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Local Government and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

My principal concern with the Government's approach to environmental issues is not about a lack of good will on the part of the Government—we have heard a great deal of it today—but about a lack of urgency and ambition. I am also concerned about the failure to extend interest in the environment sufficiently beyond the narrow concerns of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and into other parts of Government, including the Department for Communities and Local Government, whose programme we are also considering. On climate change, the urgency is extreme. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) pointed out the potential global catastrophe that we face. The Government's Stern report said that an increase in global temperatures of 2° would cause falling crop yields, water shortages, rising storm intensity, forest fires, droughts, flooding and heatwaves, and the possibly irreversible onset of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the collapse of all or part of the Amazonian rain forest. Stern quotes the intergovernmental panel on climate change's 2001 assessment as saying that the risk of that happening with atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 450 parts per million is 38 per cent. Stern also quotes the Hadley centre as saying that the likelihood is much higher, at 78 per cent. However, 38 per cent. is not a risk that I would even like to take crossing the road, let alone playing with the future of the planet. Complacency even starts to creep in in the Stern report. Strangely, Stern draws from those alarming risks the conclusion that 550 parts per million is a safe target to aim for, which has been translated into the Government's targets. As I mentioned in an earlier intervention, the IPCC figures might be conservative. The recent fourth assessment report is based on data collected by 2004 and so misses out a great deal of recent and even more alarming research. That includes research that has said that carbon intensity in the global economy might not be decreasing, as the IPCC assumed, but increasing, owing to rapid economic growth in India and China, thus making the situation more alarming than thought. The picture might therefore be worse than the IPCC, Stern or DEFRA have realised. So why is the target reduction in the Climate Change Bill still only 60 per cent. by 2050? The opinion that that target is utterly inadequate is now widespread. I was pleased to hear the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) and other Labour Members agreeing with that proposition. I hope that we can form a cross-party consensus that the figure in the Bill needs to rise, although I was a little disappointed that at an event that the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), and I attended yesterday he failed to support any increase above the 60 per cent. reduction in the Bill. I fear that the Conservatives will not be backing Friends of the Earth, the Liberal Democrats and others in arguing for much more ambitious targets. Like the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles), who spoke earlier, I regret the lack of urgency in bringing forward a marine Bill. We first consulted on the proposal, at length, in 2006. This year there has been a White Paper and yet more consultation. There is now a draft Bill, with yet more consultation in 2008, yet it is a measure that enjoys all-party support. We have years and years of consultation, but what we need is legislation. The need is urgent: more than half the UK's biodiversity is in our coastal waters, and the economic activity in those coastal waters is worth billions, yet the management of our seas is at the moment ““ad hoc”” and ““reactive””. Those are not my words; they are the words of the Government in one of their many consultations. Worse still is the fact that some measures in the Government programme will pose a threat to our environment. Measures on housing, energy and planning address urgent and important issues, but all carry risks to the environment. They will, for instance, pave the way for a new generation of nuclear power stations, which the Liberal Democrats believe will be unpopular, unsustainable, unaffordable and unsafe for generations long into the distant future. If the Government's energy strategy concentrated as much on renewable energy as it should do, we could look forward to a cleaner, greener future instead of being led down this dangerous path to nuclear new build. The planning reform Bill will be used as a cloak to facilitate the building of new nuclear power stations, probably on many of the same sites as the last generation of nuclear power stations, some of which could still be contaminated when they are overwhelmed by sea-level rises and storm surges due to climate change. To say that this is not joined-up thinking by the Government is to put it mildly. Planning reform is certainly needed, but it is needed to entrench, rather than undermine, local people's rights. In my constituency, residents are happily watching hundreds of new houses being built on brownfield sites. In fact, local councillors of all parties have accepted a figure of 8,500 new houses, so there should be no accusations of nimbyism there, even though that insult is a rather feeble one that is used whenever local communities seek to defend their quality of life, which is something that they have every right to do. Councillors and politicians in Cheltenham draw the line, however, at building 14,500 new houses, or perhaps even more, under the new targets being imposed on us by Government inspectors soon. That would represent a 25 per cent. growth in the size of our town. If a similar kind of growth were imposed on Greater London, most of the Government's 3 million target would be met in one fell swoop. Pushing all the new housing into a few urban extensions and a few growth point areas such as ours, thereby pushing development into the green belt and on to flood risk sites, threatens to bring about an unsustainable level of growth that will create urban sprawl and add further pressure to local roads and services. Such is the green light being given to developers that they are even eyeing up the Cotswolds area of outstanding natural beauty, which most local residents had assumed was absolutely sacrosanct from development. Development is being aggressively promoted at Glenfall way in my constituency, which is inside the AONB. I hope that that application will be thrown out, and I equally hope that the planning reform Bill will not encourage developers to try again later, although I fear that it might. On another site, in Leckhampton, following 700 objections to a greenfield development that had previously been ruled inappropriate by two Government inspectors, an application has been made yet again. In effect, those 700 objections to the earlier, almost identical application will count for almost nothing, and the whole process will have to start all over again in the community. We need planning reform to level that playing field and to make it a fairer fight between local communities and aggressive developers. I would object less if this manic push for huge numbers of new houses was actually going to work as a reliable way of delivering affordability. The truth is, however, that house prices in Cheltenham are high not because insufficient land has been released historically—in fact, there has been a massive amount of new building over the past 20 or 30 years—but because of a national trend towards higher house prices, which has been influenced as much by interest rates, mortgage lending and a lack of social housing as by a lack of land being released. Locally, we have outstanding schools, a thriving local economy, a fine, attractive town centre and attractive parks. All those factors would still be there if we experienced this enormous growth, and I suspect that we would still have relatively high house prices. Of course the developers want to build on greenfield sites near towns such as Cheltenham: it is much more profitable than the alternatives. One such alternative is urban regeneration. It is no wonder that the west midlands regional development agency, in its evidence to the Communities and Local Government Committee, said that the policy of creating urban extensions next to relatively affluent towns would actually undermine urban regeneration. It is no wonder that there are complaints from less wealthy counties, such as Cornwall, which want and need the housing more. And it is no wonder that there are complaints from smaller, rural communities whose post offices, shops and schools are closing for lack of people and which are not being given the allocation of housing numbers that are being attached to large towns such as Cheltenham. Another consequence of the headlong rush to have new build on valued green spaces is the loss of plant life, higher carbon emissions and loss of biodiversity, not to mention the straightforward loss of beauty, which is rarely mentioned by politicians, but valuable to our quality of life, mental health and the simple enjoyment of the countryside. Once lost, those green spaces are gone for ever. Instead of slow-tracking the Climate Change and marine Bills, which should have been fast-tracked, I suggest that the potentially disastrous market-driven predict-and-provide planning and housing policy is where the Government need to pause for thought, consult and go back to the drawing board.