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Norman Baker: That is rather a red herring, an old chestnut and an incorrect challenge. Our policy is to recommend that wind power in general is a good concept. We ought to promote itmost Liberal Democrat councils are doing sobut no one in any party is suggesting that every application for a wind farm should be approved. That is the purpose of the planning process. There is a willingness and a desire to support that concept, which is manifest in Lib Dem councils throughout the country.
Sue Doughty (Guildford) (LD): The House will be interested to hear that the problem affects all parties. Indeed, a Conservative MSP has opposed wind farms at Huntly. The issue is specific not to parties, but to planning problems.
Norman Baker: We must not demolish the planning system in considering these important matters.
Mr. Weir : I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way to me again. I agree with the hon. Member for Guildford (Sue Doughty). There are difficulties all over the country with specific wind farms, but does he agree that one thing that has not been properly explored so far is offshore wind farms, which would solve many of the problems about siting?
Norman Baker: I agree, but, having looked at the guidance, I know that it is not that easy for an offshore wind farm proposal to be successful. The Government need to sort out that problem very quickly; otherwise those in the nuclear industry will respond by saying that renewables cannot deliver, and I want to avoid that.
Let me make it clear that a sustainable future has no place for nuclear fission generation. No one who looks back at the past 50 years of nuclear power can do other than conclude that we would have been better off if we had never started down that road. The power that would be "too cheap to meter"a phrase from the 1950shas turned out to be fantastically expensive.
Curiously enough, a Conservative privatisation proposal lifted the lid and showed just how uneconomic the industry was, but the DTI is now handing out multi-million pound lifelines to British Energy to stop it imploding financiallyand still it continues. I was a little unfair to say that the Queen's Speech included no reference to the environment because it included the nuclear industry bail-out Bill, which is currently in the House of Lords and is designed to hand responsibility for gigantic amounts of nuclear waste firmly to the taxpayer in a desperate attempt to make the nuclear industry's books look better.
Then there are the usual tricks, the latest of which is the racily entitled "Consultation paper on proposals for intermediate level radioactive waste substitution", which was quietly released on the Friday of Hutton week. If that was not an attempt to bury bad news, it was
clearly an attempt at least to store it above ground. The thrust of that supposedly independent paper is that we should not necessarily return to the countries whence it came all the waste generated from reprocessing. Why? Presumably it is because that suggestion would enable prices to be cut and business in that doubtful area to be propped up.The fact is that we have more than 75,000 cu m of intermediate-level waste lying around in this country, with no clear idea or strategy on how to deal with it. Nirex has no solution. Its last suggestion was pulled and it has not come back with another proposal since, but it now seems to want more of the stuff. The projections already suggest that we will have 107,000 cu m of intermediate-level waste by 2010, and 143,000 cu m by 2030. It seems that we want more waste from other countries to add to that stockpile. However, the author of that reportNAC Internationalmakes some of its money by carrying out work for BNFL. A parliamentary answer that I received yesterday confirmed both that that financial arrangement exists and that the DTI was aware of it before it commissioned NAC to write the report. That is simply not acceptable. That paper is discredited and the DTI should now withdraw it.
I am pleased that the Government are making progress with energy efficiency: given that domestic energy consumption is up 7 per cent. since 1997, they need to do so. One useful thing that they could do is to support the private Member's Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell), who came top of the ballot, as the Minister will know.
Gregory Barker: I wish to ask the hon. Gentleman a question before he leaves the section of his speech that deals with nuclear energy. I share much of his scepticism about the nuclear lobby and agree wholeheartedly that the way in which the Government bungled the latest massive handout to the nuclear industry is very regrettable, but does he want to slam the door on all types of possible research, particularly if in years ahead the prospect of cold fusion could unwrap the potential for new forms of energy, which may be produced without all the hazardous waste that typifies the nuclear industry today?
Norman Baker: I am bound to say that a great deal of money has gone into nuclear fusion already without very much to show for it. If that money had gone into renewables, we might be rather better off than we are. I would not entirely slam the door on nuclear fusion, but I certainly wish to slam it on nuclear fission for the reasons that I have given.
Waste concerns me greatly, and no one could think that the Government have performed very well on the matter. The waste hierarchy, which everyone supports, is applied upside down. There is a perverse incentive to landfill and, if not to landfill, to incinerate and only then to recycleand reuse and waste minimisation get not even a look in.
Mr. John Horam (Orpington) (Con): Is it not evident that the danger now is that the Government's failure to produce a proper, coherent waste strategy is placing an
intolerable burden on local authorities, which simply have no guidance whatsoever to deal with the very difficult planning decisions that they often face?
Norman Baker: The hon. Gentleman is right: local councils are being driven quickly by the Government to meet the targets required by the landfill directive, but they do not have the policy options or necessarily the resources to do other than probably opt for incineration. That is not the solution that they or the people in their areas want, but that is where we are going. We will end up with a chain of incinerators throughout the country if the Government do not do something quickly.
We have had one disaster after another from the Government in the waste field. We had the famous fridge mountain about which my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon warned the Minister and his colleagues months before it appeared, although nothing was done. We now have a nationwide breaker's yard of abandoned cars throughout the country, with 238,000 dumped in England and Wales last year. That happened because the Government caved in to the motor lobby and instead of making the industry responsible for vehicles at the end of their lives, as happens in most of Europe, they put responsibility on to the last owners, who have vehicles at their lowest value. What a nonsensical policy that is. Apart from letting the motor industry off the hook, what kind of value does that give to the taxpayer? We paid £14 million last year to clear up abandoned vehicles because the Government took the wrong decision.
Next, there will be lorries looking for an official site to dispose of hazardous waste. The Government admit that only 37 of the 218 present sites will be available for use for hazardous waste after a EU directive banning co-disposal takes effect in July. However, when my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford raised that matter, the Minister told her that her concerns were premature. There are fewer than six months until the directive kicks in, so I do not call that premature.
Mr. Challen: That is all well and good, but the hon. Gentleman's speech has lasted three times as long as the Queen's Speech and we are yet to hear a single Lib Dem policy. Are there any?
Norman Baker: There are buckets of Lib Dem policies, which I shall be happy to speak about for the rest of the afternoon if hon. Members wish to hear them. They are implicit in the comments that I have made. We propose a waste hierarchy that is actually based on the waste hierarchy and that gives incentives to waste minimisationwe desire a zero waste policy. We have a sound energy policy that has no place for nuclear power, is based on energy conservation and efficiency and would give a much better leg-up to renewables than any policy that we have seen from the Government. We have a transport policy based on an increase in cycling, walking and public transport, a reorganisation of the railways and a proper investment strategy to deliver what people want. I assure the hon. Gentleman that we have strategies coming out of our ears.
Paddy Tipping: While we are pursuing solutions rather than problems, will the hon. Gentleman say a
little about the phrase "economic instruments" in the motion? Does he believe in the use of economic instruments, will he give us some examples of them, and does he believe in the principle that the polluter should pay through fiscal measures?
Norman Baker: Yes, I do believe that and I shall come on to it shortly, although I should probably take no more interventions given the time. The polluter does not pay, as a matter of fact, because figures from the Environment Agency show that only 0.5 per cent. of landfill pollution incidents last year resulted in a fine, despite the fact that there were 285 major incidents. The 100 or 200 operators who did pay paid an average fine of only £6,000, which is a pittance to a landfill operator. The message from the Government is that the polluter does not pay, but gets away with it scot-free.
Before I address the matter raised by the hon. Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping), let me say a few quick words about ghost ships. I would be grateful if the Minister would set out his position on the four ghost ships at Hartlepool. The ships are strange because they were apparently so decrepit that the US authorities demanded that they were dealt with right away. They then miraculously recovered to undertake a sea voyage across the Atlantic to this country, but they have now suddenly become decrepit again and unable to sail backthey are very curious ships. I understand that the official line was that the ships were due to return to the US when spring arrived and weather conditions permitted, yet a letter sent late last year by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to British MEPs stated:
Will the Minister deal with the issue of genetic modification when he replies? He will have noticed that our colleagues in Wales and Scotland have taken a rather more robust line on GM matters than the Government here in Westminster. They do not wish to co-operate with GM maize Chardon LL, or T25, which is patented by Bayer. In the light of those decisions in Wales and Scotland, what is the Government's strategy to deal with that matter?
I now turn to economic instruments, which the hon. Member for Sherwood rightly raised. If we are to have an environmental policy that is delivered effectively, we must have incentives and disincentives in place so that we generate the right behaviour patterns. I received a parliamentary answer showing that in this country, unfortunately, only 2.5 per cent. of taxes, as classified by the Treasury, are raised on environmental matters, which is lower than the percentage in most countries. We have some way to go. It strikes me as mad that if people build on greenfield sites they pay no value added tax, but if they renovate an inner-city building they pay 17.5 per cent.
We must create a structure that changes those perverse incentives without increasing the overall tax takethe policy is not about increasing taxes, but using different taxes. Energy saving equipment should incur lower VAT, and compensatory changes should be made elsewhere. We should especially consider how to deal with aviation, because as aviation fuel is not taxed there is a perverse incentive to take the plane, although the environmental solution would be to take the trainespecially for internal journeys, and also for cross-channel journeys. On 17 April 2002, the Chancellor said:
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