Gregory
Barker: Those terms are themselves open to interpretation.
What does the Minister believe a sustainable economy actually means?
That phrase is often abused or misused.
Mr.
Woolas: A sustainable economy is a low-carbon economy that
puts a net contribution to carbon in the air in a downward direction.
It is about not only carbon, but how we ensure that we recycle and
reuse resources without a net depletion of the earth’s natural
resources, including biodiversity. I am getting too academic—for
the Committee as a whole, not particularly for you, Mr.
Cook—and you are going to pull me back. I wish that I had not
said
that. 11.30
am Let
me turn to amendment No. 39. To ensure that we meet our objectives for
the five principles, we require that every Department publishes a
sustainable development action plan. In addition, the impact assessment
process, which must be applied to every new policy, requires appraisals
of the environmental, social and economic costs and benefits of
policies. As hon. Members know, we try to build the idea of
sustainability that stems from Rio into everything that we do. The
reason for enshrining the principle in legislation, therefore, is to
ensure that policy makers keep applying good sustainable development in
future years and under future Governments. We also expect to be closely
scrutinised by Parliament against the sustainable development
requirement in the Bill.
The
Government added subsection (3), which the amendment would remove, in
the other place. We were responding to the strong views held there,
with which we agreed, that the proposals and policies should contribute
to sustainable development. For the reasons that I have explained, that
is important and something that should be retained. I understand the
intention behind amendment No. 39, but it would not achieve that
aim.
David
Maclean: Does the Minister mean that the Bill should
contribute to sustainable development in the UK only, or that the
policies and proposals in the Bill should help to contribute to
sustainable development in the world, which would allow carbon trading
and so on?
Mr.
Woolas: Within the world. Our sustainability is dependent
on that point. The right hon. Gentleman referred to the often arduous
process of international agreement. The acceptance of sustainable
development in United Nations forums, and the fact that it is written
into treaties, is extremely important for this country and the rest of
the world. To try to extract that would be
practically impossible in terms of the global economy and dependence on
resources, food and so on. That would also take us back to the debate
on clause 1, which you, Mr. Cook, will not let me return
to.
Amendment No.
55, which relates to achieving sustainable development, is about
creating the right balance. We need to ensure that the UK’s
package of policies for reducing emissions maintains the balance among
the key elements of sustainable development. It would be a good idea to
compare this policy with the carbon budget itself. Within the context
of meeting a carbon budget, some Government policies may give rise to
increased emissions, but the important principle is that the total net
UK carbon account should be restricted. Given that policies to meet
budgets are in that way considered as a whole, it makes sense that they
should contribute to sustainable development as a whole. I have already
set out the existing processes that are applied to every new policy
individually.
Mr.
Gummer: I am unhappy about that particular part of the
explanation. For example, the Ministry of Justice is just about to take
over a newly refurbished building that used to be the Home Office.
Despite considerable efforts, the Ministry of Justice still refused to
accept that putting in hydrofluorocarbon-driven air conditioning was
wholly contrary to any concept of sustainable development. It said
that, taken as a whole, what it was doing was better than what was
there before. Of course, it was Mr. John Gieve who did that,
as is the case on many such occasions. The fact of the matter is that
the one get-out that every civil servant and every Minister has is to
say, “Taken as a whole, our policies are right, but we have an
excuse for this one.” The new Home Office had the same excuse.
It said that it had signed up to the waste electrical and electronic
equipment directive, which would not allow non-HFC air conditioning. I
use that example because, after all, HFCs are 2,000 times as damaging
to the climate as CO 2. Unless we take everything into
account and do not allow Departments to get away with “taken as
a whole”, we will not win the
battle.
Mr.
Woolas: I felt uncomfortable in putting the argument
because I knew that the right hon. Gentleman would come up with an
example that would be difficult to justify. In practice, under the new
regime in the Bill, the carbon reduction commitment will include
Whitehall Departments, so the “taken as a whole” excuse
will be removed. I know that he will welcome that in the real
world. My
second argument is stronger and more convincing. Consider the opposite
situation, in which one had to judge every action and policy as part of
the whole and to rule out any action or proposal that, in and of
itself, was damaging according to the sustainability criteria. An
ambulance trip that used polluting fuels, taken as a whole, would not
be allowed, and one could consider other examples. The right hon.
Gentleman shakes his head in mystification, but that is a good
example. There
are times when actions are necessary. The impact of the action may be
negative, but it can contribute to an action that is positive overall.
It is rather like asking which is the most important wheel on the
car—the front right, the front left, the back right or the back
left—when all are needed.
Mr.
Gummer: On the Minister’s example of the ambulance,
there can be no one alive who would not agree that it would be a
contribution to sustainable development to ensure that somebody got to
hospital in time. That must be the serious answer to the question. No
one would say that we should not do something because it costs a
certain amount of carbon to do
it. However,
a question must be asked about the individual action. We cannot allow
an individual action to be smothered by the generality of “taken
as a whole”. I cannot imagine a single proper action that would
be stopped by the removing the phrase “taken as a whole”,
but I can imagine many improper actions that would be more difficult if
the excuse did not exist. I believe that in the Minister’s heart
of hearts he knows that taking that little bit out would not put anyone
in a difficult position. Leaving it in will mean that they will go on
doing the things that they do now, as we have seen in the two examples
that I
gave.
Mr.
Woolas: I did not find the right hon. Gentleman’s
argument against my ambulance analogy very convincing. I thought that I
did well in picking that example against the much tougher example of
his experience of the Government
Department. Let
me reinforce my point. By including the phrase “taken as a
whole”, we are allowing for the carbon budget, and the policies
and proposals to meet it, to allow an increase in emissions in some
areas so long as they are paid for, and more so, elsewhere in the
economy. The
hon. Member for Cheltenham said that we had supported the third runway
at Heathrow. Let me be clear about the Government’s policy. We
said that we would support the development of the third runway, but
only if we could be confident of meeting the strict environmental
conditions set out in the White Paper. There is clearly a net judgment
in all these matters. If one were simply to delete “taken as a
whole” from subsection (3), that would not allow our economy to
function properly. It would not allow people to go about their daily
business. It is the whole that we are trying to address, not each
individual part. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal continues
to look
bemused.
Mr.
Gummer: The Minister has explained the difference between
us. I do not believe that we should do anything that cannot be said to
contribute to sustainable development. That is why I am opposed to the
third runway at Heathrow, which is nonsense, and I am certainly opposed
to reworking the figures to make that fit the environmental
requirements, which is what the Government did, as the hon. Member for
Cheltenham pointed out. However, the point is that the Minister must
believe that the third runway at Heathrow contributes to sustainable
development, because if it does not contribute to sustainable
development, he cannot support it. That is the problem for us. We are
committed to a concept that nothing of that kind should be done unless
it contributes to sustainable development. If it is unsustainable, we
should not do it. That is why Opposition Members are very strongly
opposed to the methodology that the Government are using. That is why
the phrase “taken as a whole” is so
dangerous.
Mr.
Woolas: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He has
outlined a principle very clearly, and I admire him for that. He is
right that I do not agree with him. I do not accept that we can run our
economy in a sustainable way, taken as a whole, based on the principle
that he has outlined. That would prevent us from doing many of the
things that we already do, and one could argue that in all sorts of
ways. I will stick with my ambulance example. He says that if there is
a policy in isolation that does not in and of itself contribute to
sustainability, we should not do it. I think that there should be other
judgments—it might depend on who is in the back of the
ambulance.
Let me remind
the right hon. Gentleman of Ministers’ responsibilities. Let us
suppose that it was my certain belief, based on advice, knowledge and
certain communication—I shall deliberately choose the difficult
example of Heathrow to try to pursue my argument—that a failure
to expand Heathrow would inevitably result in an expansion of Charles
de Gaulle and Schiphol. I am not saying that, just in case the
journalists are quoting me out of context, as they never do in either
the Daily Mail or The Guardian. However,
let us suppose that, and that the policies of the Governments of
the day of France and the Netherlands did not impose environmental
criteria on Charles de Gaulle and Schiphol and excluded them from their
considerations. Let us say, therefore, that the emissions caused by the
expansion of aviation at those two airports would be greater than those
predicted as a result of Heathrow. What would be the right decision
under the right hon. Gentleman’s
principle?
Mr.
Gummer: But then the hon. Gentleman would be making what
he should be making: a decision on sustainability. He is saying that he
will have looked at the circumstances not in the round or as a whole,
but on that specific decision, given the particular parameters that he
has put forward, and he would be making a proper decision about
sustainability. It would not be about “taken as a whole”,
as he has interpreted it. He would have interpreted that phrase as
meaning that one can score off sustainability with other interests. I
am saying that the definition of sustainability—this is why the
question of how one defines sustainability is so
important—involves making the sort of decision that the hon.
Gentleman has just made. We disagree about the third runway at Heathrow
because I do not believe that it is necessary, because there are other
ways of doing things, and because the proposition that he put forward
is not true as it would not stop anyone else from building runways.
Indeed, it would encourage them. Therefore, the proposal is not
sustainable. If
the Minister continues to use his argument, he is making the same
references as I have made. He does not need the words “taken as
a whole”. That is what we are arguing about, not a runway. The
phrase is not necessary to defend him in his position. If it were left
in the clause, it would enable someone to decide to have a third
runway, even though that person had not made out a sustainable case for
it. 11.45
am
Mr.
Woolas: Fascinating, except that the Bill requires those
criteria to be judged. The logical consequence of the right hon.
Gentleman’s principled stand is that we would not need the rest
of the Bill. We would not need
carbon budgeting, carbon trading and the other things that we have been
talking about. We would simply say that an individual action must
contribute in and of itself to sustainability. I simply do not
agree. Tony
Baldry (Banbury) (Con): Is not the candid explanation of
why the Government do not want to remove the phrase that if they were
to do so, it would be possible for any group to go to the High Court
for judicial review and say that a particular development was not
sustainable development? There would thus be an argument with the
courts about a nuclear power station, for example. That is why the
Government want the phrase. As I said earlier, they are desperate to
ensure that the Bill, when enacted, does not get anywhere near the
courts. It has been judicially proofed so that it cannot be
challenged.
Mr.
Woolas: The hon. Gentleman must have been reading the
Daily Mail. He is inculcated with cynicism. We included the
provision in response to the other place, not out of fear of judicial
action. I was trying to help. Sometimes when we read the Daily Mail,
we conclude that we should not have bothered.
The right
hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal outlined an important position and
showed the evolution of his policies and politics. I am not sure that
his point is shared by the hon. Members for Vale of York and for
Bexhill and Battle, nor do I think that the right hon. Member for
Witney (Mr. Cameron) would agree with it because there would
be huge consequences. However, I am repeating myself, so I shall now
sit down and shut
up.
David
Maclean: I have listened carefully to the debate and I am
not convinced that the Minister has spelled out a good, sound British
definition of sustainable development, as I had hoped initially. The
hon. Gentleman’s heart is in the right place, as is the
Government’s, but I do not know where their head is. Perhaps the
cause is my thick head. I do not understand fully what the hon.
Gentleman was attempting to say and I am not sure that has he cut
through the confusion of the plethora of definitions of sustainable
development that exist throughout the
world. The
Gro Harlem Brundtland Commission was a good starting point. When we
were in Rio, the
definition, “Development
that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own
needs” was
quoted about 10 times a day. It is simple and straightforward, but
applying it to every aspect of business and industrial development,
agriculture, farming, mining, quarrying, building and our lifestyle,
and then to the lifestyle of other countries with completely different
economic systems, takes us into severe
trouble. I
do not want to prolong the debate. I want the phrase to stay in the
Bill, so of course I shall not press the amendment to a Division. I
will conclude by trying to shed some light on the Home Office windows
and HFCs. I did not intervene in the debate—it might have been
regarded as facetious—but I spent four years in the old
building, where we were not allowed to open the windows because the top
half was heavier than the bottom half. They were hinged, almost in the
middle,
and the top half could swing round, hit someone on the back of the head
and knock them down seven storeys on to the Scots Guards’ parade
ground below. The answer to the problem is not whether the gas is an
HFC or another one, but to let us just open the windows in future,
rather than use millions of pounds worth of air-conditioning. The same
may apply in this Room in
future. At
times, when we are looking at such highly complex subjects, we ought to
get back to a bit of simplicity. The concept of sustainable development
is simple. It is important. It is something to which Parliament will
return again and again, not necessarily in the Bill, but on other
occasions. It should stay in the Bill, but I hope that in future the
Government will be clearer about what they mean by sustainable
development. I beg to ask leave to withdraw my
amendment. Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn. Clause
13 ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
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