Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Environment Bill (First sitting).
09:31 Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
Edward Lockhart-Mummery: I would just make a wider point, from a business perspective. I think that the OEP has an important role to play because it gives confidence in the overall system. That is why independence is important. I just wanted to fill in that gap as to why business thinks that independence is important in terms of having a really credible body. That can also be achieved in the way that it operates. I found this with the Committee on Climate Change. One of the important things is the appointment of the first chair—and, actually, the second chair. The chair can determine how a body like that works in practice—its credibility, the things it chooses to pursue, how it gives strategic advice, and things like that. So I think it is also very much the way, and the type of person who is the chair, that are important.
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09:42 Rebecca Pow
Let me give you a quick example. We are working with the home building sector on a sectoral plan for all new houses, for the environment, because we have got the clarity of net zero and because we are getting clarity on targets through the Environment Bill. The sector can suddenly sit down and start saying, “Right, these are the long-term things we need to plan for—water efficiency, flood resilience and air quality.” They can start investing in the R&D and driving innovation.
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09:55 Richard Graham
Edward Lockhart-Mummery: Exactly. Improving the natural environment is a good start. That could be clearer. For example, improving health is not there clearly in “improving the natural environment”, yet quite a lot that we would want to do—improving air quality, nature and so forth—is about health. Being really clear that this is also about health and wellbeing is important. Then there is sustainable resource use. At the moment, there is a big focus on single-use plastics, very rightly. If, in the very short term, we only thought about single-use plastics, we would not necessarily drive holistic sustainability overall. We might rush out of plastics into aluminium or other things, whereas what we really want to know is, right at the top, that this is about using the resources that we have sustainably. If that is clear at the top of the Bill, everything drives that. We do not take siloed short-term decisions, but we are clear that when we are setting targets we are looking to use our resources sustainably overall to contribute to a healthy, resilient, biodiverse natural environment, to health and to wellbeing for everyone. Those three objectives capture almost everything you could want to do through this Bill, alongside decarbonisation, which is the territory of the Climate Change Act 2008, but both are mutually supportive.
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09:59 Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
Q Returning to the OEP, what are your thoughts on the relationship between the OEP and the environmental governance bodies, including the Committee on Climate Change, the Environment Agency and Natural England? Major budget cuts have clearly been made at Natural England recently, and the organisation has expressed concerns about its ability to monitor environmental breaches. What are your thoughts on how that works, or does not work, in the Bill?
Martin Baxter: We support the creation of the OEP. Its role in ensuring that public authorities fulfil their duties under environmental law is important. That remit is quite different from the role of the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Committee on Climate Change. That committee has an advisory role; it does a lot of analysis and a lot of fantastic work, but it does not have a role in holding public authorities to account for the delivery of net zero commitments. That is an important distinction to make between the OEP and the Committee on Climate Change.
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10:04 Bim Afolami
Edward Lockhart-Mummery: There is a relationship between Government and the electorate every five years. The OEP has an important role in making transparent just what is going on in the interim period so that the electorate has the right information every five years and can see transparently what has been going on, what the Government have been doing, how that has affected the outcome, whether the Government have been pulling the right levers and that kind of thing. That is a role that the CCC plays very effectively on climate change, because people are increasingly aware of how the Government are performing. There is a role. The CCC is playing that role with probably less independence than the OEP currently has.
The CCC is not particularly independent, but putting forward the advice on net zero was a bold thing to do. It was able to do that. The role of transparency and making clear to the electorate what is going on could be the body’s most important function.
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11:19 Richard Graham
So we have got to recognise that even though recycling will hopefully continue to go up—ultimately I think the aim is to get, possibly, to 65%—there is something that has not yet really been covered in depth in the resources and waste strategy, which is that we need to do something with the residual waste. We operate 10 energy recovery facilities within the UK, three of which have district heating. Bearing in mind the plans that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has for a heat road map, which I think is proposed for June, there is a role, which we need at least to recognise, for energy recovery, preferably with heat decarbonisation.
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