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Building Britain's Future

Is the region well placed to deal with an economic upturn? The answer is no. In that sense—and only in that sense—we are probably fortunate that there is no upturn. My right hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South said in an earlier intervention that one of the great mistakes of the last recession was the failure to have a plan for what would follow afterwards. Sadly, that is still where we are now. I worry when I hear elected Members state that Britain is well placed to ““weather the storm”” of the global economic crisis. It is as though the storm will pass and we will return to a period of calm in order to carry on the economic voyage as it was. My take is that we will never return to the economic framework that existed before the current crisis. What waits for us after this crisis is a series of other crises that will be determined by events outside our control. At some stage, we will hit peak oil and peak phosphates. Some climate change experts say that we are already hitting the limits of peak soil and peak water. That may come as a difficult fact to take in the east midlands after the summer that we have had, but that is the reality of the world that we have shaped for ourselves and a result of policies over the past 50 to 100 years. I am pleased that the regional Minister put his name to the ““East Midlands regional climate change partnership””. On the lunch-time news, the Business Secretary was repeatedly asked whether he saw any signs of green shoots, and I was pleased that he declined to respond to that. The honest answer is that if there are to be shoots in a post-crisis economy, they will have to be green. The hon. Member for Chesterfield talked about President Obama’s approach to shovel-ready projects, which is important. However, President Obama has also set out the most incredible challenge to the US—that of transforming the nature of the economy towards a sustainable economy, and opening up challenges and directions that we have yet to properly respond to. The ““East Midlands regional climate change partnership”” document states that the region currently emits about 50 million tonnes of carbon a year. Under the current programme, we will have to reduce that by 80 per cent. by 2050. This morning, the Government’s Climate Change Committee said that if we continue with the folly of trying to exclude aviation and shipping from that equation, the rest of the economy will have to reduce carbon emissions by 90 per cent. by 2050. That means that by 2050, we will need an economy in our region that runs annually on 5 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year. Do we have a plan for doing that? No, we do not. We cannot masquerade as though we can build roads and rebuild industries that are heavily carbon-delivering, while at the same time living within the constraints that the climate and the planet will impose on us. We have resources in the region. We have lots of innovative industries. Toyota has delivered the Prius car and taken vehicle manufacture into an era in which the acceptable vehicle will not deliver more than 100 grams of carbon per kilometre. However, the issue is not about stimulating the car industry as a whole; it is about developing a different notion of the car industry. We have some exciting developments in sustainable energy, but the issue is not about carrying on with energy production as we have done in the past. In Nottingham, we are blessed with the presence of EMDA, although it is a dubious blessing. EMDA has been given national responsibility by the Government for coming up with a framework of sustainable procurement policies. I thought that EMDA was a blessing until a case when the combined hospitals trust told it about a fantastic sustainable procurement policy. There is a genius catering manager, John Hughes, who found that he could save the hospitals £1 million a year just by throwing out the culture of contractors. He wanted to set up a network of local food suppliers to double nutritional standards, secure farm incomes and develop an infrastructure that would massively reduce food miles. He also wanted to set up a sustainable kitchen and use hospital food waste and other food waste in a biodigester to harness the biomethane to provide heating resources for the process. When the project was submitted to EMDA, EMDA could not even grasp the concept. It said, ““Oh no, this is a hospital project. It is too difficult for us.”” Now, if a regional development agency does not have a clue about sustainable procurement, then someone—I do not care who—has to grab that development agency and shake it by the shoulders to make it do what it says on the packet, or what the Government try to say is on the packet. If it cannot do that, then we should dump it. We should be unafraid to say that, without lines of political accountability, the regional development agencies have no line of accreditation and just freewheel around whatever conventional strategies suit an economic view rooted in the past and not in the future. The same applies to our shift into renewable energy. We fought long and hard in Parliament to get the Government to introduce feed-in tariffs, so that consumers could be generators of their own renewable energy. The Government have got a consultation programme out at the moment—the proposals are not very good, but they can be improved—and the rules will have to be put in place by the end of the year, so that they are in operation by April 2010. However, I wonder whether, as a region, we have the skills infrastructure to deliver. The answer is no. When I talk to communities and local authorities that are desperately keen to charge down that path, they always point out that if the Government want them to run with that, there is the question of finding or producing kids with the skills to install the plumbing, produce the technology and perform servicing and maintenance. We need a whole infrastructure rethink that will deliver that and run with it. In many ways, we do not have a lot of time. Our own Climate Change Committee has made it clear that the UK’s carbon emissions must peak by 2015. From then, there must be a 4 to 6 per cent. annual reduction in our carbon emissions. We have to move towards post-carbon economics. That must be driven not by hopes or by individual projects, but by a coherent plan. I believe that we can do that, but I have to say to the Minister that my challenge to him, and to all members of this Regional Grand Committee, is that if we want the region to lead this, there has to be a lead from us. We have to make demands, rather than running on a series of promises and wishing for a future that we do not construct. If we have the courage to do that, the region can be in the lead. If we cannot do that, we shall be in a huge and almighty mess.