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Alison McGovern's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 11 Parliamentary debates in which Alison McGovern has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 17 Dec 2025: Local Government Finance

  16:16

  I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point, which is very apposite given the effects of climate change and other things. I am sure that the fire Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), will have heard what she said, and we will all work together to make sure it is addressed.

  [Source]

• 1 Sep 2025: NEET: Young People

  00:04

  The Secretary of State mentioned some moments ago that in everything we do in the Department for Work and Pensions, we are trying to close the gap between those who have suffered disadvantage and those who have not. Young people, especially those who have experienced poverty, are vulnerable to mental ill health, and the pandemic generation deserve more support to get chances that they have missed. That is why we have a joint work and health unit with the Department of Health and Social Care. We also have many agreements across Whitehall relating to our net zero mission, as well as our investment in defence, to help employers recruit the next generation, whatever their background.

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• 12 Jan 2022: Transport Connectivity: Merseyside

  17:10

  Thirdly, people without cars need better transport because they need to be able to get to work and have better chances. We all need people to get out of their cars, because we all need to do something about climate change and we know that it will most affect those who have least. It is a matter of our environmental future and a matter of equality. I ask the Minister what conversations he has had with the Liverpool city region about its plans, because we need to supercharge them.

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• 15 Nov 2021: COP26

  17:31

  I noticed that the Prime Minister mentioned Aristotle in his statement, so could he explain how breaking his own manifesto promise to the poorest people in the world, those worst affected by climate change, could possibly be consistent with the actions of the virtuous person?

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• 9 Nov 2020: Future of Financial Services

  We do not see very much of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in this place. I wonder what it could possibly be about the Monday after the electoral routing of populism in the USA over the weekend that makes him want to come to the Dispatch Box and speak about climate change. Never mind the good management of his reputation, his Government cannot escape the consequences of Brexit and the lack of the deal that was promised for financial services. Given the shape of the UK’s economy, the consequences will be far worse for those workers we keep talking about who are in financial services outside London and in other regions. Will he confirm what he believes will be the relative regional impact of the current state of the Brexit negotiations? What is his policy to stop Brexit making regional inequality even worse?

  [Source]

• 19 Oct 2019: European Union (Withdrawal) Acts

  13:56

  The next generation cannot trust this deal when it comes to environmental protections. We have seen the protests about climate change, but those voices are not heard. When it comes to freedom of movement and our rights at work, generations of trade unionists cannot trust this deal. We on the Labour Benches are representatives, not delegates, but I challenge any Labour MP to disagree with the delegates of any trade union branch in the country. We cannot trust this deal.

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• 17 Sep 2015: Feed-in Tariff

  10:14

  Green energy is vital to our economic future and I am afraid that companies such as Natural Energy Sources based in Bromborough in my constituency simply would not recognise the Government’s account of what they have done, given the risks they have created for the solar industry. I ask the Minister to think again, do as so many Members have suggested, and restructure this change to feed-in tariffs.

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• 8 Sep 2015: Finance Bill

  14:47

  I rise to speak to Opposition new clause 2 relating to the Government’s changes to the climate change levy in clause 45, which have already been outlined by hon. Members. The climate change levy is a carbon tax on the non-domestic use of energy. Clause 45 is concerned with the removal of the exemption currently available to electricity generated from renewable sources in the form of levy exemption certificates. For some years now, these certificates have ensured that electricity generated from clean sources has not been liable to what is, or was, essentially a tax on carbon emitted from the generation of non-domestic energy supplies. In removing the certificates, the clause reverses that principle, leaving us in the utterly perverse situation where renewables generators will be taxed for their contribution to climate change, regardless of the fact that they make little or no such contribution. Several Members have mentioned the apple juice analogy, so I will hold back from repeating it, but it goes without saying that it is an excellent one.

  The clause is just one aspect of this Government’s new approach to energy and climate change, which entails abandoning the most cost-effective forms of renewables, reviewing environmental taxes, and, apparently, abandoning their commitment to tackling climate change. That approach risks undermining an area of the economy that has some of the most promising prospects for the future. That sector offers more productive, higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs, particularly in the northern regions and in Scotland; and one would think that it was central to the Chancellor’s so-called productivity plan and his alleged northern powerhouse.

  New clause 2 would therefore require the Government to set out the cumulative impact of the removal of the exemption on existing renewables generators and projects currently in the pipeline, where almost all the projects and the banking arrangements or investment decisions underpinning them will have been based on the current fiscal and subsidy framework; on investor confidence in the UK’s green energy sector, which is clearly vital to the future of the green economy and the high-skilled, more productive jobs that will flow from it; and on the UK’s ability to meet its climate change obligations, in which renewable energy has a vital role to play and may make up the shortcomings in other sectors—something that Ministers do not recognise at the moment.

  Clause 45 retrospectively removes the exemption from the climate change levy—a tax levied on all non-domestic energy use—for electricity generated from renewables from 1 August 2015. The climate change levy was introduced in 2001. Its aim was to help the UK to meet domestic targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It has always been charged as a flat rate of energy consumed for non-domestic use. However, energy generated from renewable sources has always been exempt from the levy in the form of the exemption certificates that are awarded to renewables generators and, in turn, sold to electricity suppliers for less than the cost of the levy. This regime has helped to make clean energy more attractive and provided greater financial support to renewables projects for their lifetimes.

  The Government have set out two justifications for the removal of the levy exemption from renewables: first, that it seeks to correct a so-called imbalance in the tax system whereby renewables generators based overseas benefit from the levy exemption when, according to the Government, they already receive state subsidies in their origin countries and are therefore unfairly benefiting from British taxpayers’ money; and secondly, that it provides so-called better value for money for UK taxpayers—or, to put it another way, raises a considerable amount of revenue to help the Chancellor balance the books. According to the tax information impact note accompanying this measure, the renewables exemption, as it stood, would cost nearly £4 billion over the course of this Parliament, one third of which would go to overseas generators. HMRC claims that there is evidence to suggest that some of these overseas generators receive support in their own countries, although it does not provide any specific evidence. Perhaps the Minister might like to comment further. Regardless of that, the fact is that what was essentially a carbon tax is now becoming simply an energy tax. As Friends of the Earth has asked,

  “When is a carbon tax not a carbon tax? When it is a tax on zero-carbon things.”

  These changes to the climate change levy come on the back of a raft of announcements since the general election, most notably from the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, which reflect the Government’s apparent U-turn on tackling climate change. Since 7 May we have heard that subsidies for large onshore wind projects are to be axed, while other subsidies for onshore wind and solar photovoltaics are set to end a year earlier than previously announced. The previous coalition Government’s commitment to increase the proportion of tax take from environmental taxes is to be abandoned, while all environmental taxes are to be reviewed. The coalition Government’s flagship green deal scheme to provide energy efficiency standards in homes—which, sadly, proved to be a complete flop—will be not reformed but scrapped. The link between a vehicle’s tax liability and its CO 2 emissions is to be loosened under the reform regime. The zero-carbon homes commitment, first made in 2006 by the then Chancellor Gordon Brown and which would have ensured that all new-build homes from 2016 were self-sufficient, is to be scrapped.

  [Source]

  18:49

  That is terrible news for our region and the rest of the country. My hon. Friend and I have a great deal in common, not least that we have both visited renewable energy firms in our constituencies. I visited one recently that was similarly disappointed at the Government’s attitude and the business now faces risks that it simply did not expect.

  NAREC Distributed Energy, the National Renewable Energy Centre in the north-east, has suggested that it knows of at least four European wind developers that have decided to cease, or significantly to reduce, plans to develop in the UK. It says that another firm from mainland Europe with which it was in talks has decided to avoid the UK completely. We have also heard from sources in the solar industry about the growing concern that the industry faces severe challenges ahead.

  According to the Renewable Energy Association, some 112,000 people are employed in the renewable energy value chain across the UK, some 11,000 of whom are employed in the north-west—my region—alone. Companies in the north-west turn over some £700 million a year, which is investment we can little afford to lose. According to the REA’s figures, the number of renewable energy jobs has grown seven times faster than those in the rest of the economy. Green jobs are undoubtedly vital to regional economies in the north and in Scotland, where renewable technologies are deployed much more widely, and renewables supply chains are more established there than elsewhere in the country.

  “What I don’t understand is why the government would apply the carbon levy on renewable energy plants which are carbon-positive—it’s illogical.”

  If the Minister does not like to hear it from me, perhaps he will take it from those on his own side, because there has been no shortage of criticism from Conservatives. Various members of the Conservative party have, quite rightly, failed to comprehend the lack of coherence not just in the Government’s climate change agenda since the election, but in their wider approach to ensuring that the UK is an attractive proposition for investors. The Conservative peer and former shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Lord Flight, in a damning verdict of the Chancellor’s revenue-raising decisions, said:

  “Charging renewable companies the Climate Change Levy is a contradiction of Government energy policy, which is still seeking to encourage Renewable Energy investment.”

  The Chair of the Conservative Environment Network, Ben Goldsmith, wrote a letter to the Financial Times describing the climate change levy changes as “perverse” and “contradictory”. He even drew parallels with Greece:

  The reaction across the business world and among other stakeholders speaks to a wider point about what these changes mean for the UK’s economic future. Despite the rhetoric from the Conservative Chancellor about a plan to boost productivity, deliver higher-skilled, higher-wage jobs, pursue cost-effective climate change policies and act always in a business-friendly manner, the truth is that clause 45, taken together with a string of other policy announcements since 7 May, symbolises the exact opposite of that approach.

  New clause 2 calls on the Government to assess all of the impacts I have just outlined. It aims to highlight the true impact of removing the climate change levy exemption for renewable-sourced electricity. It asks Ministers a number of questions that are crucial to the future of the UK’s green economy, its role in achieving a more balanced, productive economy, and the UK’s role in the world. How does the removal of the exemption affect existing renewables generators and projects currently in the pipeline? What impact will clause 45 have on investor confidence? Finally, what does it mean for the UK’s ability to meet its climate change commitments?

  [Source]

  19:20

  The right hon. Gentleman has set out the two objectives that he thinks the Government should have. Is he suggesting that tackling climate change should not be the Government’s objective?

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• 9 Jan 2014: Global Food Security

  15:59

  The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that about 842 million people, or one in eight of the global population, suffer from chronic hunger. Although the global trend of hunger is, thankfully, downwards, all too frequently there is a lack of resilience in food supply, which can put millions of people at risk of tipping into hunger as a result of external influences, whether due to a spike in food prices, as the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) mentioned, to climate change or to conflict. It is worth noting that 1.3 million people in the Central African Republic, for example, are now at risk of hunger—that is a huge number; 40% of the country’s population—as a result of the ongoing internal conflict there.

  The Committee’s report is welcome and wide-ranging. It demonstrates not only the urgency of tackling food security issues but the breadth of policy areas, both international and domestic—from transport policy to food waste, from social protection to co-operatives and climate change—that have an impact on ensuring that food resources are used sensibly and sustainably and are distributed globally in an equitable fashion. We heard something of the breadth of the report from the Chair of the Select Committee earlier.

  Further, the report urges Ministers to push for the EU to revise the renewable energy directive, or RED, to cap use of food-based biofuels and stop those fuels counting towards the RED target. There was a difference of opinion between the Commission and the recently ended Lithuanian presidency over whether the cap should be set at 5% or 7%. What discussions have Ministers had with EU counterparts recently on revising the RED and where do the Government stand on the level of the cap?

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• 18 May 2011: Manufacturing Sector

  16:13

  My hon. Friend’s intervention is important. I will come to some of my specific questions for UKTI, about how it recognises not just the sectors that are already successful at a high level, but the sectors that are strategically placed for the future, even though they might be small at the moment. Green energy is certainly one of those. How are we going to ensure that Britain is selling green energy technology to Brazil, Russia, India and China in the future? We do not do much of it at the moment, but do we want to do it in the future? That is an important question to ask in terms of strategy.

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• 11 Nov 2010: Carbon Budgets

  10:45

  Part of the private sector in my constituency, Stiebel Eltron, has come together with training provider, Scientiam, to open a new green energy training centre in Bromborough. That is the sort of action that could really help carbon budgets. Will the Minister join me in congratulating all involved?

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See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate