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Maria Eagle MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in a speech to Labour’s Conference 2014 in Manchester, said:
The British people are fed up with business as usual.
They’re fed up of being told the economy is growing again when their wages and living standards are not.
They’re fed up of zero hours contracts, the necessity for foodbanks, the callous scapegoating of vulnerable people, the unaffordability of a decent home.
When everyday working people are struggling and the next generation are finding it harder to get on than the last.
When the economic recovery benefits a privileged few, not most families.
Our food, our water, the air we breathe - the future of our planet as climate change threatens - nothing could be more important than these things for our generation - and for our children and their children too.
Yet the record of this Government is appalling.
Far from being the “greenest government ever” as they promised, things have been going backwards.
Hardly surprising when Caroline Spelman slashed spending on flood protection and tried to flog off our forests.
When Owen Paterson refused to be briefed on climate change by his chief scientist, because he thought he knew better - no wonder he didn’t even notice when Somerset was under water for weeks on end after catastrophic flooding.
It’s the same in other policy areas - they’ve refused to take action to reduce the number of people dependent on foodbanks - up threefold to over a million people in just the last year.
And Liz Truss is continuing with the unscientific and discredited badger culls.
A Labour government will tackle the scourge of Bovine TB, but not by using a policy dubbed “an epic failure” by the Chief Scientific Advisor of Natural England.
Conference, I want to make it clear today. We will put a stop to these inhumane, ineffective badger culls.
The country is crying out for change.
People want a new government that will ensure all our families benefit from economic growth - that rewards hard work and helps the next generation get on, wherever they live.
A countryside where people prosper and don’t get left behind because they’re not living in the city, with job opportunities and homes available at a reasonable cost.
They want to be sure the food they eat is what it says it is - rather than horsemeat masquerading as beef.
Food and farming is the biggest manufacturing sector in our economy employing more than three million people and consumers need to have confidence in it.
People want to see the recovery of our natural environment rather than its non-stop degradation and decline.
Respect for nature and the creatures with which we share our world instead of the killing and culling and poisoning we all too often see.
These things matter greatly.
They want Labour’s plan for working people, not an economy run for the wealthiest and most privileged.
They’ll never get these things with David Cameron and Nick Clegg.
Take water.
A basic necessity of life, which, after all, falls free from the sky.
After more than four years of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, water companies - which made over £2 billion in profit in 2013 - paid £1.8 billion of it in dividends to their shareholders and only £74 million in tax.
Conference, that’s 90 per cent of their profit paid out in dividends - mainly to foreign hedge funds and anonymous private owners - the privileged few.
Yet rather than make water companies support customers struggling to pay unaffordable bills, David Cameron has allowed them to simply siphon money off year after year after year.
And these privatised utilities are all monopolies.
You and I can’t change our water company if we don’t like how it’s behaving.
We can’t shop around for a better deal.
We just have to keep on paying, and paying, and paying.
And rising water bills have added to the cost of living crisis.
Up by almost 50 per cent since privatisation.
Up 12.5 per cent since 2010 in the same time that household incomes are falling.
One in five households struggling to pay their water bill - but the companies get to choose whether they help customers who can’t afford to pay.
Some do - but most of them don’t - funnily enough.
Conference, it’s just not good enough.
We need a new deal with the water companies and Labour will deliver it - focused on affordability and fairness for all.
We will reform the industry, creating a national affordability scheme - compulsory for all water companies - to help people struggling to pay their bills wherever they live in the UK.
And in addition to more transparency for the first time, under a Labour government, we’ll give the regulator new powers to modify the terms of water company licenses.
Licenses first granted 25 years ago, when much of the industry was privatised - and largely unchanged to this day.
But times have changed along with company structures and ownership and we are seeing increasingly exploitative behaviour by some.
It’s not right under these circumstances that licenses can’t be reformed. Under a Labour government that will change.
And Conference, while we’re talking about the necessities of life - what about the air we breathe?
How can it be that 29,000 of our fellow citizens are dying prematurely each year as a direct result of air pollution? And David Cameron and Nick Clegg have done nothing.
That children are having their lung capacity impaired, with lifelong consequences, because they go to schools situated on the busiest roads in the towns and cities up and down our land most susceptible to pollution and David Cameron and Nick Clegg have done nothing.
That the UK has one of the worst records of any European country for exceeding EU air pollution limits, with 93 per cent of UK zones failing and David Cameron and Nick Clegg have done nothing.
But perhaps I’m being unfair when I say they’ve done nothing.
After all, they did legislate in the Localism Act to force Councils to pay any EU fines levied against the UK for missing air quality targets in their areas.
Conference, they’ve localised the responsibility for paying the fines without setting out a national framework for action to tackle the problem.
So, unlike David Cameron and Nick Clegg a Labour government will devolve the power, not just the responsibility, to Councils willing to take action against air pollution.
We’ll introduce a national framework of low emission zones to encourage greener, less polluting vehicles to deliver the cleaner air people need to breathe.
David Cameron promised to lead the “greenest government ever.”
Then he put Owen Paterson in charge of our environment.
What a joke.
But it isn’t only him. Three quarters of Tory MPs don’t accept that human activity is causing climate change.
The committee on Climate Change - the Government’s own independent advisers have warned that the UK under David Cameron and Nick Clegg are likely to miss the carbon targets the last Labour Government committed us to meeting.
They refuse to set a 2030 decarbonisation target.
They’re obstructing onshore wind farms.
They’re holding back green growth and jobs by refusing to give the Green Investment Bank any borrowing powers.
And they even removed flood protection from the priorities of the environment department.
Conference, we need a new plan - one that will work for everyone - not just the privileged few.
On climate change we’ll introduce a new adaptation programme and reinstate flood protection as a core priority of the environment department.
And Labour’s new Independent National Infrastructure Commission will identify the UK’s long term infrastructure needs including flood protection.
Labour will replace incompetence, ideology and unfairness with a better vision.
Communities with access to good jobs, decent pay, good schools, in city, countryside, seaside, town or village.
People leading healthy lives, breathing clean air, eating safe affordable food, enjoying quality green spaces.
We will build an economy that rewards hard work and helps the next generation get on, not one that is run for the wealthiest and most privileged.
That is what we seek to deliver.
That is the change that Britain needs.
Ends