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Climate Change

I shall try to keep my comments as brief as possible, Madam Deputy Speaker. I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate. I should like a more substantial debate in the future, based on a Bill similar to the one proposed by Friends of the Earth. I am proud to be a member of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has been conducting a timely inquiry into various elements of climate change. Last month, we reported on renewable energy and biofuels. We are currently taking evidence about what individual citizens can do, and we will shortly be looking at the longer-term policy agenda. We recently visited China, which was incredibly insightful. We went to a car factory, where we were told of the rather worrying aspiration to give every Chinese family a car. Several politicians spoke to us frankly about climate change; they shared their distrust of capitalism and what the west is saying. One of them summarised their views well when he said, ““Look, you’ve had your industrial revolution, you’ve had your chance to develop. Now it’s our turn.”” But if they develop as we have done, it will kill off the planet. It is essential that the international community works together, but the impact of China and India does not mean that we should not act as individual citizens. That Chinese politician said, ““We want to see you suffer as well””, and asked why we did not all have photovoltaic cells and solar power. If we expect the Chinese to change, we need to change even more. We must take climate change even more seriously than we do already. At Cabinet level there is already a precedent for cross-cutting Ministers. There should be a Minister solely responsible for climate change, not with a full Department but with a team that cuts across Departments. It is not enough just to have a climate change office, although it is a step in the right direction. Flooding and housing are significant issues in my constituency and, more generally, in the adaptation and mitigation debates. In my constituency, the Environment Agency is consulting about flood defences in the Great Wakering area, where there is an enormous risk of flooding, as there is throughout south Essex. This morning, I met Charles Beardall, the very good manager of the Environment Agency’s eastern region. He told me an astonishing fact—I had to make him repeat it three times because I thought he had got it wrong: a house built this year with only a one in 1,000 chance of flooding every year will have a one in eight chance by 2080. I have a newborn son, and those houses could flood within his lifetime. Building in the Thames Gateway—let alone in a number of other areas—makes no sense to me when we are subject to those risks. In fact, we are considering building more than 120,000 houses in the Thames Gateway by 2016. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. We must do more about the standard of the houses that are built. It is quite criminal that we let houses be built to such a low standard. I am not one of those people who say that we should compel companies to include solar panels, photovoltaic cells, water butts or insulation. We need to set overall standards, and companies can innovate as a result of them. For example, we could say that half the water consumed by the House must be collected locally, or that the House must produce half the energy that it consumes, and it does not matter whether a wind farm or photovoltaic heating is used to do so. If we are prescriptive, we will stifle innovation, and it is important that we do not do that. Action on new housing will also pump-prime the marketplace. The Chinese were very entrepreneurial in many ways. They were saying, ““We want you to have photovoltaic cells. In fact, we can produce them very cheaply if you buy in volume.”” Joking apart, such things will be beneficial, and high-profile environmental activities help to educate people. Certainly, when the Select Committee went to Leicester to see eco-houses and wind farms in schools, we could see that that was helping to educate children. We have done an awful lot to date, but there is so much more to do. We need a climate change Bill. I hope that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs misread his speech earlier on, because I was diametrically opposed to what he seemed to say. I think that he said that he believed that we would be judged not by results, but by how we get there. I think that he probably got that the wrong way around—we will be judged by results—and the Friends of the Earth Bill would put down a base point that all future Governments could aim for and achieve. That would overcome some of the electoral resistance to some of the very difficult and tough decisions that we must take.