argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Alan Patrick Vincent Whitehead (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister is sort of nodding his head, so that is good. At the earliest opportunity, we need to have a good look at the new low carbon programme to see whether what we are committing ourselves to do can really be carried out, and, if it cannot, what we must do next to make sure that we can meet those commitments. That is part and parcel of the documentation, and the sooner it can come forward, the better. I hope that by putting the two issues together, we can get a real grip on what we have committed ourselves to and how well we can do it for the future.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Margaret Greenwood (Labour, Centre-left): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) on securing this important and most timely debate Last September, I met Councillor Miguel Magalang from the Philippines to hear his first-hand experience of the impact of climate change in his country. He was visiting the UK to raise awareness of the impact of the increasingly extreme weather conditions that the Philippines are experiencing. The Philippines are made up of thousands of small islands. He told me that it looks like a tropical paradise, with sandy beaches lapped by turquoise blue waters. However, this beautiful place is suffering from the impact of climate change through increasingly frequent typhoons. His country—his home—is under threat, and people have to live in readiness to follow evacuation procedures. This means uncertainty and instability for everyone, and it has a knock-on effect on the economy, the education of children and the provision of healthcare. In the typhoons of 2012 and 2013, over 8,000 people lost their lives. The message from Councillor Magalang was simple: climate change is here now, not in the future, and we should play our part in tackling it. The UK has responsibilities to other parts of the world, such as the Philippines, as a major emitter. Like other industrialised countries, we clearly bear a strong responsibility for climate change, and we should therefore provide a strong lead in taking action to tackle it.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Energy
Nia Rhiannon Griffith (Labour, Centre-left): I was referring to exporting the idea. In the past—with wind turbines, for example—we have lost the initiative in manufacturing and find ourselves importing. We do not want to do that. We want to be world leaders—we want to make the components, export them and build potential markets for our industries for the future.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Nia Rhiannon Griffith (Labour, Centre-left): That sounds like a very exciting project indeed. The whole point is not to think about the cost of an initial project, but the huge impact of rolling it out: reducing emissions, finding good markets for our components industries and ensuring we are up there as a world-first. There would be huge kudos for the Government if they did that.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): I apologise for not attending the first part of this debate. I was chairing the Environmental Audit Committee where we were hearing from Ministers from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Minister from the Department for Exiting the EU I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) on bringing this debate forward. It has been some time since we debated climate change. Like other speakers, I believe that this issue is one of the three great challenges of our age. The first is the challenge of the ageing society and how we can all live better now that we are living longer. How can society adapt to that new longevity? The second challenge stems from technology hollowing out traditional jobs and traditional workforces. How can the Government collect taxes on the new economy when the intellectual capital exists in places such as California, but the products are consumed in our own country? The final great challenge of our age is climate change There is the challenge of adaptation to protect our island from the different weather patterns we will see in the future. How can we mitigate the risks and play our part in the world in standing by our poorer neighbours? As previous speakers have said, they have done nothing to cause this catastrophe, but having risen out of poverty, they now risk seeing hundreds of millions of their own people being dragged back into it through climate change. It will either cut off their food supplies and their traditional ways of life or, in the worst-case scenarios, see island states disappear under water altogether In 2015, 190 countries adopted the new climate agreement in the first ever universal and legally binding global deal. We cannot overstate how much of an achievement that was and what a great part the UK Government played in achieving it. The Home Secretary, then Climate Change Secretary, really took the lead on that, and it is a great shame that the Government have now abolished the Department for Energy and Climate Change. The lessons from other countries show that when climate change is put into a pot alongside other industrial and energy policies, climate change is often the loser as economic interests take over. We do not value what we cannot see. This is one of the big "abstract thinking" problems of trying to deal with climate change. We are talking about worst-case scenarios in 20, 30 or 40 years’ time, but scientists would argue that we have just seen 14 consecutive months as the hottest on record and are now 1.1° above our pre-industrial revolution peak.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): What I would say about a 2050 target is that it is long enough away for none of us to be accountable for it, because most of us will be dead by then. [Interruption.] Well, some of us; I probably will be—no, I will be enjoying a long and fruitful old age, as I intend to live until I am 100. I want to see interim targets, so if there is a 2050 target I would be interested to see what are the 2020, 2025 and 2030 targets, because faraway targets can always be our children’s problems The issue in the report about our transport sector is that we are not doing enough now, and I want to develop my theme because transport emissions increased in both 2014 and 2015. Some 94% of those transport emissions are from road transport, and we were concerned that less than 1% of new cars are electric. There is a good reason for that: they are very expensive—£30,000 or £32,000, perhaps. The Committee on Climate Change says that we need 9% of all new cars to be ultra-low emissions vehicles by 2020 if we are to meet those targets at the lowest cost to the public. We should match what the Committee was saying with the Department’s forecasts; the Department was saying, "Well, actually 3% to 7% of vehicles will be ultra-low emissions by 2020, but our average central point is 5%." So the Department’s central forecast is 5%, but the Committee on Climate Change says it should be 9% That is worrying, because the next target—the 2030 target—is that 60% of all new vehicles should be low-emissions. If we are only at 5% by 2020, I cannot see a way of getting to 60% of low-emissions vehicles without some spectacular change in the way we buy cars in this country, and we did not hear any brilliant bright ideas from the Department for Transport. We heard of the money that was committed, but we did not hear a strategy for getting that mass take-up. That means we are playing catch-up and we are not going to follow the lowest cost route to decarbonise the economy.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): We did not look at all the life cycle issues, but I have a feeling that that might be coming out in the hon. Gentleman’s report. If so, that would be great—a good bit of boxing and coxing from both Committees. He makes a good point: we still have coal-fired power stations, and it would make no sense to have emitting power stations fuelling electric vehicles. We need to look at the whole life cycle of the power supply. There are big issues with battery storage and battery life, and it would be a great prize for our industry if we could find a way to capture renewable energy and store it when we have more than we need I have talked about air pollution and air quality zones, and the fact that the targets will not be met until 2020. The report contains a detailed analysis of that. The Volkswagen emissions scandal revealed that 1 million diesel cars in the UK contained cheat device software, and we found a worrying inertia among Ministers when it came to deciding whether to take legal action or any other action. We want Ministers to ask the Vehicle Certification Agency to carry out tests to find out whether those Volkswagen group cars in the UK would have failed emissions tests without those cheat devices. It is important for people to know that. We would also encourage the Serious Fraud Office and the Competition and Markets Authority to make their decisions about whether to take legal action against Volkswagen. In the United States, Volkswagen owners have already started to receive compensation; some have received as much as $10,000 The Committee has also produced a report recently on the Government’s approach to flooding. Flooding is the greatest risk that climate change places on our country, and the risk is threefold. There is a risk from surface water following heavy rainfall, whether in summer or winter. The July 2007 flooding, which flooded more than 1,000 homes in Wakefield, was the largest civil emergency that this country had seen since world war two. There is a risk from river flooding, which is what we saw in the Christmas and Boxing day floods in York and all across the country, including Scotland and Wales. There is also a risk from a tidal surge from the North sea. We were in a position, I think in 2014, in which a combination of high winter tides and heavy rainfall resulted in red flood warnings and evacuations from Newcastle all the way down to Margate. The entire east coast of England was at risk from a tidal surge The ways of mitigating these risks are complex. We need to get in place the civil resilience systems so that we are able to respond when floods occur. So far, we have been fortunate that most of them have happened at different times, but if we were to experience all those different kinds of flood problems at the same time, there could be issues relating to our ability to respond adequately.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: International Affairs
William Roffen Esterson (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his exceedingly early intervention in my speech. Of course, there are many examples of the kind that he gives We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) about the worrying loss of UK influence on tackling climate change, like so much else that results from the Brexit vote. He also mentioned his grave concerns about the damage being done to the international community’s ability to tackle climate change, given our leading role up till now and the likely dramatic reduction in our influence outside the European Union We heard contributions from my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), who reinforced the importance of the UK’s role and the implications of Brexit. He questioned whether Government policy meant that we were on track to meet our obligations. That theme was picked up by other hon. Members later in the debate, including my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh). We heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood), for Copeland (Mr Reed) and for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), among other contributions Earlier, the Minister spoke about what he called the Government’s fantastic record, but he rather ignored the fact that investor confidence has plummeted, subsidies have been cut and jobs, not least in the solar industry, have been lost. He blamed the European Union for our not having ratified the Paris agreement, while acknowledging that other European countries had done so. The Government and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have been happy enough recently to act against the rest of the EU. The UK recently blocked action by the rest of the EU to protect our steel industry. The Government are happy enough to take unilateral action when it suits them, but we had enough false claims about the EU during the referendum campaign, thank you.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Alan Patrick Vincent Whitehead (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister mentions the signing off of the fifth carbon budget and my pleasure about that, but perhaps he missed the point I made earlier, which is that the Government are nowhere near in any possible way meeting the terms of the fifth carbon budget, as a result of the policies they have recently put in place. That is presumably of some concern to him.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Environment
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): I do not know whether the Minister has seen the conclusions of the Environmental Audit Committee report, but the transport sector is set to miss one of the Committee on Climate Change’s interim decarbonisation targets by over 50%. Will he comment on some of the specific challenges facing the transport sector and on the fact that we are set to miss our fourth carbon budget for 2027, which is in nine years’ time?
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Diana Ruth Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): On the regions, at the same time in 2014 that the Department for Transport was providing £30 million of public money to back the bridge, despite the £185 million scheme not having the required £100 million of private sector funding, Hull had £100 million of private sector funding to electrify the rail line to Hull. The Hull scheme was submitted to the Department for Transport and has sat in the Department for over two years, even though it had to provide only £2.4 million of public money. Does that not show that the regions are losing out again when it comes to transport investment by this Government?
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Christian John Patrick Matheson (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is a doughty campaigner for her constituency in London, but does she agree that no other city or region of the UK would qualify for the level of Government attention and initial expenditure the bridge has received?
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Christian John Patrick Matheson (Labour, Centre-left): In my very brief contribution, let me start by paying warm tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey). It says a lot about her and her priorities that when she is offered what is apparently a prestigious large-scale project in her constituency, she instead considers its effect on ordinary people in her community, and her mind is made up partly because of that. I also pay tribute to her for the forensic way she has tried to get through the murk of the financing of this project. She has obviously made some progress, but some murk remains; there is still a lack of clarity My ears pricked up at the sound of the £30 million from the Government. The Transport Minister who is in his place will know that I have been campaigning for just £100,000 for a transport project on the M56 to put in police and Highways England safety cameras. Sadly, the Minister declined that expenditure. Yet at the same time we can find £30 million to pour into a black hole, which my hon. Friend tells us is a vanity project, with several big-name backers but no clear benefit to the community. Will the Minister tell the House in his response whether he thinks that £30 million spent on a vanity project garden bridge in London is better expenditure than £100,000 on motorway safety cameras in Cheshire? Is the garden bridge receiving this level of public money simply because it is in London rather than the north-west of England?
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Stephen Pelham Pound (Labour, Centre-left): I am afraid my hon. Friend seems to be straying into the Brexit argument about figures written on the sides of buses, because I do not necessarily think this is an either/or. I am massively in favour of my hon. Friend getting all the money he needs for his part of the world, and he has made the case very strongly, but he must not think it is because of the garden bridge that he is not getting it. I ask him to let his spirits soar with the imagination of this marvellous project which will be immensely beneficial to London and the country. Tourists will flood in to see this beautiful creation. Have a little imagination. Chester is a beautiful city—I admire it and love to visit it. Come and visit London and see, hopefully, our marvellous garden bridge.
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Government Operations
Christian John Patrick Matheson (Labour, Centre-left): My spirits soar every time I hear my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound). My point is simply that there seems to be a reason why £30 million of public money is being given to this project despite the immense lack of clarity that my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall has exposed, despite no clear end to the project, and despite very little financial and accounting responsibility and oversight.
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Peter Christopher Dowd (Labour, Centre-left): I completely take on board my hon. Friend’s point. Does he agree that, by all means let us have vanity projects, but let us have them when we have done the bread-and-butter stuff? In my constituency, we have got £10 million for a major link to the port and railway, but meanwhile tens of millions of pounds are being spent on these vanity projects.
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Government Operations
Christian John Patrick Matheson (Labour, Centre-left): Much as I support the campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile), I am concerned that we are getting away from the main points that have been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall. I simply want to ask the Minister whether he believes that this would be £30 million of public money well spent, and whether that amount would ever have been spent anywhere other than in London.
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Diana Ruth Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have listened carefully to what you have said. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) on her speech and on the questions that she has asked. We all deserve to get answers to them. I appreciate that London is the capital city and that it rightly gets more money as a result, but I recently learned that the new Crossrail station at Canary Wharf was costing £500 million —and getting a roof garden; there is obviously a thing about gardens going on—which is more than double the cost of what my city of Hull needs for rail electrification and for all the road transport schemes that we have been arguing for for many years. It would therefore be helpful if the Minister told us what prospect there is of closing the gap, given the ratio of 6:1 in relation to funding for London compared with other parts of the United Kingdom. That seems quite out of kilter, especially if the Government really are committed to the northern powerhouse and to rebalancing the spend on infrastructure all around the country.
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Catharine Letitia Hoey (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister might be aware that the Ramblers, an organisation that is not known to oppose anything that will help people to be able to walk, has made it clear that it opposes this, because one condition of going on to the bridge will be that people will not be able to be led in a group, so it would not be able to take its groups across the bridge. Many different conditions have been put in place. This is not just going to be a garden or a bridge, and it certainly cannot be called a garden bridge.
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Government Operations
Catharine Letitia Hoey (Labour, Centre-left): None of this scrutiny would have taken place just because the NAO decided to do it. These things have happened because local people, local councillors, myself and others who are campaigning were so concerned about what was happening that we asked the NAO and Greater London Authority members to investigate. The investigations are still going on, so this has not been completed. The fact that this is being investigated is not any sign that there are not huge problems, and I think that all sorts of things will emerge when the process is finished.
Garden Bridge — House of Commons, 2016-09-07
Topic: Transportation
Diana Ruth Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): The scheme to which I referred in Hull—electrifying the train line—involved private sector money. It was not going to cost the Treasury or the Department for Transport; the money was there from the private sector, yet the plan has been sitting in the Department for two years waiting for a decision.
Allies and Partners: Co-operation — House of Commons, 2016-06-27
Topic: International Affairs
Benjamin Peter James Bradshaw (Labour, Centre-left): Given the intensified bombing of Aleppo by President Putin over the weekend, and the important role that Britain played in stiffening European resolve on sanctions against the Putin regime, how concerned is the Secretary of State about the impact of the referendum result on European solidarity in standing up to Putin?
Daesh — House of Commons, 2016-06-27
Topic: International Affairs
Louise Margaret Haigh (Labour, Centre-left): What assistance are the Government providing to the Jordanian authorities in the light of the recent deterioration in security there, and especially in the light of the recent suicide attack that killed six soldiers outside a refugee camp?
Daesh — House of Commons, 2016-06-27
Topic: International Affairs
Joan Marie Ryan (Labour, Centre-left): Opposition activists and Kurdish officials have said that hundreds of Kurds are fleeing Manbij, and that the Syrian defence forces are engaged in clashes there with Daesh. If Manbij is captured, it will be the biggest strategic defeat for Daesh in Syria. Can the Secretary of State comment on the situation, and particularly that of the Kurdish civilians, who are being abducted in their hundreds?
Daesh — House of Commons, 2016-06-27
Topic: International Affairs
George Edward Howarth (Labour, Centre-left): While we have been otherwise preoccupied, the atrocities that have been carried out by Daesh over the last few weeks remain deeply worrying. Will the Secretary of State give an undertaking that he will co-operate through NATO bilaterally with other European allies and take strategic action unilaterally to make sure that everything possible is done to try to stop these appalling atrocities?
Naval Procurement — House of Commons, 2016-06-27
Topic: Macroeconomics
Kevan David Jones (Labour, Centre-left): After last week’s vote, these are uncertain times for UK manufacturing. One thing that the Government could do now to boost manufacturing and protect British jobs and skills would be to make a decision on Successor and bring it forward. Will the Minister say when that vote will be?