| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con): The hon. Gentleman is right to praise the Government for their commitment, but does he not realise that green Ministers were established by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition when he was Secretary of State for the Environment, in 1992? My right hon. and learned Friend also led this country to Rio de Janeiro for the world summit. Does not the hon. Gentleman also realise that the Transport Department and the Environment Department were intentionally co-located in Marsham Towers, and that there was a good deal of discussion between the two?
Norman Baker: I did not realise that green Ministers were present in the Conservative Government, which may suggest that they were less effective than that Government might have wished them to be. It is true that there was Rio, and I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), who is not here today, who did some sterling work on the environment. However, I am sorry to say that, according to a number of indicators, the previous Conservative Government did not do very well. For example, they had the most appalling recycling record. They had a road-building programme that was the biggest since the Romans, and they had a joke figure for renewable energy. So I would not concentrate too much on the previous Conservative Government.
I believe that it was a mistake to break up the DETR. I note that the "Greening Government" report stated:
- "Part of the Government's approach to this institutional difficulty"—
- "has been to eliminate one such divide with the creation of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR). The Deputy Prime Minister described this as 'in itself . . . a very important step towards achieving the environmental objectives'."
With due respect to the Minister and his colleagues, for whom I have a great deal of time, as he knows, DEFRA is a bit of a throwaway Department. The Minister knows very well that key decisions affecting the environment are nearly always taken elsewhere—at the Department of Trade and Industry, whether on energy policy or trade matters, which are key to environment; the Department of Transport, with regard to aviation or road transport; the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, for planning issues and key issues about the use of greenfield sites and so on; or No.10 or the Treasury, which is very happy to take decisions on behalf of any Department that it can muscle in on.
Perhaps that helps to explain why, despite the commitment of DEFRA Ministers—I include the hon. Gentleman's immediate predecessor, of course—the Government's domestic record on the environment is a bit patchy. Many of us had high hopes with regard to
transport, for example. The Government came to power accepting at last that we could not build our way out of congestion. We had tried for 100 years and it had not worked. The Deputy Prime Minister even famously pledged himself to road traffic reduction targets and asked us to hold him to them. I happen to think that the Deputy Prime Minister understands transport, with his history in the National Union of Seamen, and that he was sincere when he made that pledge. But he could not have anticipated that he would have the rug pulled so swiftly from under him by No. 10, which is what happened.What do we have now? Last week I received a parliamentary answer from the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson), who told me that road traffic—already up by nearly 8 per cent. since 1997, by the way—
- "is forecast to grow by between 20 per cent. and 25 per cent. in England between 2000 and 2010."—[Official Report, 3 February 2004; Vol. 417, c. 824W.]
While industry is busy cutting carbon emissions, emissions in the transport sector are going through the roof. It is not simply road transport, of course. There is also aviation, where I was told in answer to another parliamentary question that carbon emissions, which were 20,000 tonnes in 1990, would double to 40,000 tonnes by 2010.
Mr. Bellingham: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a dilemma here, because if traffic grinds to a halt there is obviously much more pollution? The Government have got another 1 million passengers on to the railways. Is he advocating the use of other modes of transport, such as aviation, which will create yet more pollution? It is obviously a very complex issue, and he should not try to simplify it in the way that he is.
Norman Baker: I hope that I am not trying to simplify things. I recognise that this is a complex issue to which there are no overnight solutions, which is why the Government were right to produce a 10-year transport plan. That is the sort of period over which improvements can be delivered, but an election intervened and the Government did not see the policy through—they bottled out in an attempt to get through the 2001 election. Transport is now in free fall, or automatic pilot—whatever metaphor is used—and no one is pushing things forward. It seems that the Secretary of State for Transport dare not do anything that would upset anyone, so we have to make the best of things and, in the meantime, market forces take over. Market forces involve lots of people flying on cheap airlines, a massive increase in road transport and an
atomised, ineffective rail system. We have not moved on, which is a bitter disappointment for many of us who thought that the Government would do rather better on transport.
Mr. Mark Francois (Rayleigh) (Con): There is great concern in Essex about the environmental damage that could result from the proposed extension of Stansted airport. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is possible to achieve 40 million passenger movements a year using the existing runway at Stansted? Does he support the action being taken by Conservative-controlled Essex county council to consider submitting the proposal to judicial review in view of the fact that we believe that the Government are wrong and that the people of Essex are right?
Norman Baker: The people of Essex must make up their own minds about how they wish to take that matter forward. Clearly, there is a strong body of opinion, to which the hon. Gentleman refers. The aviation White Paper relied far too much on predict and provide—a concept that I hoped we had got rid of in transport planning, but it seems not. The Prime Minister did not have very good answers when the Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), pressed him on the issue last week. The Government still have to bite the bullet. They cannot please everyone all the time: they must decide on a sustainable strategy and stick to it. They did the first bit; they did not do second bit.
The recent energy White Paper genuinely embraces the concept of a big switch to renewables and the Government rightly view offshore wind as the first easily attainable tranche of that, but there is a mountain to climb: only 2.5 per cent. of our energy currently comes from renewable sources and most of that is hydro-electricity. That is pitifully lower than other developed countries. It is also important that the Government do all that they can to smooth the way for a transition to a renewable future. That involves sympathetic planning guidance and seeing off the nuclear industry's attempts to discredit wind power, in which it is busily engaged at the moment.
I must confess that I find it breathtaking to hear those in the pro-nuclear lobby complain about the effect of wind generators on the countryside, when they are busy generating tons of highly radioactive material with a half-life measured in hundreds if not thousands of years. Having just managed to keep the door open to nuclear power in the energy review, the strategy is to try to demonstrate that renewables cannot deliver and to force Ministers back to "safe, reliable" nuclear power—those adjectives are in ironic quote marks.
Mr. Francois: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his courtesy in giving way to me a second time. He mentions the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I have the honour to serve. The Committee considered this issue in great detail under the previous chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam), who is in his place this afternoon, and we found that one of the greatest impediments to renewable power was planning opposition to the development of wind farms in certain localities. Will the hon. Gentleman assist the House with the great dilemma that
we found: Liberal Democrat Members are always in favour of wind farms in general, but they always oppose them specifically whenever they are proposed in their own constituencies?
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |