not just the tread-water, rollover one of which the present agreement consists. In the case of Cameroon, it would be helpful if the Minister could say, quite clearly, whether the reported human rights abuses were raised in the negotiations. If so, what was the response of the Cameroon Government? If not, why not? Is it not the case that the EU’s Cotonou agreement, to which we were hitherto a party, does in fact provide scope for raising human rights abuses More widely, what are the Government doing, together with others including the African Union and the Commonwealth, to prevent the internal tensions between the anglophone and francophone communities in Cameroon sliding into a full-blown crisis, of which there are far too many in Africa When the Trade Bill was passing through this House, the Minister gave a number of assurances that human rights issues would be an integral part of the Government’s future trade policy. So, these questions are valid ones, and I hope he will be able to answer them. In April, we heard that there had been no discussion of human rights in the context of the UK-Turkey negotiations, despite the prevalence of such problems in that country. I will listen carefully to the Minister’s replies to this debate and, in the light of that, decide whether to support the Motion to Regret which I am minded to do.
Britain’s Railways — House of Lords, 2021-05-24
Topic: Transportation
David Brownrigg Craig (Crossbench, Unknown): [Inaudible]—the experience, particularly of Southern, has been blighted from time to time by industrial disputes. What involvement have the rail unions had in helping to formulate these new plans? Post Covid, many people may continue to work part-time from home, reducing passenger numbers below the 2019 figure of 1.8 billion per year. What assessment have the Government made of this likely reduction?