Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Debate on the Address.
15:32 Kemi Badenoch (Conservative)
The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) asked what the plan was. We have published an alternative King’s Speech, and the reason is that we need to take tough decisions to get the country out of the mess we are in by cutting wasteful spending, funding defence, securing our borders and reducing the cost of energy. If you want to bring down bills for families and bring industry back to this country, you need a plan to scrap the net zero legislation that is strangling industry and making energy costs higher. That is why we are proposing a cheap energy Bill to do just that.
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15:44 The Prime Minister (Keir Starmer)
No matter the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow will find the local connection, whether it is championing the role of Harlow college in dealing with climate change, praising the invention of fibre-optic cables in Harlow, or telling us how Harlow doubled for Paris during an episode of “The Crown”. I remember clearly my hon. Friend saying to me that wherever he goes in the world, he is always thinking about Harlow, and he is quite right.
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17:23 Rachael Maskell (Labour)
I trust that we will do more on the climate crisis. As the national emergency briefing highlighted, we do not have the luxury of time. The UK is in the bottom 10% of countries in the biodiversity intactness index, and one in six species is at risk of extinction. While our planet burns and our icecaps melt, we need to invest fast. Finance should be invested to hasten decarbonisation, and projects such as BioYorkshire should be funded to ensure that we hasten agricultural resilience, preventing the low yields and crop failure that are escalating the cost of food. That is why I am really glad that we are moving to independence in our energy market, too. We need a second employment rights Bill to capture the single status of worker, extend collective bargaining, and improve the wellbeing of workers.
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17:50 Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Labour)
I understand that some things take time, but other things are not hard. I would have liked to see steps to address the continued private sale of human remains. At the start of this year, I presented a simple Bill that ought to have ended the vile practice of human remains, many of which have unknown provenance, being bought and sold by private individuals. It would have been relatively straightforward to end this practice, but the Government have no plans to close this loophole and implement such legislation. As I said, I understand that these things take time, but there are some simple things that we could just get done. It feels like the Government may be inclined to capitulate to the right and row back on some of their climate goals, but I remind them that we lost more votes to the left of us than we did to the right of us; if we carry on doing the bare minimum on climate issues, this could only get worse.
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19:06 Ruth Jones (Labour)
There is no clearer expression of the cost of living squeeze than people’s energy bills, which doubled under the last Government. The latest energy crisis highlights the danger of Britain’s continued reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets, which would only be exacerbated under the Conservatives and Reform. Genuine energy independence cannot be achieved through continued exposure to volatile global fossil fuel markets. The fastest way to improve energy security, while meeting the UK’s climate and nature obligations and bringing down bills, is through the expansion of renewable energy and the roll-out of energy efficiency and electrification measures. I urge my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero to go further and faster, looking not just at solar and wind—onshore and offshore—but at tidal, including wave energy and lagoons.
The need for change is pressing. A third of all households across Wales live in fuel poverty, amounting to approximately 9,000 households in Newport and 12,000 in Caerphilly county borough, and that can only be tackled by bringing down bills for good. I am disappointed to see that the Welsh Government in the Senedd have tied themselves in knots over decarbonising Wales’s energy supplies, because Plaid Cymru’s policy of undergrounding cables at all costs will mean cancelled projects and higher household bills. They need to rethink that as a matter of urgency. The Bill proposed in the King’s Speech shows that Labour is clear that the UK’s future is in clean, cheap power. The energy independence Bill is a decisive step towards energy security, warmer homes and reforming our broken energy market.
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19:35 Hannah Spencer (Green)
One in three households in Gorton and Denton live in fuel poverty. The UK has some of the leakiest homes in Europe. I know that, because I have worked on thousands of them in my previous job as a plumber. If we want to cut energy bills for good, we really need a properly funded and properly regulated national home insulation scheme, and to go even bigger on renewable energy. That is where investment should be going, not into nuclear power.
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Emily Darlington (Labour)
We also need the social housing renewal Bill. Social housing was part of my cabinet portfolio when I was the Labour deputy leader of Milton Keynes city council. We were able to build new council homes to high, green standards, with air source heat pumps and solar panels, further bringing down energy bills for our council tenants. We also had a social housing decarbonisation fund that supported over 2,000 tenants in bringing down their bills through insulation and new windows.
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Jeremy Corbyn (Other)
We need to look to the real issues facing this world—climate change, environmental destruction, global inequality and poverty, or the 70 million people worldwide who are refugees—rather than just the language of more and more money on arms and more and more preparedness for war. Can we not have an agenda for peace? If we cannot talk about peace when a war is going on, what is the point of ever talking about peace? I would hope that something could happen with that.
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19:59 Roz Savage (Liberal Democrat)
I absolutely support renewable energy—I have spent decades campaigning for climate action—but the transition works best when communities have ownership and agency. I would like the Government to address the barriers facing community groups that want to supply local customers directly. Liberal Democrats believe that communities should be able to generate clean energy, sell it to local households and keep the benefits locally.
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