| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
There is a different mental process going on in Scotland at the moment. I am not obsessed with the whole devolution/independence/non-independence nexus but it is interesting to see how civil servants in Scotland operate differently in the new political context, and that is not necessarily healthy. Recently, I had to write to the Scottish Executive to inquire about some detail in this case. It is purely a constituency case—it has no party political basis, and it would not bother me if it had. I am quite keen that the Government should change the rules, and if they do not, I will continue to say what I am saying now. I wrote to Historic Scotland, staffed by civil servants, and I got a super, professional response from the experts on the ground. They are the experts in the nexus of planning, building, history and all that stuff. Those experts are ultimately employed by the Scottish Government, with a link to the UK Government. The civil servants there engaged with me—they said that they did not make the decisions, but explained how the process worked and the sort of the thing that could be expected. They explained how people would logically respond and gave their views as experts, emphasising that Ministers might not take the same view and so forth. I therefore got a good steer from the professionals in Historic Scotland—the response was first class. I met them and they took me through the stuff. Ultimately, they are civil servants and they work essentially for the Scottish Government, not the UK Government, although there is a clear link.
That was contrary to my other experience. I do not blame civil servants for that—it is the culture and the way in which they have to work in Scotland now. I used nursing as a way into the problem. I could have used engineering, but I chose nursing because many people doing the HNC were doing the nursing version and then going into nursing education. The scheme is a combination of policy, knowledge of education, especially higher and further education, and so on, so the people who pulled it together are essentially the civil servants and experts who work under the auspices of the Scottish Government. Sometimes they work for agencies and sometimes as conventional civil servants in a conventional Department.
I wrote to a civil servant, explaining that I had a problem and that I was not sure whether I had the right end of the stick, and asking for a heads-up or general idea of whether what I said cohered. I phoned initially and got a call back saying that the relevant official would ring me, perhaps before the end of the day. However, instead, I got an e-mail saying that there was some concern that I was a Member of Parliament rather than a member of the public so the query had been referred to the official’s boss. It became clear through a series of e-mails that those—doubtless excellent—civil servants were afraid to have any communication with a Back-Bench Member of Parliament who was making inquiries about a legitimate constituency case, with no party political intent. I appreciate that it is difficult for people to make that judgment, but I was putting a fairly technical argument, and it appeared easy for a person with a good bit of knowledge about the subject to give a professional opinion.
I ended up getting a letter or an e-mail from someone more senior in the organisation who said that civil servants were not permitted to communicate with Members of Parliament. Even worse, I was told that if I wrote to
the Minister, the civil servants would send me a description of the procedures in Scotland. I was in a position whereby, as a constituency MP, I could not ask the experts for an opinion. I was not asking about procedure, because that is a matter of wiring diagrams and so forth. I knew the procedure like the back of my hand—that is how I perceived the problem in the first place. However, as a constituency MP in Scotland, I could not ask the Government a technical question and get a technical response.
The difference between the two examples, which I have given at some length, is that Historic Scotland is an agency in its own right. People can describe it better than me, but I would say that, although it is an agency and therefore works for Ministers, it has self-confidence as a professional body with its own professional integrity. If people ask it questions, the staff will give their professional opinion, while stressing, “You can quote me if you want but I might be wrong or people might disagree.” They are confident in giving their professional opinions. However, there are other parts of the civil service in Scotland, which are much more sensitive and work at the direct command of Ministers. Unlike civil servants in Departments here of whom I have asked technical questions, those in Scotland appear to have been told not to speak to Opposition Members of Parliament. As a constituency MP, trying to get at something to which there is no corollary here because the expertise is in Scotland, there appears to be significant dysfunction.
Sir Robert Smith: Is not it the convention here that we do not talk directly to civil servants, except with the permission of the Minister for whom they work? Indeed, that came to light when my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) dealt with the fridges directive. Members of the European Parliament got access to civil servants and could make clear to them the approaching disaster, but the Member of Parliament who dealt with the subject here could not have that direct access.
Mr. Joyce: The hon. Gentleman may well be correct—I am sure that he is; he has been here longer than me—but if he is, I was not aware, because I do that all the time. All sorts of people are experts in their field, but if we cannot talk to them, we simply cannot get knowledge about a particular situation. If I wanted to know something obscure about traffic regulations or something like that, I probably would not write to the Minister. [ Interruption. ] I can see my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House on the Front Bench looking like I should write to Ministers.
Chris Bryant: I am not looking like anything.
Mr. Joyce: My hon. Friend moved as though he was looking in a particular way, but from here I could see only his finely honed pectorals heaving, which I probably misinterpreted.
In any case, in the example of MEPs that the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith) mentioned, the corollary of us speaking to local government officials may be MEPs talking to sovereign Government officials. Where it will clearly not be politically embarrassing, there will be all sorts of
situations in which common sense says that it is useful to pick up the phone and ask someone who is a technical expert a question. I find it extremely helpful to pick up the phone in that way where there are technical issues, although not in party political cases—one would always deal with Ministers in that way where something was sensitive, and I would not expect to put civil servants on the spot in any sense. An example might be local jobcentres, the immigration service or the various help lines, where we basically speak directly to civil servants. I will speak to local jobcentre officials, Child Support Agency officials or immigration officials regularly, and that works extremely well. There are no party political issues at stake: I will just be looking after the interests of a constituent.
Having waxed orchestral about that issue, perhaps I could start to draw to a close. [ Laughter. ] Or perhaps not.
Mr. Joyce: Perhaps. Let me draw together the strands of that extensive description of HNCs and education in Scotland. There is tremendous scope, if we look carefully at legislation, to see little niggles here and there that we can tidy up. If we tidy them up, sometimes that will have significant effects on constituents. My phase 2 argument is that there seems to be a bit of a dysfunction in Scotland when it comes to MPs gathering information—we gather it anyway; we just gather it by a different route—and talking intelligently to officials. The dysfunction seems to exist in those Departments that are under direct command and control, as opposed to being among the professionals, who have personal self-confidence and perhaps more a sense of professionalism, and who will say, “This is my professional opinion.” That is increasingly absent among the experts in certain parts of the Scottish Executive.
May I wish everyone an enjoyable Easter, including you, Mr. Deputy Speaker?
3.3 pm
Sarah Teather (Brent, East) (LD): I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak in this debate before the House rises for Easter.
Last week, Brent Friends of the Earth, my local branch, held a number of screenings of the film “The Age of Stupid”. If hon. Members have not seen the film, I strongly recommend that they go and see it. It is a powerful film, campaigning for action on climate change. The film features Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in 2055. He is pictured as the last man alive in an archiving centre somewhere off the coast of Norway, looking back at films from 2009 and asking why we did nothing to try to halt climate change when we had the chance. One of the people in the archive films asks whether people will look back and think that we were living in an age of stupid, when people were stupid not to see what was staring them in the face.
As the G20 meets today, having bumped climate change off the agenda, I cannot help but think that we almost certainly do live in the age of stupid. Not only has the G20 bumped climate change from the agenda, with the decision to look at it at the Copenhagen conference later this year, but it will have failed—at
least I expect that it will have failed; we await the Chancellor’s statement later this afternoon—to link the fiscal stimulus that so many countries are arguing for with the green economy. That most certainly is a very stupid thing indeed.
Mr. John Randall (Uxbridge) (Con): Does the hon. Lady not agree that the Government can have no credibility at all on climate change while they persist with their ridiculous plans to enlarge Heathrow airport with a third runway and a sixth terminal?
Sarah Teather: I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. My constituency, along with his, will be affected by increased noise as a result of the expansion of Heathrow. I might well return to that point later.
It is as though we are trying to compartmentalise climate change into one conference and one meeting, and to turn it into something that can be discussed only at that meeting. By taking it away from the economic reform agenda, we are encouraged to think of it as a special case that we come together to talk about and which we forget about as soon as we leave the meeting. In so doing, we demonstrate that we have failed to grasp the seriousness of the problem that we face.
The issue in that film that stood out and left the most lasting impression on me was the story of the young Nigerian woman, Layefa Malini, who wanted to become a doctor. She lived in the Niger delta and suffered the consequences of the oil harvesting, the pollution and the poverty in the area. She told of the challenges in her life as she wrestled with the problem of putting together enough money to enable her to go off and study. She described the impact that that had on her, and her choice to give up fishing in order to sell oil illegally just to make enough money. That story left me with an overwhelming sense of how we live in excess here, and of how much poverty there is elsewhere in the world. That sense of injustice struck a chord with me, as did the impact of climate change on the poorest people in the world.
We often talk about climate change as an abstract thing, a scientific debate involving international jargon and diplomacy. Frankly, most of us cannot get a handle on it. I have a degree in natural sciences, although if I am truly honest, I must say that much of the science involved in the climate change debate leaves me cold. However, the image of the poorest people in the world, who are likely to suffer the consequences of what we are doing, strikes a chord with me. They are also likely to suffer first and most profoundly. I suspect that that would be a galvanising force for most people if they really understood the consequences of what we are doing to the poorest people in the world.
Climate change will affect us all, and it has no respect for international boundaries. It is the poorest people in the developing countries, who are already held back by a chronic, sustained lack of resources and power and by poverty that limits choice and security, who will first, and most profoundly, experience the consequences of what we are doing here. Developing countries are the most vulnerable partly because of their geographical position and partly because so much of their population is reliant on rain-fed agriculture. Also, many of those people live in appalling living conditions.
Poverty exists regardless of climate change, but climate change is already creating a vicious cycle that will rob people of their ability to improve their own situation. It
threatens to wash away much of the progress that we have made towards achieving the millennium development goals. This ought to be a matter of serious concern to the Government, as they have made the delivery of those goals a key plank of their own international priorities, but that is being undermined by our failure to tackle climate change in a serious, sustained way.
Natural disasters already happen more often in developing countries. If we look back at the natural disasters that happened in the 1990s, for example, we can see that in the eight years between 1990 and 1998, 94 per cent. of the world’s 568 major natural disasters happened in developing countries. That ought to give us pause for thought. People in those countries are more vulnerable to their effects because they often live in very poor-quality, overcrowded accommodation. They are susceptible to losing their homes, and their water sources tend to be polluted. It is not only the major disasters that have an effect, however. The more subtle changes will also have devastating consequences. Crop yields are predicted to fall by as much as 50 per cent. in some African countries by 2020 because of the impacts of climate change.
The story of Layefa Malini, which I mentioned earlier, struck a particular chord with me because I visited Nigeria last summer to work on a project with Voluntary Service Overseas. I visited the capital Abuja while I was working on an education project. I then travelled north to Kaduna and Kano and south into Enugu, so I saw people living in very different conditions. We moved out to visit some of the rural areas outside Abuja and saw the problems people faced because of lack of water. People living in those villages will be particularly affected if rainfall decreases and they are unable to get clean drinking water.
Kano, one of the most northern places in Nigeria right on the border up near Niger, has a very arid climate, but it is also prone to flooding during the rainy season. Niger has already experienced the devastating consequences of desertification as the Sahel moves further into areas occupied by people. Many people have been forced to flee into Nigeria, looking for a method of making a living. North Nigeria experiences the consequences of displaced people moving from Niger into Kano and neighbouring areas.
I saw the consequences of flooding during the rainy season when I was in Kano. Along with many other areas in the developing world, Kano does not have a sewerage system. Sewage moves through trenches in the road, effectively, sometimes just a few inches below the path people are walking on. It does not take much water to wash that sewage out into people’s homes, on to footpaths or into the road. When it rains in Nigeria in the rainy season, it really rains. People quickly find themselves walking through one or two feet of water, all of which is sewage-infested water that transmits disease, making it miserable for people to live with. Drinking water, in as much as there is any, becomes quickly polluted with sewage and rubbish.
One particular problem I noted in Nigeria was the failure to deal with rubbish in a sensible way. I am afraid that landfill is often actually open rubbish in the streets, and flood water washes toxins from rubbish straight into any drinking water. Even if the water is boiled, it is often still too toxic to drink.
The young woman shown in “The Age of Stupid”, Layefa Malini, lived in the Niger delta region—an area we expect to be particularly affected by coastal flooding. It will be even more difficult for people living there to eke out a living as their farm lands become less and less inhabitable. It is not just Nigeria, as Ethiopia and Kenya have already experienced the devastating consequences of drought. Those two countries are predicted to be the first in line for climate change impacts, with lack of rainfall and effects on food security.
In Africa, the intergovernmental panel on climate change predicts that water stress will affect between 75 million and 250 million people by 2020, which will rise to 350 million to 600 million by 2050 if we do not take dramatic action on climate change. Of course, as I said, changes in agriculture lead people to change where they live. Many people living in rural areas find that they need to move into towns and cities in order to make a living. It is often young members of a family who are asked to leave for the towns and cities to try to send money back. Charities working in Cambodia have said that that can have a real impact on disease, with many people previously living in rural areas—perhaps mainly the young—moving into cities, but then returning with HIV or other infections, which are brought back into the rural areas. Clearly, the impacts of climate change are much more profound than just a bit more rain or heat.
We can also expect dramatic changes in conflicts as the competition for resources becomes more and more acute. In 2007 and 2008, because of rising food prices, we witnessed food riots in more than 30 countries. International Alert has estimated that in more than 46 countries, which are home to some 4.6 billion people, climate change, in conjunction with existing problems around economic and social issues, will create a very high risk of violent conflicts.
The consequence will be increased migration, internally displaced families, and families moving across international borders, most likely to other developing countries that are ill equipped to deal with an influx of poor people. We think of refugees as a problem that we face here, and of course the Government have been keen to drive down the number of people trying to claim asylum in this country, but if we were really serious about wanting to reduce that number we would make a more serious effort to tackle the causes of poverty and conflict, and to prevent conflict from arising in the first place. It is not our country that bears the burden of looking after refugees, but other, poor countries that are ill equipped to do so.
Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op): Will the hon. Lady add northern Nigeria, which I have visited, to her list of causes? It is a maelstrom in the conflict between the Christian and Muslim world. All too often, people who should know better use every opportunity to cause such conflict. Many communities that have lived together for generations are now being forced apart by religious discrimination.
Sarah Teather:
I agree. The area around Jos in particular has experienced conflict between Christian and Muslim communities. In Kaduna, another place that I visited,
the two communities live together. Relations can be very tense, and if the difficulties involving food and water resources continue to increase, that will only heighten the tension. It is not only religious tension that is at the root of the problems. Religious tension is often an excuse, or the label given to something much more profound relating to land, food, money and water. It is certainly true that Nigeria has had its difficulties, and it is a country that I know, but many other countries face similar problems.
We may have only a few years left before atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases reach a tipping point, and we find ourselves on an irreversible journey towards dangerous climate change. We cannot underestimate the importance of taking leadership on that issue now. The challenges that we face in tackling the financial crisis should provide us with opportunities to tackle climate change in a lasting way. Some of our present economic and environmental problems may have the same solutions. If South Korea can produce a fiscal stimulus of which 80 per cent. concerns the green economy, we must ask ourselves why on earth we cannot do the same. It is not too late for us to cancel the VAT cut, and to put the money saved into insulating homes, schools and hospitals and building new zero-carbon homes. That would enable us to tackle fuel poverty, house the homeless and do something serious to deal with climate change for the long term. Instead, we have given a small amount of money to a few relatively rich people who want to buy expensive goods such as flat-screen televisions, which seems petty given the problems that we are facing.
It is not too late for us to match our reform of the banking sector with carbon reporting. If we are not prepared to do that, at least we can influence our own banks—the banks that we now control—to prevent environmentally damaging investments in tar sands and deforestation. We should try to use the control that we have over many of the banks to build a new economy that will itself build for the future, rather than simply trying to replace the broken problem that we already have.
It is not too late for us to take a lead by cancelling damaging environmental projects such as Heathrow, or unabated coal power stations such as Kingsnorth. It is not too late for us to take a lead on renewables, and to adopt a credible strategy for the meeting of our 2020 targets. I fear that the Government have given up, feeling that it is too late for them to do anything before the next general election, but they have an opportunity to leave a legacy regardless of the result of the election, and I wish that they would take it.
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |