Brexit: Environment and Climate Change — House of Lords, 2017-03-23
Topic: Environment
Lynne Featherstone (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): It is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who really made my role redundant as he has said everything I would wish to say. On Brexit, of which I am sure it is clear I am not a great fan, I think of the phrase, "How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time". This is obviously the environment and climate change bit. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Teverson and the committee on beginning its gargantuan task identifying and categorising the issues and actions needed even to begin to address extracting ourselves from the EU in this regard. I sometimes think that everyone who works on this, whether a remainer or leaver, must have at some point thought, "Wow, it would be much easier to stay"—at least, that is what I hope they think I hope and trust that much of what we are about to do will be to recreate what currently exists. My particular portfolio is energy and climate change. I will confine myself to those aspects of the report and perhaps look at some of the compensatory actions that we will need to take. The report rightly says that we have established in UK law our commitment to those measures contained within the Climate Change Act, including the carbon budgets and of course the well-respected Climate Change Committee—thank goodness. As I said, I thought the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, covered beautifully all the aspects of climate change policy that need to come into play. But while the Climate Change Act protects us to a degree it goes only so far The Government have stated on many occasions, in this House and in the other place, that they will uphold their agreements, standards, targets, commitments et cetera, but I confess that I lack confidence in the Government. When we are not held to those standards or targets, when we are no longer monitored by the EU institutions and fail standards enforced by the EU, I fear we will not meet our targets. I fear a decline and a rush to deregulation. I was a Minister in the coalition. I cannot forget those occasions when the Conservative part of the coalition went on and on about deregulation. It was almost a religion with them. Statements made on becoming a virtual tax haven and other comments in that direction do not encourage confidence in the maintenance of standards The emissions reduction plan was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I ask the Minister: where is it? Is it ever disappearing into the future? Although I understand that the Government believe they can hold themselves to account, I do not share that optimism. Sadly, I prefer supranational oversight in this regard. We will need to set up new institutions to deal with compliance, infraction and additional enforcement. There will need to be biting sanctions on non-compliance. If we adopt EU regulations on energy efficiency into our own law, as I think we should, and if we keep up fuel standards for land vehicles and product standards for appliances, we will surely have to comply in order to trade. We need that alignment of standards. The report rightly says that the emissions trading scheme is not super-effective but it is very important. How and with whom will we trade emissions? What will happen about updates to EU regulations? They do not stand still, so even if we adopt them as they are, we will very quickly fall behind on, for example, the energy efficiency directive I do not want to just go through the report: it lays out well the areas and issues of importance. I trust that we will work towards reconstituting literally all of this. If this is the opportunity that we are encouraged and enjoined to support, then we have not only to reconstitute outside the EU what we subscribed to and benefited from in the EU but to go further. We need to change gear. There is no sense of urgency currently from the Government about meeting our targets or taking new actions and producing new policies to help us reach the level of emissions reductions that the Paris agreement committed us to. That was not an EU commitment but a world commitment. If the argument that there is a big, wonderful world out there with which to trade is to hold water, we need to capitalise on the economic opportunity that the clean economy offers us. We need to act faster and more urgently to make it clarion clear to the rest of the world that we are open for clean business and completely committed to decarbonisation Our future prosperity is going to depend on developing an economy that is innovative, entrepreneurial, internationally open and environmentally sustainable, and one where the benefits of growth are shared fairly across the country and with future generations. Our membership of the EU guaranteed our commitments to the climate change agenda and was a safeguard against this Government or any Government undermining our ability to deliver on our legally binding targets. Will the Minister say, outside the EU, what our guarantor of delivery will be We must improve the efficiency of resource use and decarbonise the economy. That will help create high skills and high value-added industries able to compete in the new global markets for low-carbon and resource-efficient products, technologies and services and create jobs throughout the country. It is really as plain as the nose on your face that with the Paris agreement and the sustainable development goals, low-carbon products and services are the future, and that future is worth trillions to this country I have to say that the industrial strategy offered by the Government was virtually mute on climate change. We need to establish a clear and consistent commitment to policies that create long-term demand for low-carbon transport and energy efficiency, thus giving investors the confidence they need. And boy, do they need confidence, because thus far this Government have done their best to undermine investor confidence by changing the goalposts. They have taken away from wind and solar subsidies that everyone would agree were necessary to remove in the long term but which, done at a stroke, undermined all business plans—let alone the removal of the £1 billion carbon capture and storage manifesto pledge The Government need to strengthen their support for clean innovation and encourage the creation of clean financial products to bring consumer capital into these clean industries. As I am at seven minutes, I will simply thank my noble friend Lord Teverson and the committee for the vital work that they have done. I reiterate, however, that although reconstituting must be mandatory, it is but the minimum needed to drive both our economy and a clean planet forward.