Maria Eagle MP, Labour’s Shadow Environment Secretary, speaking at WWF UK in Woking this morning, said:
Thank you very much Trevor for that introduction and thank you to WWF for hosting me today.
I’m pleased to hear from Trevor that I am making the first political speech in this wonderful new space. I am absolutely certain that it won’t be the last.
Since it was established in 1961, the work of WWF has been an inspiration to the environmental movement all over the world. I’m sure that your work in the UK here will go from strength to strength. Your beautiful new, environmentally friendly building is a symbol of that. It shows what can be done and I am sure you have a great future ahead of you here.
WWF has a proud record of engaging with politicians of all parties as it should. You did this with my team recently during the passage of the Water Act 2014. You have already set out your priorities for the coming General Election in a manifesto for all Parties to see and there are some interesting ideas in there. Because you understand how important the environment and climate change are.
There will be a General Election in just nine months’ time. As Ed Miliband has said, the People of Britain will be facing a choice about the future of our Country and the big challenges ahead.
Today, I want to talk about the choice they face on the environment and climate change. There could hardly be a more momentous or urgent set of issues.
We know that the climate is changing. We know that human activity is contributing to that change. I think that this is the biggest challenge facing the world today.
The stability of our climate system provides the basic underpinning for all human life and animal life and plant life as Trevor said. Small shifts in global temperature will cause massive impacts for millions of people. This isn’t speculation or the sci-fi musings of an imaginative, bestselling author. It is solid, established scientific fact, accepted by 97% of the scientists who study our climate systems.
I believe that if being a Labour politician is about anything, it is about improving people’s lives and bequeathing something better to our children than we ourselves inherited.
If internationalism is about anything, it is about doing that for people around the world regardless of where they live.
And promoting environmentalism and sustainability are key ways of making sure we preserve our planet for future generations. We must ensure that we deliver to them a planet that can sustain them as it sustains us.
No sensible Government can govern in these challenging times without putting tackling climate change at the core of what they do. Ed Miliband, Caroline Flint and I all understand that.
And it must be done consistently over time, beyond just the confines of one Parliament, across all Government Departments led by the Prime Minister.
I thought that David Cameron understood this.
It was actually on a WWF trip to Norway that the Prime Minister, when he was Leader of the Opposition, went to examine the impacts of climate change.
He came back apparently convinced. So of course I was pleased to see David Cameron, as Leader of the Opposition, saying that the Tory Party understood the threat of climate change and pledging to tackle it if he was elected to Government.
Labour in government certainly understood the threat. In fact Labour led the way internationally.
At the Kyoto talks, where our Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott negotiated hard for the toughest deal obtainable.
Leading by example, by cutting carbon emissions in excess of the targets we had agreed to meet.
And we had Ed Miliband – the first Secretary of State in a new Department established specifically to lead on tackling the climate threat. He piloted the Climate Change Act 2008 through Parliament and into law – still the most ambitious legislative framework on climate anywhere in the world today
When Labour left office, we left a green goods and jobs sector that was growing at four times the rate of the rest of the economy – and the economy was growing again too.
David Cameron’s apparent conversion to the reality of climate change should have meant that a Tory Government would continue the work we had started – or so I thought. That is what the Country needed, that is what the country voted for.
But the reality has been different. David Cameron has gone from wanting to lead “the greenest Government ever” to ditching “the green crap”
He’s gone from changing the Tory logo from a fossil fuel burning torch in an aggressive fist to a lovely oak tree and telling people “vote blue, go green” to having appointed a climate change denier as environment secretary. In fact, lately, he has taken to calling the new environment secretary the agriculture secretary as if he can’t even bear to say the word anymore.
And under the stewardship of Caroline Spelman and Owen Paterson, the Government have failed to protect our environment.
We’ve seen a damaging reversal of progress.
A situation that is worsening not improving.
A Government and Ministers that don’t seem committed in any way to tackling the threat of climate change. Some are actively hostile.
Five more years of such negligence, indifference and outright hostility could lead to catastrophic consequences for people in Britain and overseas.
The committee on climate change – the Government’s own independent advisors on climate – have warned that without taking new steps to reduce our emissions, the UK is likely to miss the carbon targets committed to by the last Labour Government.
The Government have undermined the renewable energy industry in the UK by refusing to set up a 2030 decarbonisation target just as Eric Pickles takes steps to stop onshore wind farms being built.
And they have spurned a golden opportunity to promote green growth and jobs - instead choosing to hold back the Green Investment Bank by refusing to give it any borrowing powers.
David Cameron has given top jobs in government to known climate change deniers. He made Owen Paterson his Environment Secretary, a man who argues that climate change will benefit Britain.
And with Michael Fallon we had a Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change who referred to climate science as “theology”.
While Labour made progress on the climate agenda the Tories have put us into reverse.
In Defra, the Department I shadow, the first thing Caroline Spelman did as Environment Secretary was slash flood defence budgets. The second thing she did was try and sell off the Public Forest Estate. That went so badly amidst the outcry from all quarters, including a public petition half a million strong, that she was sacked.
Owen Paterson was worse. Can a denier of climate change be a suitable Environment Secretary for the self-styled “Greenest Government Ever”? I think not.
He refused to meet his own scientific advisors to be briefed on climate change and repeatedly put his own personal prejudices ahead of following the science.
He slashed the budget for climate adaptation.
He removed flood protection from the core responsibilities of the Environment Department.
He drew up a National Adaptation Programme that is not fit for purpose.
Last winter saw the worst floods since 2007.
Yet Owen Paterson didn’t even seem to notice that Somerset was under water for weeks until the local authorities there issued desperate cries for help. Then he went down there without his wellies to inspect the damage.
The Prime Minister had to go on an extensive South West tour clutching the Government’s chequebook to try and rescue Tory reputations.
This failure is more than a disappointment. It is a betrayal of all those people who believed that the Prime Minister’s apparent conversion was real. But David Cameron and the Tory Party have reverted to type.
This matters – because it gives a clue to what the next five years would be like if David Cameron was to be re-elected. And it matters because the people of Britain cannot afford another five years of prejudice based policy making on climate change and the environment.
Imagine if Tory Ministers like Michael Fallon or George Osborne, who reputedly talks about the “environmental Taliban” were attending the Paris talks next December to try and get a new global deal to limit emissions.
With increasingly credible rumours that many Tory backbenchers want to repeal the Climate Change Act 2008, what chance would there be of UK Ministers contributing positively to achieving such a deal?
Virtually none.
The consequences of a Tory victory would be dire.
Take flood risk as an example. It is increasing because of the impact of climate change. It requires consistent, long term planned action and investment from a Government committed to taking the issue seriously.
We know that around five million properties in England are at some risk of flooding from rivers, the sea, or from surface water. We know that there are 490,000 properties at serious risk of flooding.
After the shock of the 2007 floods the previous Labour Government recognised the need to significantly increase spending on flood protection.
We did so. This was supported by David Cameron in opposition. There was a cross party consensus that it should be done.
But one of the first things David Cameron did when he became Prime Minister was to cut it again.
The Committee on Climate Change have calculated this decision represented a real terms cut of around – and this is a quote from them - “20% compared to the previous spending period under the Labour Government.”
And despite the Prime Minister’s announcing some additional money as he toured the flood hit areas earlier this year, that will primarily be spent on repairing and reinstating defences that have been damaged recently in the storms.
It will do nothing to prepare us for the increased risk of severe flooding caused by our changing climate.
Committee on Climate change calculations show that current Tory plans will put an extra 330,000 properties at serious risk from flooding by 2035. This means another five years of David Cameron’s Government would on average, put over 80,000 new properties at serious risk of flooding every five years.
They have also said that the chance of a catastrophic flood happening in England within the next two decades, causing in excess of £10billion in damage is around one in ten. This would be an event ten times worse than last winter’s floods – more than three times worse than the 2007 floods in terms of the damage caused.
The Met Office, the Committee on Climate Change and the overwhelming majority of the scientific community all tell us that last winter’s floods are consistent with the projected consequences of climate change.
The signs are all around us.
The Thames Barrier was closed 50 times over last winter to protect 200,000 properties in and around London. This is twelve times more than is usual in any given year.
Yet by 2015 almost three-quarters of the flood defence systems in England will not be maintained according to their identified needs.
And there will be fewer emergency responders to help us cope. The numbers of flood risk management staff within the Environment Agency fell by a fifth (800 or 20%) after the 2010 spending review, over 400 fewer staff responsible for the maintenance of defences and the response to flooding incidents.
The Government believe in cutting the size of the State and letting people fend for themselves. Their record is one of ‘cross your fingers and hope it doesn’t happen’ when we need a Government that takes the increasing risk of flooding seriously and tackles it appropriately and consistently over the long term.
Labour will be that Government.
Labour will take flood protection seriously.
We will re-prioritise flooding as a core responsibility of Defra.
We will end this Government’s short-term approach to flood investment and prioritise preventative spending that can save money in the long-term.
As part of the Armitt Review, we will establish an Independent National Infrastructure Commission to identify the UK’s long-term infrastructure needs, which will include flood protection. It will be answerable to Parliament and will enable Parliament to hold the government to account for meeting the needs and priorities it identifies.
We will produce a new plan for climate change adaptation to replace Owen Paterson’s discredited National Adaptation Programme which is not fit for purpose.
We will make achieving a global deal in Paris to limit emissions a top priority.
Air Pollution.
There is another environmental issue which is crying out to be tackled urgently and about which the current Government have done nothing. Air pollution.
The World Health Organisation has recently classified air pollution as one of the primary causes of cancer.
Scientists have warned that poor air quality in Britain’s most polluted cities is stunting the growth of children and damaging babies’ lungs in ways which will affect them for the rest of their lives.
29,000 people in the UK die prematurely each year because of air pollution in our towns and cities. Air pollution is a key issue of environmental inequality because there are higher concentrations of pollutants affecting people in deprived areas.
The UK currently has one of the worst records of any European country for exceeding EU air pollution limits. 93% of British zones for assessing pollution levels exceed these limits. This is much higher than similar large member states such as France at 30% Italy at 36% and Germany at 62%.
It is a problem crying out for Government action – not least because from next year the EU will be able to levy hundreds of millions of pounds in fines for our failure to meet the targets set for safe air quality in the UK.
The Government’s approach to tackling air pollution has been described by the “Healthy Air Campaign” which includes organisations such as the British Heart Foundation and Asthma UK, as – and I quote - “designed to mask the true scale of England’s air quality crisis rather than make any attempt to solve it”
Last December, the Government had to scrap their consultation on “Local Air Quality Management” because the evidence suggested it would have made the problem worse and now they have no strategy for tackling air pollution at all.
The Government legislated in the Localism Act 2011 to force Local Authorities to pay any EU fines which are levied against the UK for missing European targets in their areas. They have localised the responsibility for paying the fines without setting out a national framework for action to tackle the problem. They don’t seem to think that the Government itself has any real role to play.
The Labour Party recognises that people simply cannot afford to move further away from areas of high air pollution and shouldn’t be expected to do so.
We believe that everyone should have the right to breathe clean air- but it is the responsibility of central Government- not just the responsibility of Local Authorities to tackle the causes of air pollution.
The next Labour Government will deliver a national framework for low emission zones to enable local authorities to encourage cleaner, greener, less polluting vehicles to begin to tackle this problem.
We will consult with businesses, NGO’s and Local Authorities on what this framework should look like and how best to deliver it.
We will assess the effectiveness of the current low emission zone in London- which covers just 7 per cent of the Capital’s most polluted roads.
Unlike this Tory-led Government the Labour Party will devolve the power, not just the responsibility, for Local Authorities willing take action against air pollution.
Most importantly we will support and work with Local Authorities who wish to take action to reduce the air pollution caused by road traffic, something which this Government has failed to do over the last four years.
Many Local Authorities already wish to implement various forms of Low Emission Zones in their respective geographical areas but are being discouraged because there is no such framework.
Under a Labour Government, there will be.
Leadership
So the choice at the next election is about real leadership from Labour on the environment and climate change or the indifference, inaction and hostility that we have seen from David Cameron and his Government.
It is the sort of leadership that Ed Miliband showed when he piloted the Climate Change Act 2008 through Parliament, when he was in office. He’s already shown that he gets this.
David Cameron is the leader who said “vote blue go green” to get elected and then told his aides to cut the “green crap” after he got elected.
And that is why the next election matters so much.
It is a choice between a Conservative Party that says it cares about climate change but gives up pretending at the first signs of trouble and a Labour Party that believes strongly in the duty of government to protect people, whether it be from floods caused by a changing climate or the threat of air pollution and to protect our environment.
A choice between a Labour Government committed to working hard to get a global deal on limiting emissions in Paris next December or a Tory Government divided internally about whether it believes in climate change at all and whether it should repeal the Climate Change Act 2008.
The next election will be the most important for a generation.
We need a government that will take climate change and the environment seriously. After the last four years of this Coalition Government, that can only be a Labour Government led by Ed Miliband.