CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 113-vHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE
ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE
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This is a
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee
on
Members present
Mr Tim Yeo, in the Chair
Colin Challen
Mr David Chaytor
Martin Horwood
Mark Lazarowicz
Jo Swinson
________________
Memorandum submitted by Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Lord John Krebs, a Member of the House of Lords, Chairman of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change and Mr Neil Golborne, Team Leader Adaptation, Committee on Climate Change, gave evidence.
Q242 Chairman: Good afternoon and a warm welcome to the Committee. It is the first time we have been able to talk to you, certainly in this capacity. As you may know, we have a lot of interest in this particular inquiry and some people feel the amount of attention adaptation has received has not been commensurate with the amount of attention mitigation seems to get, so you are all the more welcome for that reason. I know that the Sub-Committee has a role which is set out in the Climate Change Act and has certain statutory functions. I wonder whether to begin with you would just like to set out what you see as the role of the Adaptation Sub-Committee.
Professor Lord Krebs: Thank you very much Chairman
and thank you for inviting me to give evidence to you. I should also like to introduce Neil Golborne
on my right who is the Team Leader of the Secretariat. What do I see as the role of the ASC? We describe ourselves as having three
roles. Number one is to scrutinise the
Climate Change Risk Assessment which has been commissioned by Defra and to comment
on it. Number two is to assess the
degree of preparedness of the
Q243 Chairman: Do you think that your Sub-Committee is in a position to do what it needs to do? You mentioned the three things you see as its principal role. Are you equipped to do so? Is it going to work well?
Professor Lord Krebs: It is very early days so I do not want to be over-confident but another way of looking as it is: what are the barriers which could prevent us doing what we are setting out to do? One barrier would be the failure of the relevant participants, stakeholders in the public and private sector, to engage with the adaptation agenda. It is very important that people buy into it whether through the requirements of the Act, the departmental action plans or the Reporting Powers for various statutory undertakers and bodies with public roles. That is one element which could inhibit us but we cannot tell yet whether stakeholders of that kind will engage. The second would be if the risk assessment were in some way inadequate to enable us to provide good advice to government and we are playing a role where we are scrutinising the risk assessment as it goes along to try to ensure that in our opinion it is steered in the right direction and delivers what it is supposed to say on the tin. The third thing that could be a barrier to us would be lack of resources, if our budget were severely cut and we did not have enough resources to continue with the work we have set out to do. In terms of the expertise I have on my Committee and the support I have from Neil and his team, we are very well placed.
Q244 Chairman: Just on the budgetary point, we would be hopeful that the whole Climate Change Committee, including your part of it, was going to be protected; I am not sure there is going to be a period when there are going to be huge increases in resources. You have a statutory role in commenting on the progress of the National Adaptation Programme. Would you see a role in actually helping to design the programme and influencing what goes into it?
Professor Lord Krebs: That is not explicitly in the
Act; our role is to comment on the programme and on progress towards
implementing it. However, in the view of
my Committee, the work we do on commenting on the Climate Change Risk
Assessment and on the assessment of the preparedness of the
Q245 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the organisational structure that the Act set in place for preparation of adaptation, are you confident that that structure is sufficiently streamlined or are there overlaps and duplications which are likely to cause problems?
Professor Lord Krebs: I would say that it is
probably a bit too early to tell. As
people have become aware of adaptation, there are clearly several players in
the field, of which we are one. There is
the UKCIP[1]
programme based at
Q246 Mr Chaytor: As it develops, where do you see the main pressures and challenges in bringing all these different bodies together and moving the whole thing forward?
Professor Lord Krebs: I suppose the story starts really with the role of the Met Office Hadley Centre to provide the underpinning science of climate change. If we are going to adapt we have to have some idea of what it is we are adapting to and what the levels of uncertainty are; the key challenge is dealing with uncertainty in long-term decisions. There is a clear role there that all the different players have in a sense to agree that they are reading from the same scientific script. If we were reading from very different scientific scripts, that would be a bad start. I think there is agreement that the Met Office Hadley Centre's projections are the starting point. At the other end, in terms of engagement with stakeholders-and I emphasised to the Chairman that is a key element and that we are not going to become a well-adapted society unless the different players who have a role to play buy into the agenda-it is important that we do not introduce stakeholder fatigue by having duplicated stakeholder engagement programmes and that different players may have specialisations. I have already said that UKCIP is particularly concerned at the local level whereas we may see our engagement very much with major players at national level. Defra also has a stakeholder engagement programme and we are seeking to understand more about what they are doing before we embark on our own. With careful thought and good communication we can achieve the best fitting together of the pieces of the jigsaw without all trying to put ourselves in the same place.
Q247 Mr Chaytor: Earlier you touched on the question of resources. Whatever shape the next government takes it will have to deal with the deficit in some way or another. Where would you prioritise reductions that your Committee would have to take when the time comes, as it will do? What areas could you dispense with?
Professor Lord Krebs: If we actually had to reduce our budget-I am going to turn to Neil who would be the one who would have to decide within his team-as it stands at the moment, with the resource we have, we believe we can fulfil our obligations as laid out in the Act. If the budget were cut we would have to engage in discussions with the Secretary of State, whoever he or she was, to ask which bits of this they wanted us not to deliver, because we would not be able to keep it all.
Q248 Mr Chaytor: The Secretary of State would be asking you to advise him as to which parts.
Professor Lord Krebs: Then it would be an iteration. We are advisory so in that sense we are prepared to offer advice on the areas the Government feel are the most urgent. Let me ask Neil to comment from his perspective.
Mr Golborne: Basically the budget we have is about £819,000, excluding VAT. A large proportion of that is fixed costs, salary for Committee members and salaries for staff, so these are not things you can flex. Roughly 10 to 15% of the budget is stuff that you can flex.[2] It is a research budget and some expense items. If they asked and the cut were substantial, we would probably need to cut the research element of the budget quite deeply. As someone who has to deliver a programme for the Committee, you are basically into a decision about how to adjust the scale, the scope, the timing of what you are trying to do. We would have to give our advice on a slower timescale if possible or to a different degree of accuracy or scale.
Professor Lord Krebs: We had a discussion in the
Committee in fact last week about what our top priority was; another way of
coming back on your question. We
distinguished between the top priority in the longer term and urgency in the
short term. In the short term, that is
over the next year, we have to ensure that the Climate Change Risk Assessment,
which we have to comment on before it is presented to the Secretary of State,
ensures that we have the resource and capability to make that commentary in an
effective way. If you ask for our top
priority in the longer term, it is to assess and advise on the state of
preparedness of the
Q249 Colin Challen: When the first Climate Change Risk Assessment comes out, what benefits do you think will emerge from that assessment to benefit our understanding and so on?
Professor Lord Krebs: I cannot really anticipate precisely the answer to that because the assessment is still in the first few months of the process, so I am in a sense guessing. What the risk assessment aims to do is to provide, where possible, quantitative or semi-quantitative assessments of risks in different sectors and do an associated cost-benefit analysis. The ideal outcome, which I am sure is a kind of optimistic view, is that we would have some semi-quantitative assessment of risk and impact and a cost-benefit analysis of those impacts which would lead to thoughts about alternative routes to adapting to those impacts. Do you build more sea defences or do you relinquish bits of the coast because it is going to be too costly to build sea defences? The other element which should come out is a sense of priorities. One of the difficulties of looking at the whole adaptation agenda is that there are so many things which might need to be attended to, whether it is power generation, telecommunications, transport infrastructure, health, agriculture, food production, water and flood protection and so on. It will give some sense of priorities which we will then be able to advise the Secretary of State on in terms of what the policy implications are and the implications for the adaptation programme that he will develop.
Q250 Colin Challen: It has only really been in the last year or so that the Government have been openly prepared to say that the temperature increase that we may see could go well beyond 2°C. The Met Office and others have said a central estimate of something like 3.9°C by 2080 could be on the cards. Will the assessment reflect a broad range of potential temperature increases and, if it does, what is the central estimate?
Professor Lord Krebs: They are asked to look at a range of future scenarios and I will ask Neil what the central estimate is because I cannot remember. One must not forget the uncertainties. When you say the central estimate might be around 3.9°C, that is with a huge range of uncertainty and I think whatever we get out of the first CCRA, Climate Change Risk Assessment, we must be clear in our minds that this is a work in progress and that we need to come back and repeat the risk assessment as our understanding of the climate system gets better. As I am sure you are aware, the UK CPO9 projections are the first attempt to make probabilistic projections on such a fine spatial resolution of a 25 by 25km grid. The actual climate models which underpin those projections run on a much bigger grid, a 300 by 300 km grid, in which England would be a couple of grid squares. We are pushing the limits of the science and therefore we should take whatever assessment comes out of the CCRA as a provisional view. Part of our job in advising the Secretary of State on the implications of it will be to balance the provisionality which says it is all too difficult, with some steer which says these are reasonable steps to take even though there is a great deal of uncertainty. Neil, I have given you time to think what the central estimate is.
Mr Golborne: I will give you a range and the central estimate falls somewhere between the two. By the end of the century you have scenarios which give you about 2.5°C of warming globally and at the upper end you are looking at about 4°C. In our advice we have been asking Defra and the contractors to consider as well global mitigation scenarios such as those recommended by the CCC[3] in its advice in its 2008 report. That would give you a temperature increase of just over 2°C. These figures are central estimates; there is a lot of uncertainty about those points.
Q251 Colin Challen: Bearing in mind those uncertainties and certainly the regional differences around the world, if you had a two-degree increase just for the UK-it would be very much greater elsewhere-would you be able to say whether a substantial difference was required in effort whether it was 2°C or 4°C or only a marginally greater effort?
Professor Lord Krebs: The general pattern which
emerges in all models is that there will be more extreme events, there will be
some degree of sea level rise and that could be anything from 0.2 metres to 0.9
metres; those sorts of figures are in contention. There will be increasing periods of drought,
particularly in the south-east of
Q252 Colin Challen: How much depth will the assessment be able to go into in the wider questions you have raised?
Professor Lord Krebs: That is a good question. The CCRA itself has not been tasked with
looking directly at international effects on the
Q253 Chairman: If it is just a short project, will it be sufficient? Should we identify where the research gaps are and start focusing on those?
Professor Lord Krebs: I would very much expect that part of the CCRA output and part of our advice to the Secretary of State would be to highlight knowledge gaps; not only the uncertainties but how knowledge gaps might be plugged and uncertainties might be reduced. Yes, we are looking at an evolving story not something which we do for a year and a half and then full stop, draw a line under it. It is going to be an evolving story.
Q254 Colin Challen: Finally, I am just wondering whether the CCRA will not suffer the same fate as the IPCC[4] reports when people come along afterwards to unpick them and to criticise them for always being out of date and so on. Is that going to be a problem? How robust will they be?
Professor Lord Krebs: An important part of our job is to comment and advise on how robust the CCRA is. We are not waiting until the final report is produced and then reading it and saying "It is rubbish; go away and start again". We are watching the progress of the contractors, H R Wallingford, as they go along. We have already written two substantive letters of advice to the Secretary of State giving our views on the contractors' work. What I can say is that when the CCRA is produced, we intend to be as robust as is possible in the time constraints and the resource constraints. I reiterate that it will not be the final answer but we will do our best to make sure that it is robust and provides a sound basis for advice to the Government.
Q255 Chairman: A couple of points. It is one thing for people to adapt by changing their diet because the pattern of global food production is altered by the impact of climate change. It is a slightly more serious matter if we have to have three or four million people suddenly. Is the pretty substantial and broad implication of possible large-scale population movement something that you will be expressly considering?
Professor Lord Krebs: In so far as the Foresight study gives us a basis for commenting on that, we would wish to include that in our comments. I should mention-again as I am sure you are aware-that there is also a Foresight study on migration going on at the same time. There is also a Foresight study on global food security and these will also, in so far as they produce results, be relevant to our thinking as we develop our advice.
Q256 Martin
Horwood: Quite a lot of the areas of responsibility
that you have talked about, including things like agriculture and health, are
clearly UK-wide, as is your remit. But
in detail they are often the responsibility of different administrations;
devolved administrations in
Professor Lord Krebs: I certainly think there should be sharing of best practice. One of the benefits of having a diversity of administrations is that different administrations may develop different approaches and we would be in a position to comment on those and offer advice across. So yes, I would say that as we move forward that would be something we would wish to comment on.
Q257 Martin Horwood: That comment could get quite controversial, could it not, if you were saying that the Scottish Government was not as far advanced in its adaptation policy as the English administration of the UK Government; it could get quite heated. Are you prepared to step into that kind of controversy?
Professor Lord Krebs: Yes, we are not here to avoid controversy, if controversy is necessary. We are not here to mince our words. We would be quite straightforward. What for us is very important in terms of our reputation is that we root everything we say in clear analysis and in evidence. We would not be expressing an opinion that was drawn out of thin air. If we had a firm enough evidence base and an analytical base to make an assertion, we would wish to make it.
Q258 Martin Horwood: In other evidence we have heard about how in some bits of adaptation strategy, flood risk management is a good example but health would be another one, there are third parties like the insurance industry who might start to qualify their flood risk cover for home insurance and might start to qualify their life cover for heat waves or something like that if the Government are not seen to be living up to their part of the bargain. Are you going to step into territory like that and comment on whether or not something like the flood risk management strategy is adequate or the NHS's adaptation strategy for higher temperatures is adequate?
Professor Lord Krebs: We do have a role to comment on the departmental adaptation plans and that is something we will be undertaking as these plans are produced over the year ahead. We have also been asked by Defra to comment on the bodies which will be required to report to the Secretary of State under the Reporting Powers' authority in the Act. We have said that we would not be able to comment on every single report individually but we will take an overview of certain sectors. In that sense, commenting on the preparedness of different sectors and different government departments for dealing with the challenge of adaptation of climate change is clearly part of our remit and we will comment and those comments will be in the public domain.
Q259 Martin Horwood: Just to be clear, would that kind of comment extend to devolved administrations and to bodies like the NHS Executive at national level?
Mr Golborne: Yes, because there is of
course a separate Scottish Climate Change Act, to take
Q260 Martin Horwood: The other question was about authorities like the NHS or the Environment Agency. If they were reporting to you, would you expect to be commenting on the quality of their adaptation plan and by implication the amount of money they might be getting for it from government?
Mr Golborne: Certainly I am sure we would be looking at the Reporting Power submission from the Environment Agency. There is an opportunity there for the Committee to raise any issues where it feels that there is a vulnerability.
Q261 Jo
Swinson: You mentioned there the possibility that
Mr Golborne: It is not something the Committee have considered and to be perfectly honest it is probably a matter for the Scots not for us.
Q262 Jo Swinson: So you would work within whatever structure?
Mr Golborne: Yes, we will work within the existing structure.
Q263 Jo
Swinson: In terms of mitigation it could be argued that
Professor Lord Krebs: We are at very early stages,
but one group of organisations that one might refer to in this context are
local authorities. Local authorities
have the option of reporting on their adaptation plans under what is called the
National Indicator 188. I believe that
about one third of local authorities in England have chosen to report under
this particular option, that is 149 of them, and of those 149 one has reached
what is called level three; there are four levels, nought, one, two and three.[5]
Q264 Jo
Swinson: Just to pick up on the Climate Risk
Assessment, you mentioned the possibility of population moving here and the
Mediterranean changes. Will you also be
advising on the impacts for British businesses whether that is different crop
growing cycles within the
Professor Lord Krebs: You highlight a very
important point which is that we should not view adaptation purely as a
negative. There may be new business
opportunities there in tourism, in food production or indeed opportunities for
Q265 Mr Chaytor: Returning to the question of reporting, you have freely acknowledged that you cannot particularly comment on all the reports of the 1,000-plus organisations who will write a report. Is the burden of reporting as set out in the Act too great? If you cannot do it and Defra are unlikely to do it, why are all these reports being published?
Professor Lord Krebs: There are two parts to that. One is whether the details of what is required under the Reporting Powers are too onerous either for the companies or the public bodies to fill in. Second, whether anybody is going to read them once they are filled in. Clearly it is important, as part of our assessment of preparedness, to understand what the key players are doing. So we have to have some information. What we have said is simply that in the time allowed and with the resource we have we cannot possibly read every single individual report. My understanding-and I will ask Neil to confirm or correct me-is that Defra will, perhaps through a consultancy, get somebody to condense down the reports into groupings, perhaps by sectors, and we will then comment on those overviews and perhaps dip deep in a few cases just to check that we agree with what the consultants have said. I think that is the approach. Have I got it right?
Mr Golborne: Yes, you have.
Q266 Chairman: We will draw to a close there. Thank you very much indeed for coming in. I hope we can keep in touch with you on these issues.
Professor Lord Krebs: Thank you very much. I very much look forward to keeping in touch and thank you for your time this afternoon.
Memorandum submitted by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Robert Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser and Mr Robin Mortimer, Director, Adapting to Climate Change Programme, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, gave evidence.
Q267 Chairman: Thank you very much for your time this afternoon; it is much appreciated. There is a great deal of interest in our inquiry into this subject which we have just agreed with Lord Krebs has perhaps, relative to mitigation, not received quite as much attention as undoubtedly it needs and deserves. May I ask you to start with just how big an impact you think climate change has on government? Does it actually change the objectives of individual departments and how those are going to have to be delivered?
Hilary Benn: First of all, good afternoon. May I say how much I welcome the Committee's inquiry? The truth is that trying to stop climate change getting worse has for very understandable reasons received a great deal of attention and learning to live with the climate change which is coming anyway has not, although I think that is beginning to change, both because of the adaptation provisions of the Climate Change Act and the framework that has been put in place, and that is a great aid. I know, having read the evidence sessions you have had in the inquiry, that there has been a lot of discussion about process. I simply observe that if it is process for a purpose, then it is a good thing because it helps to answer your question "Does everybody get it?" in understanding the importance of adapting to climate change. We have in a sense been at it for two years, we are trying to concentrate on the things which are most important. It is beginning to change and certainly within the Department I think we saw the publication of the UK Climate Impact Projections last summer as an opportunity to tell the story on the back of what the projections had to say about what may be coming, about what people need to do to think about how they are going to adapt to those changes when they arrive. Although it is not quite what people would anticipate, if you think of the recent spell of severe weather we have had, well there is a classic example of trying to adapt to circumstances that we have not seen for a little while because we have had a run of pretty mild winters. In summary, it is having an impact, but we are learning and that goes for everyone inside government and outside and we are trying to put the right building blocks in place. I hope you will be encouraged as a committee by the progress that we have made, recognising that there is a lot more to do.
Q268 Chairman:
It is
clearly, as indeed is mitigation, a very cross-cutting issue. Do you think that other departments in
Hilary Benn: Yes, but the real proof will
be with the publication of the Departmental Adaptation Plans when they come out
next month. They are going to be
published and everybody can see. Let us
take a couple of very practical examples.
The experience of the 2003 heat wave in
Q269 Chairman: You quoted some good examples of where departments have reacted: Department of Health has a heat-wave strategy, Transport are looking at crossovers on motorways. Reaction is better than not reacting but anticipation would be even better. Let me ask about the Home Office for example. It is quite possible that by the end of the century we might have to have several million immigrants who have been forced out of their homes in other parts of the world, whose connection with this country may be somewhat historic. Has the Home Office developed a strategy to adapt its immigration policies, which clearly do not envisage immigration on this sort of scale, to take account of this aspect of adaptation?
Hilary Benn: There is a Foresight study
which is trying to look slightly further ahead.
It depends what assumptions you make about the extent to which climate
change will force human beings to move around the earth to find somewhere where
they can live because they cannot live where they were previously. We can all think of lots of examples. By and large the evidence is that people will
move to the nearest place to where they were living. Take the example of
Professor Watson: I do not know whether they have any plans but Paul Wiles, the Home Office Chief Scientific Adviser, and I went to a World Bank meeting about a year ago to look at what the evidence was of the implications of climate change on hunger, on human health, on displacement of people and to try to gain some understanding of what degree climate change would lead to environmental refugees. Clearly what we learned was that it was very dependent on the socio-economic and political structure of those individual countries as to what degree they could cope with climate change. Paul has also commissioned some additional research on the issue. They are certainly looking at it as an issue. To what degree any of the results have influenced an adaptation strategy I really do not know.
Q270 Chairman: Is the cross-Whitehall programme board strong enough? Is that going to be effective?
Mr Mortimer: I chair it. It is really important to say that it is ambitious in the sense that we have 16 departments around the table. We are trying to be incredibly comprehensive. We are getting very good engagement and one of the things that has changed is that there had been a step change in the last two years. There has been, from permanent secretaries down, a sense in which adaptation is now seen as a priority alongside mitigation and that will bear fruit in the adaptation strategy. It is attempting to be incredibly comprehensive and not just to look at individual departments but also to look at the linkages. For example, we are doing a cross-cutting piece of work looking at national infrastructure with CLG, DfT and DECC in particular and trying to understand how some of the impacts on one part of the national infrastructure will affect others and so on. In both those senses it is attempting to be comprehensive.
Q271 Chairman: Is Defra better able to drive this forward than, say, the Cabinet Office?
Hilary Benn: I think we are doing a pretty
good job to be honest. You could sit the
function anywhere you like in government.
We have a range of things we obviously have direct interest in which are
big for adaptation: food, farming,
flooding, biodiversity, marine and so on.
In my view there is a good structure in place. What was in the Climate Change Act gives us
the information, puts duties upon us as a government to make sure we have
thought about what the risks are and what the plan is for dealing with
them. As I said, I think we are making
reasonable progress. Certainly to judge
by the number of people who come from other countries to
Mr Mortimer: We do have very close links, particularly with the resilience part of the Cabinet Office who sit on our programme board and vice-versa. Essentially, they are taking a five-year forward look at immediate risks, particularly to critical national infrastructure, whereas obviously we take the very much longer-term view. Making the connection between the short term and the long term is why we are trying to join up.
Q272 Mr Chaytor: Just coming back to the Departmental Action Plans which will be published this year. Last year the National Audit Office produced a survey of the state of play. Did your inter-departmental board consider that NAO publication? If so, how did you respond to it because the variation between departmental achievements was pretty striking?
Mr Mortimer: Absolutely. The NAO Report was incredibly helpful in terms of pushing us towards the concept of producing departmental adaptation plans to try to get that greater level of consistency. There is a wide recognition around the programme board that departments are at different stages; organisations like Defra, like CLG, like DfT have been looking at this for longer, others are coming to it fairly fresh. Yes, it was a very useful piece of work from that point of view.
Q273 Mr Chaytor: Last year's Green Book introduced this new advice on accounting for climate change impacts.[6] What has been the effect of that on the work of individual departments?
Hilary Benn: It is a very interesting question. I am told it has been downloaded 12,000 times, so someone is having a look at it. As you know, it was published in June last year. It recommends that the standard discount rate is used for adaptation. It is getting people to begin to think about how we work this into decisions that we take about investment. It is not straightforward. I was much struck by what Helen Phillips had to say to you in answering a question about this when she said that they did a lot of work and they peer reviewed it and in the end came to the conclusion that it was fairer to describe these as case studies because it is quite difficult to say "Here are the rules that everybody should apply in trying to take adaptation into account in economic decisions". The economist group is looking at how sustainability can be taken account of in decisions. Anyone who is taking decisions must take account of climate change. There is the really tricky question of, in the jargon, inter-generational equity: what do we do now to avoid cost falling on others later? How the conversation will go when people actually looked at projects and what the cost is going to be. If it is a case of designing slightly differently and therefore it is not necessarily more expensive-a slightly bigger pipe, going back to my Highways Agency example-we are not talking about an enormous cost, then we have a much better chance of making progress. The other thing you need is the right skills in terms of design and building. Having gone to RIBA[7] to give a presentation a few months back on the projections and adaptation, talking to some of their folk beforehand, there are bits of that profession that have got it, they are building it-no pun intended-into what they are designing currently, and then others who have not. It is about raising awareness all the way across the piece. This was a step forward in publishing the supplementary guidance to get people thinking about it and give them some advice on how they ought to take it into account.
Q274 Colin Challen: Looking very briefly at the Climate Change Act and the things we hope we are going to do in terms of mitigation, it has been suggested that the Government tend to have an optimism bias. If you have a range of values which science says at one end or the other, depending on various probabilities, you may achieve this outcome, we tend to go to the lower end. We have a very low expectation of getting more than a 50:50 chance of keeping temperatures in 2°C. Is there any kind of optimism bias in our adaptation plans? Earlier on I was asking about the estimates of temperature increase that would form part of any assessment that is done. I do not think our previous witnesses were in any way trying to deflect the question. They did provide an answer of somewhere between 2.5°C and 4°C by the end of the century. How should we pitch our adaptation plans? Not at the bottom of the level of expectation surely, but we could get away with that if we wished to.
Hilary Benn: There are several points
there. The first thing to acknowledge is
that the UKCP09 projections[8]
were of course new and better because for the first time they gave an
indication of probability. That is a big
step forward. When does probability
matter? An example I give is if you are
a manufacturer of sun hats and someone says it is going to get warmer and it
may be 2°C, 3°C or 4°C, that is probably just about all you need to know to
anticipate. If you are responsible for
the Thames Barrier, which is protecting the building we are sitting in today,
then you are really, really interested in the 10% probability of the highest
sea level rise. The best assessment we
have on the Thames Barrier for the moment is that it is good to 2070; it
depends what happens thereafter. That is
the first point. The second is, as the
projection showed very clearly, the next 20, 25, maybe 30 years are all of the
lines-because we took, from memory, some of the projection scenarios for global
emissions and they are roughly moving in the same direction. There is not a huge amount of difference
because we are dealing with what is already out there and therefore the impact
it is going to have on climate change.
What then spreads them apart in the graph is what we do from here on in
when it comes to mitigation. Part of the
purpose of projections is obviously to raise people's awareness, to get them
thinking about this. Each organisation,
whether it is government, business, local authorities, has to look at what that
says about what might happen and then say "Well, if that did happen, depending
on the outcome, whether it is 4°C or lower or higher, then how might that
affect me and my organisation and the things I have responsibility for and
therefore what do we need to do in case that comes to pass. One of the other things the projections of
course do is reinforce the argument for making sure we do not get to those
kinds of temperature increases that the medium-emission scenario indicated we
could get to by the 2080s, if we do not get a decent global agreement. We made a bit of progress but not as much we
hoped we would in
Professor Watson: In addition to that, the question
is: what are we going to try to adapt to? It is dependent on a mission scenario and our
knowledge of the climate system now up until about the mid-2030s. The climate of the mid-2030s is already
preordained due to the emissions in the past.
It is only past the 2030s that the results of the
Q275 Colin Challen: How will this issue of probabilities play out in your negotiations with the Treasury? The obvious approach is to say you have all these assessments and you will go with the central estimate; that would seem to be the obvious thing to do. They are going to say we are living in an exceptional period of austerity, all the parties are signing up to what some people describe as savage cuts and others are far more gentle in their approach to this, but, all the same, it is a huge constraint. The Treasury are going to come back to you and say "Sorry, but we are going to go for one of these cheaper estimates, still within the range of probabilities" and therefore you get this optimism bias being forced back into it.
Hilary Benn: It is a very pertinent
question. I give you one example of
where government already responded and that is expenditure on flood
defence. I came into this job on
Q276 Colin Challen: That CSR was agreed before the recession.
Hilary Benn: That is true. I asked the Environment Agency to do an assessment of what we are going to need to do in the years ahead. They came back and said that flood defence spending was going to need to rise-from memory-about £20 million a year or so each year just to keep pace; if we wanted to keep the level of protection where it was, that would be what we were going to need to do. Secondly, of course in normal times let alone when money is tight people will be asking whether we really need to do this now. One of the arguments which has to be put is that we may be saving a bit of money now but what is the cost that we may be looking at later on? If you look at what Nick Stern was able to do through that extraordinary report of his on the economics of climate change, he turned the argument, certainly within the business community.[10] Frankly, if you are able to demonstrate to people the cost of dealing with this problem is going to be this and the cost of not dealing with it is going to be this and ask them which they fancy, lots of people, not surprisingly say they would go with the lower option, thank you very much. It is slightly more complicated in the case of adaptation, for the reasons of the uncertainty that you allude to in putting the question, dealing with the range of probabilities and whether this has come to pass. I can give you a very practical current example. If you had been a local authority officer who had gone to your council three years ago and said you would like to build a whole new dome to store double the amount of salt, you might have got the answer from the councillors "Hang on a minute, we've had 23 years of really mild winters, why do we need to do that now?" The debate we had after February last year, which led to the Lugg report in the summer which said actually you ought to up your supplies to cover a certain number of days, is a really good example because we saw what the consequence of not doing it was, therefore we are more inclined to take action than when it was what might be perceived as a theoretical possibility that may not come to pass for a number of years.
Q277 Colin Challen: One way of tackling it could be to change the discount rate again. It was lowered in the Green Book but it is still fairly high. Obviously we want to help future generations but that is by doing things now and not having any particular rule preventing us from doing it. Why not reduce the discount rate again so that we are not front-loading the costs so much?
Hilary Benn: The guidance which came out in the summer, as I understand it, did take the Stern view, in relation to what is described as significant and irreversible impacts on future generations, to use in fact a lower discount rate which is still positive. I am told that it is called the zero rate of pure time reference. I will not pretend to the Committee that I understand what that means but basically it is a slightly lower discount rate-I think that is the case-and that has been contained in the guidance. We are going to have to reflect on this as things unfold. It is no use pretending there is not going to be some wrestling going on about this because of current economic circumstances. That is why a really important point in all of this is trying not to see this as something extra, because the climate has always adapted, that is the story of human beings' existence on the earth, but we have to build this into what people think about as the norm. That is why it is about understanding awareness and skills, rather than this being something extra we are going to have to do, and helping people to see what the consequence is. There are some very good examples where people have got that already. It is easier in some areas frankly than it is in others is the straight answer I give.
The Committee suspended from
Q278 Martin Horwood: A quick supplementary on the flood management budget, just because that is a good example of adaptation spending but also one which is obviously under your control. We have seen some shifting backwards and forwards in the total sums in response to the stimulus package. Is there not going to be huge pressure in the hangover from stimulus spending, when we are having to make public spending cuts generally, to see that spending would be presented as a temporary cutback in flood risk spending? If you look forward over the next three or four years could you confidently predict that those increases in flood risk spending will be maintained?
Hilary Benn: Those of course are always matters for the Chancellor and the CSR. I am on record publicly as saying that we are going to need to spend more on flood defence for reasons I think the Committee is only too well aware of. The question is where the funding comes from. At the moment it comes from central government, but increasingly it will be a question for communities too because obviously a lot of authorities have a wellbeing power, and involve some very difficult choices, particularly for dealing with coastal erosion, which is very tough indeed. One of the ways in which we are trying to encourage adaptation to that change is the coastal pathfinder programme that we announced a little while ago which was very practically giving money to local communities that bid to be thinking through how they deal with the consequences of that for their local economy and so on and so forth. We have seen the benefit of that increased investment and the changing climate and rising sea level in my view mean we are going to have to do more. The question we have to address is how we raise the money. I am not anticipating the CSR because that is in the hands of others and not me.
Q279 Mr Chaytor: Pursuing the question of costs, we have touched on the short term, the long term, the inter-generational aspect. You have touched now on the split between central and local but how do you build up a broader base of public support for the need for this? The public at election time will support spending on their children's schools, their healthcare system and their local police force but will reluctantly support spending on other things. How do we change that culture and lift climate change to the level of schools, healthcare and policing?
Hilary Benn: Let us take schools as a really practical example. If we are going to have hotter summers with higher temperatures for more days-and some of the scenarios in UKCP09 suggest that is the case-how are we going to keep those schools cool? What does it tell us about design? Shutters. Think of hot countries. They are much more likely to have shutters on windows than countries which are not quite so hot. What kind of ventilation system are you going to put in? There are some examples of schools which are already being designed taking account of that. The time to have that conversation is really with architects and those who are putting together the specification for the schools. Obviously in some other countries the school day operates to a different timetable to take account of the weather. These are things we may or may not have to address, depending on the nature of the change and, crucially depending on what we do to mitigate the change in the climate domestically through the Climate Change Act but, crucially, on what agreement we can get internationally because this is very much a shared problem. I would simply observe that the more we can enable each other to think about these kinds of consequences and people to see that there is a problem here that we need to deal with or to adapt to or learn to live with or take advantage, of the better chance it seems to me that we have of making progress. There are some things, if you think of the kind of crops we can grow with the change in climate, that will enable farmers to grow some things you cannot grow currently or extend the growing season. There are some opportunities as well as some quite serious risks.
Q280 Mr Chaytor: Coming back to the question of schools, was the time to have that discussion not more than six years ago when the Government decided to launch the Building Schools for the Future programme? We now have the largest investment in building new schools or refurbishing schools but, in the early years, very little consideration of the design consequences of the climate change policy.
Hilary Benn: The straight truth is that we are, as a world and as a society and as a country, coming to terms with these consequences. We are ahead of a lot of other countries because of the framework we have in place but this is a process and sure, at some point in the future, given what we know now, go back, would we have done some things differently? Fair point, but it takes time to raise this awareness and get people to think about these things and the great benefit of the Act and the framework is that we have a very clear process for encouraging all of us to do this and that does represent a step forward.
Professor Watson: To be quite honest, the world's community spent way too much time only thinking about mitigation-absolutely critical obviously-and not enough thinking about adaptation. It has only been in the last three to four years that I would say the adaptation issue has become a major issue politically through the negotiations post Kyoto/Copenhagen, et cetera. Until then, even though the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change had almost an equal stress on the evidence that was required there, adaptation and mitigation, the international community has predominantly focused only on mitigation. Clearly what we need to do is understand the implications of acting and not acting. What are the implications for floods that would resonate with people? What are the implications for coastal erosion? What are the implications for food security? What are the implications for human health? We have to make these issues totally relevant to the public at large so that when we think about these issues they will understand why we need to integrate considerations of adapting to climate change in all development portfolios, so that when we are thinking about our roads, we understand why we do need to consider it, thinking about food security, why we do need to consider it. We need to educate the public.
Q281 Mr Chaytor: All over the country now we have new schools, new clinics, new hospitals, new police stations, the vast majority of which were designed more than three years ago. So my question is: what is your assessment of the current state of the dialogue between climate change planners and architects and the construction industry? Is there not here an absolutely central role for government?
Hilary Benn: Yes, there is and that is why
we have had this programme on the back of UKCP09 taking the projections out because
this has been the best opportunity we have had to get to a wider audience and
say this is what may be coming now and ask what they think that means for them;
thus the roadshows and the things that people can download from websites. I attended one roadshow which was in
Q282 Mr Chaytor: May I digress a moment and respond to a point you made there about permeable surfaces? One of the country's leading manufacturers of permeable surfaces has a base in my constituency and is extremely concerned; welcomes the change of policy but is extremely concerned about the weak enforcement by local planning authorities. I wonder whether you have an observation on this and whether you have discussed this with your colleague, the Secretary of State for CLG.
Hilary Benn: I have not, but since you raised it I will.
Q283 Mr Chaytor: I am very grateful. We have talked about public funds so far. May I talk about private funds? You have been very good on giving concrete examples of adaptation. Do you have concrete examples of some interesting means by which private funding can be brought in to support the financing of adaptation?
Hilary Benn: In what way are you particularly thinking about private funding?
Q284 Mr Chaytor: For example, what about the role of developers and planning permissions and conditions on planning permissions and section whatever agreements?
Hilary Benn: Going back to the floods and the Water Management Bill, the provisions there relating to sustainable urban drainage are good examples of us setting a standard in the Bill-which I hope will be on the statute book before the election. It is really important that we collectively get it through, given the support there is right across the House, which will then impact on those who are developing housing estates. Clearly, if you can find a way of managing the water and the run-off that does not involve it getting into the surface water run-off, then you are helping to minimise what otherwise would be the impact of surface water flooding. We really have learned from the events of 2007, particularly in relation to surface water flooding where we now have clarity in the Bill as to whose responsibility it is: the upper tier local authority. In the past you had the council responsible for its bit, you had private culverts, you had the Highways Agency and no-one was looking and saying if we have paved, tarmacked and concreted over most of our town and city and it rains in huge quantities where do you think the water is going to go? You are dealing with an infrastructure that dates from a different age and there has been a lot of development. There is a really good story about practical adaptation that we have now built in to the legislation that is going through Parliament and we have given some funding to a number of authorities to start piloting how they are going to pull everybody together and think through the consequences of this. The sustainable urban drainage is another example, because it shows we have it but we do not want to add to the problem with stuff which is going to be built from here on in.
Mr Mortimer: A slightly separate angle to that. It does not cover the entire public sector but would be for the statutory undertakers, the regulated sector, where, because of the power under the Climate Change Act to require statutory undertakers to assess their risk and produce action plans, we have consulted a number of bodies, the energy companies, water companies and so on, being captured by that and that would be a very direct way in which we would be looking to leverage part of the private sector to invest in adapting.
Hilary Benn: May I just add on that very point that I know that, if we take Ofwat as an example, they have a climate change team and I think they were praised in evidence to the Committee in a previous session and of course Ofwat will be directed to report on what it intends to do to adapt its regulatory system. I would just say that I think the time has come, certainly now our PR09[11] is out of the way, to ask whether the current regulatory framework relating to water sufficiently takes account of climate change adaptation and other things like affordability.
Q285 Chairman: Do you think where private developers are involved in proposals which might have some impact on the adaptation strategy of a particular community that their obligations are sufficiently clear and the onus is on them to make sure that they are not making things worse or if they might make things worse that appropriate offsetting action is taken?
Hilary Benn: That is a very difficult question to answer. It is why I mentioned a moment ago that we would certainly like to see more representatives of industry in these regional roadshows that we have been running. The big companies that are clued up will of course be thinking about the impact of a changing climate on what they do and their supply chains. I have been talking to some of the supermarkets, for example, and they are thinking very clearly about this as far as the future is concerned and they have very good plans in place for ensuring the continuity of their supply chains depending on a range of things that might happen. One of the ways in which we signal it is indeed through the building regulations and that is a debate about the rate at which you crank them up. We have further to go to get a better understanding of how industry is responding to all of this.
Mr Mortimer: On the building regulations and the question about whether they are onerous enough, part of the issue there is whether we can be clear enough on what the specifications would be. If we take an issue like thermal mass of buildings, we are working hard with CLG and the Building Research people to look at what might be an appropriate standard but as yet there is not sufficient consistency of view on that to apply a universal standard across the building sector. We would look to use something like the code for sustainable homes, the voluntary approach into that through the experience of builders working with the code, then look potentially at a later date at building regulations. It is not always absolutely clear universally what has to be done. We are learning through mechanisms like that.
Q286 Martin Horwood: May I talk a little about the risk management approach that you have been talking about. Clearly Defra has done a huge amount on the flooding damage and on the Floods Bill and that is an area you know very well and which has percolated down into things like the Floods Bill and the EA. However, other departments may not have done quite as much thinking about this. If we look at the NHS or the Department for Transport and things like that, do you think they have any understanding of the kind of risks they are prepared to tolerate, the level of disruption to rail services or levels of mortality from novel diseases or from heat waves and things like that? Is that kind of risk management approach you are talking about actually present in the other departments yet?
Hilary Benn: I think the fact that the National Health Service has a national heat-wave plan is a really good example of the NHS having looked at what happened in 2003 and responded. The examples I gave about the Highways Agency obviously comes within the purview of the Department for Transport and it is another very good example of people who are getting on with it already because they can see the consequence, have experienced it and have responded accordingly. In other words, the need to adapt has become immediate and real and we see that in what they have done. As I indicated earlier, we will get a full view and people can make a judgement when the plans get published in March.
Q287 Martin Horwood: The UK Climate Impact Programme has actually quoted that example of the heat-wave plan and, if you will forgive the slightly grim quote, they said the heat-wave plan lacks a political statement about the acceptable death rate for old people in a heat wave or about the acceptable level of risk of such deaths. This means that adapters at many levels cannot determine how much adaptation is required. Effectively, without a value for such a death, it is impossible to allocate the "correct" amount of resource which should be put into avoiding such deaths. That is something the NHS does in other respects like quality adjusted life years. Although it sounds a bit grim to us, it is actually a methodology they are not unfamiliar with but it does not seem to have been applied to adaptation, does it?
Hilary Benn: My reaction is that I do not quite see how you could attempt to quantify it in the way you suggest, to be honest.
Q288 Martin Horwood: It is actually the way, although it is grim, that they do for quality adjusted life years in determining cost effectiveness of drug treatments. That is what the National Institute for Clinical Excellence does all the time.
Hilary Benn: That is true but one of the things we are dealing with here, as we have already touched upon, is the range of probability and the uncertainty. Quite how you would come up with a figure, given that, I do not know.
Q289 Martin Horwood: A risk management approach-and you have quoted the example of flooding where we are talking about 1:100 or 1:75 being acceptable-surely does have to be based on data. There are flaws in this process because it is based on past data and, as Professor Watson said, we have the inevitable climate change coming into play which actually changes the baseline, as it were, as you are going along. So 1:100 becomes 1:3 towards the end of the century in terms of flooding. You do need a data-based approach, do you not, for risk management to work?
Hilary Benn: Yes, we do.
Mr Mortimer: The Climate Change Act also has within it a requirement on government to produce a national risk assessment by 2011 and that is a major piece of work which we are now doing and which the Adaptation Sub-Committee, which Lord Krebs is chairing, is scrutinising us on. Alongside that is an economic appraisal where we are attempting to do the very thing you are suggesting, namely to look across the whole economy and society and ask where the greatest impacts are likely to be, where the greatest risks, whether we can quantify them and how we can prioritise across government programmes as to where the most significant impacts lie. We are in the process of doing that but obviously it is a major piece of work and will take the full time we have been allowed under the Act. That is work in progress.
Q290 Martin Horwood: That sounds very welcome and I suppose in a sense that would perform a job for adaptation that Stern did on mitigation. However, there is a bit of a problem with that as well. These are very top level quantifications of the risks, are they not? UKCIP has pointed out that there is a bit of a trend towards all this stuff being top-down, whereas a lot of the actions that are required are going to be by primary care trusts and local authorities and people like this. How are you going to try to get that risk management approach to percolate down? Has any attempt been made to communicate with staff at local level about this yet?
Mr Mortimer: Take local authorities. One of the things we have been working with local authorities on following publication of the projections is that very question: how can they take the projections and look at their own services. A current example I know is Nottinghamshire County Council which is looking across its services at what the risks might be, using the scenarios to understand the impact on social services and on transport and so on. Our job is to help them think through how they quantify and manage those risks, make the trade-offs and decide on the investments. You are right that it is absolutely ultimately local decisions which will determine a lot of adaptation effectiveness. What we are trying to do is provide the framework within which those decisions are taken.
Q291 Martin Horwood: Do you imagine a similar process happening where people are organisationally remote? Imagine people like Network Rail or other independent bodies which also have to adapt. Is this framework actively going to encourage that?
Hilary Benn: Sure and one of the organisations which is going to have to report under the Reporting Power is indeed Network Rail. They are going to have to indicate to us and to broader society what they think the potential risks are and the plan for dealing with it. That is why I said at the beginning that this process which has been put in place is very practical because it is about trying to answer the questions that you and other members of the Committee are rightly putting and it will help us to get a better understanding of where people have got to and where we have yet to go.
Q292 Colin Challen: I am wondering how wide we should set the boundaries for public responsibility for the private impacts of climate change on private individuals or private property. Some communities, as a consequence of climate change, may suffer more than others. What is our responsibility to them? How should we define it?
Hilary Benn: I am not sure I quite understand the question.
Q293 Colin
Challen: Let us say that we accept that a certain
coastal erosion is the result of climate change not only the fact that the east
of
Hilary Benn: We do all take a responsibility to the extent that we are spending more on dealing with flooding and coastal protection. We were discussing earlier what the size of that amount is going to be. This is exceptionally difficult because it is one thing if your home floods and it does not happen again for another 25 years or it never happens again. It is a whole other thing if your history, your culture, where you were born, where your kids were raised, is facing the prospect of being reclaimed by the sea. You go down the East Coast in particular, where of course the coast has been moving and eroding, reclaimed in some places, over the centuries. This is exceptionally difficult. We have to be straight and say that even if you had unlimited pots of money, depending on what happens to sea level rise, you get to a point where you are not going to be able to defend everywhere. Our starting point has to be that we will do our darnedest to defend as much as we can, which is why we are putting more money in, which is why communities themselves might want to do it. A second example of the responsibilities we are taking is the Coastal Pathfinders example that I gave. How you adapt to that. You might have a road which is vital for getting tourists to the beach they want to enjoy and it is going to crumble into the sea. If you can build a new road a bit further back, then you can sustain those opportunities for tourism and the local businesses that depend upon them. This is very, very practical stuff that the people in those communities themselves are best placed to understand and weigh the pros and cons of what needs to be done. Those are two examples of how we are trying to assist in those circumstances. The third point I would make about the small "p" politics of this is that we have the structure with the Environment Agency and what it does, we have local authorities which lead on the shoreline management plans. It does not work if you have communities and their elected representatives saying to the people who are trying to put the plans together "You are the cause of this problem". We have to share responsibility for this. I feel this very strongly. Having seen where it works well, that is the right approach. In the case of the Environment Agency, its job is to say that this is the problem, here is a range of things we might be able to do and this is what we might be able to contribute. In future might you want to contribute something? Then we are in a better position to deal with the problem which faces all of us and not to get into institutional warfare. That is using too big a term but you have to get the relationships right because it is a shared problem not all of us face, whichever bit of the system we are working in.
Q294 Colin Challen: In cases where government policy, government of any description, in the past has led to the building of a lot of housing estates on flood plains, which is now perhaps not quite the case but up until recently, I can remember inquiries by this Committee into housing policy, it was the case and people will have bought houses in good faith. Perhaps local authorities are partially to blame as well. Then a few years later along comes the Environment Agency and publishes a map of flood risk. Immediately your insurance costs are going to go up. Should people be compensated for that? This is an adaptation question.
Hilary Benn: Compensated by whom, if you do not mind me asking?
Q295 Colin Challen: By the people who allowed the housing to be built in the first place.
Hilary Benn: That would be in the end the local authorities who gave the permission. I cannot undo the past and none of us can. What we can do is try to avoid the problem being repeated in the future. The single most important thing that we have done is to strengthen PPS25[12] by saying that the Environment Agency has to be consulted as a matter of course. The evidence is very clear. The last time I looked at the figures-from memory and I will drop you a note if I have the precise figure wrong-about 96 or 97% of the decisions were going in accordance with what the Environment Agency had to say about flood risk and whether the development should be allowed or not. We have learned the lesson of that and I think we have a pretty good system in place. The question for each individual application is what is the risk and can you defend against it? We are sitting in a flood plain, we have the Thames Barrier downstream, which I think the Committee has visited, and that means that we are protected. Those are the things that planning authorities have to take into account. Ultimately they have a responsibility. Government have to set a proper framework and in PPS25 we have done that to avoid adding to the problem to which you have rightly drawn attention as a result of decisions in the past.
Q296 Colin Challen: The Government quite rightly is publishing more and more information, assessments about climate change impacts and so on. That could raise people's expectations that the Government will do more to protect them and that is a reasonable linkage. Should we not be looking at also publishing guidance on what kind of assistance people should be able to expect and what not to expect?
Hilary Benn: One example of adapting to
flooding is the way in which your home is built. During the course of 2007 I visited a lot of
homes which had been flooded, some in Mr Horwood's constituency. Not surprisingly, a lot of them were in
places like Riverside Close and
Professor Watson: What we also need to do, when
local authorities look at issues such as coastal erosion, is to take a fairly
holistic view. For example, one area
where there is significant coastal erosion today is in Happisburgh in
Q297 Colin Challen: In mitigation terms we have the Carbon Trust and the Energy Savings Trust. In adaptation terms should we have a similar body which is clearly recognisable, a one-stop shop or have we already got one and I have just missed it?
Hilary Benn: It is a really fair question. If you like, the programme that we have put in place in the wake of UKCIP's publication last summer was the beginning of that. It is clear that there is an increasing thirst for advice, guidance, practical examples, how to do it, manuals and so on. One of the things we will need to think about is the best way to give that. It will not just be about central government. If you take architects as a profession, there is a whole network where architects talk to each other and share good practice and ideas and have conferences and so on, getting it into there, people who are designing buildings, builders in their building techniques. We need to use all of these methods to get awareness out, for people to see how you can do it differently, showing by example. I think that way lies the best chance of getting more people to get on and make it happen. That is the way I would see it.
Q298 Martin Horwood: Secretary of State, you did visit my constituency and it was very much appreciated at the time. I am sure you will intimately remember the area we visited, which was called Whaddon. There are some bits of Cheltenham which are already fitting very expensive flood defences and I am sure in time they will be fitting Indian shutters and solar powered air conditioning systems and things like that but I do not think it will be in Whaddon, which is one of the least well-off parts of the constituency; it also has people who are not only relatively poor but may be vulnerable because they are elderly or because they are disabled. We often talk about the vulnerable being the first to be hit in climate change, but that is going to be true in this country as well, is it not? Do you have or do we need special strategies for vulnerable groups like that who are unable to adapt to climate change as easily as people who are better off either physically or financially?
Hilary Benn: We have tried to prioritise the way in which we have allocated some of the money out, although ultimately that responsibility really has to rest at the local level. That is not to say what you have raised is not a national issue because it rightly is. The people who know the local community best are indeed the local authority and that is why, when we have given the funding for the property level protection, it has been in response to bids from local authorities because they know whether they have a problem they need to deal with and why we have said we did not seek to instruct them so it has to be match funded; clearly you make the money we have been prepared to put in go further if you match it with funding yourself. It is then really for local communities to work out, through the local authorities, how they are going to prioritise what needs to be done on the ground.
Q299 Martin Horwood: If I may say so, there is a broader social issue, is there not? At national level you could say that there are clearly identifiable groups, whether it is the people who are poor enough to have so many other worries in their lives that they do not really want to worry about the possibility of a heat wave next summer or it is people who are too frail to be able to do some of these things, people will need to adapt. How do we engage with those groups? Are you going to be developing strategies, giving advice to local authorities on how to do that? What do you think the best way of engaging with those groups actually is?
Hilary Benn: Some of the vulnerability you
have drawn our attention to is place specific, because they are places where
there is a risk of flooding and there will be others where that is not the
problem, which is why I answered your previous question in that way. Others. If you take air quality, you think of summer
temperatures, not much wind, concentration of smog, there are already schemes
operating in different parts of the country.
I saw one in
Q300 Martin Horwood: Let us take that one example of elderly people, potentially very vulnerable in a heat wave, not particularly place specific. Do you see it as your Department's role or as the Adaptation Sub-Committee's role to advise local authorities or local health authorities on what to do to protect elderly people in that situation?
Hilary Benn: I would say those who have responsibility at the local level in this particular case we are talking about, the impact of air quality on health, will be the primary care trust. That is one of the things they ought to think about and the fact that there are several of these schemes operating in the country already shows what can be done and it is certainly something I would encourage. In the advice and the guidance and the awareness-raising that we do that is a really good example of something we should talk about but the responsibility for responding to it is with those who have the lead responsibility for looking out for people's health.
Q301 Martin Horwood: So it is not a national responsibility at all to advise on that.
Hilary Benn: No, I have just said it is a national responsibility to advise but I am saying the lead for what you then do about it, it seems to me, would need to come locally.
Q302 Chairman: Are there aspects of adaptation which need to be dealt with regionally?
Hilary Benn: Good question. Specifically regionally?
Mr Mortimer: On some aspects, where there are regional structures in place, we work with them and through them. Take economic development, we are working with the RDAs[13] as part of regional partnerships to look at how they might need to think about adaptation in terms of economic strategies, for example. Where there are regional structures then yes, it does make sense for us to work through those.
Hilary Benn: I was thinking, to answer your question particularly about regional aspects to climate change and therefore adaptation needing to be different in different places, that we already alluded to one: water supply. Obviously there are places where flooding is a particular risk and in the south-east we really have to be more efficient in the way in which we use water. That is a really good example. It is different in the north-east if you have Kielder and a lot of rain. It is very different in the south-east if you do not have a lot of rain and you have a growing number of people.
Q303 Mr Chaytor: May I ask a little bit more about the position of local authorities? One local authority has apparently achieved level three in its adaptation planning, one out of the best part of 150. What can be done to spread best practice more effectively amongst local authorities?
Hilary Benn: All local authorities will have to report in relation to the indicator; about one third have adopted NI188[14] as a priority and just about half are at level one or above; level nought being not even at the races and level four getting on with getting it taped. It is a process and this is self-assessment and locally it is a question that local communities and indeed councillors need to ask. I was interested in the evidence you had about the extent to which elected members are engaged in this. I would say from our point of view that there is some way to go. I am not singling out elected members. I am just saying that right across the piece we need to get those with responsibility for taking these decisions, a number of which we have touched on in conversation already, to see this as an important part of what they do and that is why there is a particular project for training and awareness-raising which we are going to do during the course of this year to try to engage that particular group of decision-makers.
Mr Mortimer: Yes, as well as elected members.
Q304 Mr Chaytor: To come back to the case for parallel organisation, to the Carbon Trust to provide financial support but also models of good practice, examples of good practice, is the local government sector exactly the part of our national system that could provide this kind of lead, given that they are absolutely in the firing line of the climate change impact and the expertise, engineering, planning, transport, infrastructure, emergency planning is all there in local councils? Should they not now be establishing a national institute that would disseminate good practice in this way?
Hilary Benn: That is for local government
and its responsibilities. I have no
doubt one of the things they will want to address is how we best support all
local authorities in doing these things.
No sooner do you ask the question than I am reliably informed that we
are tomorrow-it cannot be said we do not respond to the Committee's requests-launching
a guide for elected members at the LGA[15]
conference in
Mr Chaytor: I could not ask for a better reply.
Q305 Chairman: I wish all our recommendations were responded to with similar alacrity.
Hilary Benn: I do my best. When it comes to the rest of society, whether
it would make sense for the business community to be looking to local
authorities to give them that kind of advice, I am not so sure. You have raised a fair point about what are
the most effective means going forward, once we have got past the
awareness-raising stage, in which we are still engaged at the moment, to make
sure people have a good place to which to go to get advice and
information. There is a consultancy
world that is growing up in the
Q306 Martin Horwood: What research do you think has been undertaken to assess how well business and the private sector are really preparing for this?
Mr Mortimer: We are doing some. We are doing a benchmarking exercise to look
at levels of awareness and the truth again is that it is very mixed. There are clearly some companies who have a
direct interest because their supply chains may be impacted overseas, for
example, who have done quite a lot of work in this area. There are others who frankly are at first
base. Interestingly the CBI is itself
just doing a major piece of work looking across
Q307 Martin Horwood: Have you done any work on what you think should be the priority sectors and, if so, how have you gone about actually identifying them?
Mr Mortimer: At the moment the priority has been to focus particularly on the providers of public benefits, particularly the privatised utilities would be the first on our list of priorities. Beyond that there are sectors which we are looking at. We consulted last year on whether we should ask on a voluntary basis some sectors, like food retailers for example, to report, sectors which could be in the front line but which lie beyond the powers in the Climate Change Act. There is some possibility for us to look to them to report to us on a voluntary basis.
Hilary Benn: For the sectors for which
Defra has particular responsibility, we have discussed water and flooding quite
extensively but food and farming is a really good example. If you look at the Food 2030 document which
we published at the beginning of the month, there is a fair bit in there about
the need to adapt, how we are going to grow more food with a changing climate,
water under more stress. We have not
talked much about pests and diseases relating to crops and things; take
something like phytophthora which is an increasing problem particularly in the
south-west and elsewhere. We have a very
big research programme trying to understand how to deal with that. That can affect some of our much loved trees
that shape the landscape that people enjoy and value. The one other example I would give in
relation to food is some research that we have been co-funding at East Malling. The strawberry industry in
Professor Watson: In fact one of the reasons we
are working with the Technology Strategy Board is that they work directly with
the private sector so you know any information and knowledge you get will be
directly useful. The other comment I
would make is that when we think of infrastructure and we are going to have to
make major investments in infrastructure over the coming decades in the
Hilary Benn: I would just add one other
thing. If one takes the parallel with
climate change and mitigation, one of the things which has been quite striking
in the
Q308 Martin Horwood: Picking up for the moment the issue of the food supply chain which surely must be up there with energy as one of the most critical, that is hugely dependent on what is going on in other countries. Have you had any international discussions about things like the future of food security, adaptation and how to consider that internationally?
Hilary Benn: We have. We are 60% self-sufficient overall in food;
we are 73% self-sufficient in the food that can be grown here. Interestingly, we are more self-sufficient in
food now than we were in the 1930s and 1950s, which I must say surprised me
when I first learned that. The peak was
at the height of the Common Agricultural Policy but that was not a very good
policy when it came to the natural environment or indeed for the life chances
of farmers in developing countries whose nascent business we were undercutting
with dumped stuff. If we are going to
have another two and a half to three billion human beings on this earth in the
next 40 to 50 years-and that is what the indication seems to be-we are going to
need a big increase in food production.
Both because of that and because as people get better off, they buy more
and eat more, they consume more meat and cheese, more dairy products. Internationally, through the FAO,[16]
the work of the global partnership, we are both trying to support people's
direct needs for food; where drought happens we put more money into the World
Food Programme, we look at the problems in
Q309 Martin Horwood: May I draw you back to the British private sector which is where we started this question? Wearing my all-party-group-on-corporate-responsibility hat, I know that there are quite a lot of networks out there which have been used a lot to promote responsible climate change mitigation measures; the corporate responsibility movement but many other green business organisations. Are you using any of those networks to start British companies talking about adaptation? I have to say I am not aware of a lot.
Mr Mortimer: Yes, we are. We have our own partnership group in the Department with a range of organisations including some in the private sector. We use networks, particularly some of the professional networks, so the environmental risk managers, the architects, the engineers, professional groupings who work across sectors. Thirdly, I would highlight what the Secretary of State said around the finance sector. The ABI[17] and the investment groups clearly have an important role to play in talking to a whole range of clients. Obviously we are a small team and we are fairly limited in the number of direct relationships we have with individual businesses but we try to use those networks as much as possible to get the message out.
Q310 Chairman: Within the financial services sector the Government now controls one of the biggest banks in the country. It would be possible to analyse their lending policies to see what account they are taking of the risks to their customers and borrowers that adaptation to climate change involves.
Hilary Benn: Sadly I have a pretty good idea. I suspect that the conversations which have been taking place over the last year between the banks and their new part-owners have been about something else.
Q311 Chairman: There is time for those discussions to move on to this agenda. We are coming to the end. We are very grateful to you for giving us this time this afternoon. It is a really interesting and important subject for us.
Hilary Benn: It was a pleasure.
Q312 Chairman: If there are things we want to follow up with your officials, we may wish to do so in the next few weeks.
Hilary Benn: With the greatest of pleasure and we look forward to your report.
[1]
[2] Note by witness: The proportion of the budget that can be flexed is closer to 20%.
[3] Committee on Climate Change
[4] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[5] Note by witness: There are actually five levels (nought, one, two, three and four) rather than four.
[6] HM Treasury, The Green Book: Appraisal and Evaluation in Central Government (and Supplementary Guidance)
[7] Royal
[8]
[9] Comprehensive Spending Review
[10]
[11] Periodic Review of Water Price Limits 2009
[12] Planning Policy Statement 25
[13] Regional Development Agencies
[14] National Indicator 188
[15] Local Government Association
[16] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
[17] Association of British Insurers