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I am confident that the staff will welcome the new emphasis on local decision-making and stronger community links, because they are not just public sector workers, but parents, carers, community activists and consumers. They have strong views on what works and unique insight into how services can be improved. They have seen first hand how “one size fits all” policies increasingly fail to address the complexities and diversity of problems at a local level; and they have felt the frustration of delivering services aimed at meeting targets rather than need.
I hope that the new models of local power will draw not only on the aspirations of citizens but also on the rather neglected expertise of front-line workers. As someone who has worked closely with local government leaders for many years, I welcome the recognition of their crucial role in civic leadership and service innovation. There is little doubt that the road back to strong democratic participation has to begin with the next generation of community leaders—more diverse, more outspoken and more valued by the communities they represent.
I referred to the importance of passion in shaping our contribution. Parallel to my trade union background, I have another passion which I hope the local government legislation will help to address. I mentioned that I was a rebellious teenager, but for many years I was also packed off to the local Baptist church in Whitchurch. One day the sermon took as its source a book called Bury Me in My Boots, which graphically described how Sally Trench worked for the Simon Community with the homeless on the streets of London. I hope that the right reverend Prelates will not be too offended if I say that the sermon's punch line—that God would not let us be buried in our boots—was rather lost on us. However, it inspired me to buy the book and start a lifelong campaign against poor housing and homelessness, which I continue today.
For many years I was the chair of the Empty Homes Agency, a small charity that campaigns against the wasted potential of 300,000 empty homes in Britain. I am very pleased that in the recent Housing Act the Government finally took steps to bring back into use many of the long-term empty properties.
I have also sat on the board of Shelter for a number of years, and it gives me no great pleasure to report that this year is our 40th anniversary. Indeed, this autumn the BBC will show “Cathy Come Home” to mark the occasion. In that time the nature of housing need has changed, but it remains a challenge and an affront to a civilised society. The scale of the challenge is daunting.
The Government have already allocated nearly £40 billion to tackle housing shortages in the south and problems of low demand in parts of the Midlands and the north. They are doubling investment in social housing and are well on the way to ensuring that social housing meets the decent homes standard by 2010. They have expanded home ownership schemes and have taken steps to reduce rough sleeping and to outlaw families being placed in bed and breakfast. But demographic pressures, such
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Underpinning these problems is a chronic shortage of affordable homes to rent. Shelter estimates that an additional 20,000 units a year are needed to address that problem. Meanwhile, a UNISON survey showed that the majority of its members—many of whom are the key workers we are desperate to attract—want the opportunity to own their own homes in the future. So, in addition to more social housing, new models of ownership and shared equity are crucial to bridge the affordability gap.
I very much hope that the new legislation will recognise that decent homes are central to delivering strong communities. For me, that model has to be based on mixed tenure with a mixture of sufficient homes to rent and to buy. When we talk about giving communities a stronger voice, this has to include a new compact with tenants, giving them new rights to determine the ownership and management of their homes. It takes time and perseverance to get people involved, but all my experience shows that if you give people real power and influence, they will respond.
We all recognise the twin challenges of delivering responsive public services and reviving local participation, but if we can get the right ingredients, the democratic prize for all of us is bigger than any individual Bill. I look forward to listening with great interest to the range of expertise which will inform the debate today and hope to contribute in some small way to the unfolding debate in the months to come.
Noon
Lord Redesdale: My Lords, the pleasure falls to me of welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, who just made her maiden speech. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said that it is a test, but it is one that she passed with flying colours. Most of us remember the fear associated with our maiden speech very well.
The noble Baroness brings a wealth of experience, especially from her long work with UNISON, where she championed fighting low pay and discrimination at work. She mentioned her role on the boards of Shelter and the Empty Homes Agency, but she missed out the topical fact that she is on the board of the School Food Trust. She will have many opportunities to raise that issue in the coming weeks and months. Also, as this is the agriculture and environment day on the gracious Speech, she missed out the fact that, being a rambler, she may have a lot to add to the debate about access.
For many people, the gracious Speech seemed to be divided into two areas: Home Office Bills, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said, and climate change. I do not think that we have previously come across a
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Climate change is taking place. As the right reverend Prelate pointed out, we are producing only 2 per cent of the world's production of carbon dioxide, but that is a frightening statistic when we consider how many millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are involved. We should not forget that, as the instigators of the industrial revolution, this country has an historic legacy in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. There are now about 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For how many of those are we responsible? The wealth of this country is based on the fact—I cannot remember which Minister said this in a speech—that carbon has no cost. We have always believed that carbon has no cost, but that is no longer the case.
The Climate Change Bill is also very unusual in that it has almost been pushed forward not by politicians but by the electorate themselves. Interestingly, it was difficult to get a handle on what was going to be in the Bill until two days ago, but people’s expectations of what it will include are far higher than most politicians believe, expect or even feel they can cope with. All of us across the political spectrum will be running to catch up with people’s expectations. I therefore believe that year-on-year targets, although not part of the Bill at the moment, will end up in it because there will be such a massive move. I understand why the Government are opposed to year-on-year targets to reduce carbon production, but the major problem is that there is always a reason why our carbon footprint will slip. Last year, the increase in gas prices meant that many coal-fired power stations were brought back on line so that energy costs could be brought down. However, that had massive implications for the amount of carbon that we as a country are producing. Will this be seen as acceptable in the future? We talk about 10 years to the tipping point. Many people believe that we have gone past that tipping point, but, if we are talking about such small time-scales, is it acceptable if we fall one year behind any targets that we set? If we do not have mandatory targets, it will be very difficult to ensure that we push people into agreeing to them.
I recently spoke to some Liberal Democrats at an LGA event. They were not particularly interested in the whole concept of targets for carbon, but I asked them to remember what happened where there were targets for waste; suddenly, local authorities had to stop everything else that they were doing and focus almost entirely on recycling and waste management. The same will happen with targets for carbon. When we talk about targets, we talk about businesses and local communities, but the burden will fall not only on them but on Government, on local authorities and
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It is also assumed that we cannot somehow bring about a reduction in power usage. I find that incredible, because it is easy; it is easy for the individual, in companies, and in Government to take the first steps. It is not easy to achieve a 90 per cent reduction, but it is not impossible to achieve a 20 or 30 per cent reduction. I decided to change all the light bulbs in my house and to stop using the tumble dryer. That has had a marked effect on the bill that I pay. While I was in the attic trying to fit some insulation, I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Young, say on Radio 4 that everyone should have insulation, so I felt rather good about myself at that point.
Reductions will be made by individuals and elsewhere at every level. Many people mention China and ask why we should bother, but the Chinese are particularly concerned about climate change. At the moment, a vast amount of water is coming off the glaciers, probably due to climate change, but that will run out soon and there will be water shortages and an increase in temperature. This will cut the number of rice harvests in some areas from three a year to perhaps one. On that basis, China will not be able to feed itself. We should therefore not assume that the Chinese are not taking this seriously. There is a rapid move to industrialisation, but I think that they understand the real issue.
We can change things without affecting our lifestyle. We could introduce mandatory targets to reduce standby, which takes up 10 per cent of the electricity used in the country, to one watt. That should not be impossible. I believe that there are moves afoot to see whether we should outlaw the use of filament light bulbs. Many people say that they must keep filament light bulbs because of the quality of the light. However, we are sitting in a Chamber where only last year the light bulbs were changed to energy-saving ones and I am not sure that any noble Lord has noticed the difference. That reflects the better quality of energy-saving light bulbs and apparently has saved £3,000 a year on the electricity bill because the others were each 500-watt bulbs; it is quite a saving in energy, although I cannot recall the exact figures.
There are things the Government can do. The Private Member’s Bill on climate change that went through last year made interesting points about localised micro-generation and making changes to the planning system. I think that we will have a number of debates with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, over issues such as permitted development. A particularly important point is that we now have permitted development orders going through to allow up to 50 kilowatts of micro-generation capacity on a house. Why can that not be changed to permit up to 50 kilowatts of electricity generation on agricultural land? That would have a major effect in changing power supplies for certain areas.
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Other issues such as the decentralisation of energy will have major effects, but I would go far beyond my time if I were to go into them. What really needs to be addressed in our debates is that while we think we are leading the way, I think we are going to be pushed a great deal further. An indication of that arose at our conference this year. We raised the issue of green taxes. A great deal of discussion arose on how we would be shot down in flames because everyone would be upset by the proposal, but I have had a large number of letters of support saying that this is the right move. We should not be scared of the fact that we are going to have to impose limits, taxes and regulations. The country actually wants us to be far more proactive in these areas.
12.13 pm
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch on her excellent maiden speech. I should like to say to her that if before she started to speak she had any fears that she would not be able to compete in this Chamber, I think she need not have any such fears now. We look forward to hearing much more from her in the future.
I was encouraged by the news in the gracious Speech that the Government intend to bring forward a Bill on climate change and it is clear that everyone else in the House is equally encouraged. Let us hope that we can look forward to some cross-party consensus on the issues that will arise. However, I am afraid that I shall return to a matter on which I have addressed your Lordships’ House more than once; namely, the increasingly damaging impact of aviation on the environment. This theme touches not only on the big issue of climate change, now pushed so dramatically up the political agenda by among other things the publication of the Stern report, but also—as the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has just pointed out—by the very significant change in public opinion which we are beginning to see reflected in opinion polls and in comment. There is a much stronger sense of the issues we are facing over climate change, a sense that is more widely shared than perhaps we in the Palace of Westminster have quite got a handle on yet. But beyond the big issue of climate change, the question of aviation also touches on more local environmental impacts which we can sometimes overlook as we contemplate the scale of the global threat we face.
In preparing for this debate I looked at recent research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of Manchester, as well as work from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. What these much-respected groups have to say about the dangers we face from the current explosive growth in air travel makes for very sobering reading. They tell us that unless something radical is done to curb the current rates of growth in aviation, particularly in air travel, we have no chance of meeting the targets on carbon emissions put forward by my noble friend Lord Rooker in his opening remarks. This leads me and, I think, many others to the conclusion that current government policy on air
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On every previous occasion when Ministers have been pressed on the issue, the response has always been to point to growing demand and to suggest that restricting growth in the air industry would amount to an unfair denial of the supposed democratic freedom to fly. Even my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham, when answering my recent Question on this issue and doing his noble best to look green but clearly feeling more like a chameleon on a tartan rug, felt obliged to say,
and to refer to this activity as part of ,
But in what sense can the wish to fly, say, to Italy for next to nothing or, come to that, the wish to eat strawberries in December honestly be described as a need? We have a tendency in a consumer-led economy to conflate needs with desires and call them freedoms. In few areas is this more apparent than in our ambivalent attitude to transport.
But the time has surely come to recognise that the price we are asking our children and grandchildren to pay for our freedom to consume energy and pollute the atmosphere is simply too high and we have to do some big things now to make a difference. I welcome, of course, the Government’s intention to introduce a Bill on climate change and I look forward to seeing exactly what it proposes, but I fear that it will be too little and its effects will come too late in respect of aviation.
Let me give a couple of statistics taken from the Oxford Environmental Change Institute study published last month. It states:
“In just ten years, between 1990 and 2000, carbon dioxide emissions from UK aviation have doubled. During the same period, the combined emissions of carbon dioxide from all other UK activities fell by around 9%. A review of various forecasts of UK air travel growth indicates that aviation emissions are set to more than double again between 2000 and 2030 and could increase to between 4 and 10 times their present level by 2050”.
- “the UK generates more flights than any other European country; a fifth of all international air passengers worldwide are on flights that arrive or leave from UK airports. Hence, aviation makes a proportionally greater contribution to climate change for the UK than for most other countries”.
- “there are now five overseas holiday flights for every business flight made overseas by a UK resident”.
“Passenger traffic at UK airports has grown at an average annual rate of about 6% since the mid-1970s, with an increase of 12.5 million new passenger movements in the last year. Much of the recent expansion in flying has occurred because better off people are flying more often. There is little evidence that those on low incomes are flying more; flying cannot be regarded as a socially inclusive activity”.
Further evidence was published only last week by the Civil Aviation Authority showing that it is the well off who benefit from cheap travel. Eighty-three per cent
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There is further evidence from the Office for National Statistics which has just published figures showing that the trade deficit on air travel in 2005 was £18.8 billion compared to just £2 billion 10 years earlier. Fifty-four million overseas flights were made in 2005 by UK residents, who spent £28 billion while they were away. This compares with only 22 million foreign visitors coming to the UK, who spent only £12.3 billion. We are often told that imposing significant as opposed to minimal constraints on the growth of air travel would have terrible consequences for our economy. I do not underestimate the importance of jobs in the aviation industry and of the economic activity it generates more widely but, set against the social and economic disbenefits of growth now becoming apparent, I wonder whether the evidence for that claim really stacks up.
I sense that the Government’s preferred option—and, indeed, that of the party opposite—is to think about these matters as essentially problems for the future to which we should take a responsible but gradual and incremental approach. In most circumstances, I am a natural gradualist, but on this matter I believe the future is now and there are choices we must make now. I know the Government are already considering some of them. It must be right to include aviation in any EU emissions trading scheme, although this measure will take a long time to achieve any significant impact and its effectiveness will depend crucially on the design of the scheme, as the European Committee of your Lordships’ House pointed out recently in its report.
It is right that the cost of air travel should rise. The Civil Aviation Authority figures seem to indicate that the people flying most frequently could certainly afford to pay a lot more. Bringing in an air passenger duty would be one effective way of countering the trend towards even cheaper fares and would not, as the Oxford institute points out, require international agreement, unlike the taxing of aviation fuel, although that must surely also be pursued.
Another possibility would be the application of VAT to domestic air tickets. The Oxford study points out:
“An appropriate fiscal package for flying would also raise significant public revenue ... One estimate suggests that aviation’s tax advantages amount to £9 billion p.a. of lost revenue for the UK Treasury”.
There is one further thing that could be done now which would have a major effect and is at the top of the list for both the Tyndall Centre and the Oxford institute. I refer to an immediate moratorium on further expansion of runway capacity at UK airports. At this point, I must declare an interest, because I live less than 10 miles from Stansted and am directly under its main flight path. It might be thought, therefore, that everything I have to say is driven by self-interest. Oddly enough, my life would probably be made slightly easier if the extra runway proposed for Stansted were built, because the flight paths would change. But for every other reason, the plan should be sent back to the drawing board, along with similar plans for Luton, Birmingham and Edinburgh, and all
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The best, quickest and cheapest way to limit demand for air travel is to limit the capacity for aircraft to take off and land. I suspect that when my noble friend comes to reply, she will say that to do so would shift business to other European airports and damage our economy thereby. But what is the evidence for this belief? She may say that technologies are leading us to quieter, less polluting aircraft, making restrictions on growth unnecessary. If this has crossed her mind, I refer her to Dr Alice Bowes of the Tyndall Centre who, in a recent e-mail to me, put paid to that hope as follows:
“The fundamental point is that all of the other sectors within the UK’s economy have many opportunities to improve energy efficiency and use alternative fuels, even today. However, the aviation sector does not have that luxury and, furthermore, the long lifetimes of aircraft lock the aviation industry into current airframe designs and high-carbon fuels for around 30 years. Hence the need to tackle growth”.
I fear that my noble friend may also say that it is undemocratic to prevent people flying if they want to. But is it not far more undemocratic to concrete over vast swathes of this country for extra runways, for car parks and support services, creating not only enormous growth in carbon emissions but misery for hundreds of thousands of people through increased noise, traffic and other pollution, so that more of our better-off citizens can fly more often on holiday abroad, taking their spending power with them?
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