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Climate Change

The proposal that we have advanced is to change the air passenger duty. When the Conservative Government introduced air passenger duty, they made no estimates of its likely impact on the growth of passenger numbers, but clearly there was some. We are suggesting that we abolish the air passenger duty and restructure it so that it is a duty on the emissions of flights. We proposed a package of £8 billion extra in green taxes overall. I am happy to deal with that in more detail later. The first area that shows the lack of joined-up government is the Treasury. The Government have been going backward on green taxes. That is a crucial part of the explanation for the rise in carbon emissions since 1997. The second area in which policy is dysfunctional is public spending. The DEFRA budget overruns in farming are one-offs, but the Treasury is still insisting on cuts in DEFRA’s budget—for example, in flood defences and the maintenance budget for flood defences, as the Secretary of State admitted earlier. When we know that one of the effects of climate change is rising sea levels and more extreme storms and weather events, that seems little short of irresponsible madness. There is clearly an appropriate degree of concern from the Association of British Insurers about that, given the understanding that the ABI reached with the Secretary of State’s predecessor about covering households that were to benefit from the introduction of flood defences, but may now be deprived even of the proper maintenance of those that already exist. The third area that demonstrates a lack of joined-up government is public expenditure within the Department of Trade and Industry. The fact that the Government, through the Natural Environment Research Council, are closing the centres for ecology and hydrology—in particular, the centre at Wool in Dorset, which I recently visited—is extraordinary given the importance of that centre’s work in understanding the impact of climate change on biodiversity in the United Kingdom. A recent article by Chris Thomas and his colleagues in one of the leading scientific journals projected that 18 per cent. of all species sampled would be, as the article somewhat euphemistically put it, ““committed to extinction”” on currently projected levels of global warming. There is a clear need for the Government to address that issue, because we need to maintain the expertise that has been built up at centres such as Wool, and the long data sets of natural phenomena, if we are to understand the impact of climate change. My fourth example concerns the Department for Communities and Local Government, which—I hope that this is contrary to the advice of the Secretary of State—is planning no fewer than 108,000 new homes on flood plains. That is a crazy policy, given the likely impact of climate change. The hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) has mentioned procurement, so I will not labour the point. However, I will mention the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s extremely high-handed abandonment of the operating and financial reviews in the current Companies Bill. There is no evidence that there is an effective Cabinet Committee, let alone an effective Cabinet, on global warming or climate change. Does such a Committee meet? Who chairs it? Should the chair be the Deputy Prime Minister? How will it be made far more effective in linking the efforts of the Government on climate change? And is there anybody other than the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs who is committed to the agenda?