---

Climate Change

As other Members have said, it is most important that Parliament is debating climate change—and on only the fourth day back. Our debate has mobilised the local radio station in my constituency, BBC Radio Stoke, to cover energy issues on its morning programme during the whole of next week. I hope that our proceedings today will encourage such debates all around the country. I particularly look forward to the Secretary of State’s contribution to those radio programmes next week. Our debate today is an opportunity for us to congratulate everybody who is doing so much to put climate change at the top of the agenda. Only if we all act together can we respond to the challenge of climate change. If we ignore that challenge, we will leave our grandchildren, and even our children, to suffer the consequences. I want to flag up the work of the Environmental Audit Committee. I am sure that everybody agrees that when it was set up 10 years ago our understanding of environmental degradation was nowhere near as wide as it is now. Our Select Committee has really tracked climate change and I pay tribute to the work of the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), who now speaks for the Opposition, as former Chair of the Committee. Our Committee’s reports on green government, on the pre-Budget reports, on education for sustainable development and on ““Keeping the lights on”” have helped us to focus on the targets and actions needed, as well as on the gulf between words and action. Through Parliament, the Committee has helped to maintain and to inform the debate. As we move on to the next, urgent stage in tackling climate change, we should be looking at what extra role this Parliament and Parliaments across the world can play to keep world leaders focused on tackling climate change. The fact that the general public—our citizens—can now easily access the Committee’s reports and use them to inform themselves, their colleagues and neighbours, at work and at home, about the changes that we shall all have to adopt and to engineer means that there is a new way of bringing home to people a simple truth. We all have to find new ways of tackling the challenge of climate change—not only world leaders and national leaders but leaders in every community. I am pleased that this debate coincides with the Committee’s decision to publish quickly, on Monday, the Government’s response to our most recent report; we felt that Parliament should have the benefit of the report this afternoon. Anybody reading the reams of detailed, wide-ranging, technical and, in places, passionate written and oral evidence received by the Committee will instantly be able to catch up with issues that often seem complex and with which the Government have to grapple within an extremely restricted time frame. As we have already heard, we have only a short time to meet the challenges of climate change. It is as though we are speaking at five minutes to midnight—or even later. Our report acknowledges the unprecedented change in the energy policy landscape and the sharp rise in public interest in energy supply and energy security against the backdrop of rising prices, while climate change is the most pressing issue of our times. It is for Government to lead us through all the contradictions, but they can do so only if the public are aware of, and understand the bigger picture. A constant theme in all the Committee’s reports on the issue is the need for leadership, so I applaud our Government and our Prime Minister for the leadership that the UK has shown and continues to show nationally and internationally. We are shaping the international framework. We have already heard about the follow-up to the G8 summits at Gleneagles in 2005 and St. Petersburg, and meetings have recently taken place in Mexico. Our Government are helping to create consensus among the big polluters, although I do not know whether we can achieve one across the Chamber. We have heard about the bilateral treaty that was signed with India. Today, Parliament must endorse all the international initiatives, and we must support Ministers as they approach the Nairobi meeting next month. I am also pleased that we may have representatives from the Environmental Audit Committee at that meeting as well, to support what is being done. Action on the world stage must be matched by leadership in our own country. It is important to have a foolproof way to deliver year-on-year commitments to reduce carbon emissions. We must turn our attention to what we can do, and how and when we can do it. I therefore want to add my support for the pleas to include a climate change Bill in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech. However, a climate change Act would not be the be-all and end-all—the single magic solution—to reducing carbon emissions. Quite simply, there is no single, simple solution. As well as systematically preventing CO2 emissions, we must all make unprecedented changes to the traditional way of running our economy and living our lives—something that has been touched on in the opening speeches. The Government are right to promote energy efficiency seriously, to support new green technologies and to transform procurement policy. I should like to add my support for the procurement policy issue that was picked up by the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), because the Government could be doing far more about that. We need to consider revised planning guidance. We want to make the comprehensive spending review an unapologetic driver of sustainable development. We need to do all those things at the same time and with urgency. But most of all, we need to have the backing of the British public in all those changes, and we need to do far more to find out how we can get them on board. I shall quickly deal with the legislation on energy policy that is expected to be presented to the House in the coming months. It will provide an important opportunity for Parliament—both in the House, in the Chamber and in Committee, and in the other place—to debate how we can make the changes that we need. We have heard a lot of reference to how the UK met its Kyoto targets early, but we did so as much by chance as by design: we were very much able to take advantage of the dash for gas. We should beware of a false sense of security because emissions are on an upward trend, as we have heard. That could jeopardise the medium-term target of 60 per cent. cuts by 2050. Of course, as we heard in the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen), the more science and understanding that we have, the more we know the scale of the problem and the quicker we may need to go, perhaps even more quickly than the 60 per cent. cuts. We can only do that if we all understand the bigger picture. Once we start a journey, the more distance we cover, step by step, the more we can see just exactly where we need to be. I should like very briefly to dwell on the role of nuclear energy. I do not feel that the Minister for Energy, who is based at the Department of Trade and Industry, has set out how the new nuclear build needed to replace the generation of reactors that is being phased out can be in place by 2010. The Sustainable Development Commission, which is the Government’s own adviser, noted that nuclear power will make little contribution towards reducing carbon emissions before 2020. The then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, who appeared before our Committee, acknowledged in his evidence and supplementary memorandum that it was likely to be 2018, at the very earliest, before nuclear capacity in a new form could be in place. The issue for the Government is that, as things stand, there is no institutional framework to guarantee investors secure returns over the long term, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will look at that in the coming months. Turning away from energy policy at the DTI to other Departments, I am pleased to see the lead that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is taking in ensuring that other departmental policies are consistent with our climate change policy, but the problem is that such things never happen quickly enough. I should like to ask whether the Government can do more to resolve the issues that have been flagged up by the Companies Bill, which the House will debate next week, and to find out what they can do to respond to the requests for environmental reporting, which we need if we are to keep tabs on what is happening. Looking at the framework for sustainable development in respect of the Government estate, which was introduced in 2002-03 and flagged up in earlier Environmental Audit Committee reports, we can be really proud of the aspirational target that the Government have set to become carbon neutral by 2012. That is going to make a big difference. I would like the Minister to put his energies into seeing what can be done to extend that further, so that rather than excluding the NHS and the education estate, it could extend beyond Government offices. I would like the greening government targets for operational management of Departments to apply right across the board. The Lyons review is looking at ways to relocate Departments from London and the south-east. There are huge opportunities to integrate all that. I want to flag up the issue of private finance initiatives and how they are being used. I am pleased that the Minister of Sport and the Government have pledged that the 2012 Olympics are going to be the greenest ever. We should take a leaf out of that book in respect of PFI and the design, construction and maintenance of each and every new building around the country. It is clear that we are embarking on a major programme of house building, as well. High standards will be needed. As we have already heard, we could go so much further. We could look at Treasury rules in respect of whole-life costing so that financial appraisals take account of the full costs—capital and revenue—and the extra investment that is needed now will not be ruled out because there is not the maintenance and the revenue money to pay for it. There are also the issues raised by the built environment professions. I want to flag up the Royal Institute of British Architects and its ““Manifesto for Architecture””, which was recently published. I share its hopes for the Government’s code for sustainable homes, which I acknowledge has been strengthened. The issue is that the code remains voluntary, apart from houses built by English Partnerships or the Housing Corporation. Pressure needs to be placed on the commercial housing sector to raise building performance standards even more.