Claire Hanna MP: Climate-Related Speeches In Parliament

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Claire Hanna's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 12 Parliamentary debates in which Claire Hanna has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 10 Jul 2023: Northern Ireland Budget (No. 2) Bill

  22:08

  That is a big choice about our future, but there is also a here and now that this budget does not serve well. Colleagues from across the House have highlighted some of those impacts. On infrastructure, our ability to address climate change, let alone things such as road safety, is hampered. The PSNI is facing its numbers falling to their lowest level, at a time of not just security threat, but increasing complexity of the issues it deals with, particularly on mental health. Across the economy, regions that are doing well are doing well by leaning into their economic potential and their successes, but instead we are cutting things such as the arts sector and Northern Ireland Screen, and we are cutting the budgets of Tourism NI and of further and higher education. All of these cuts undermine all of the flagship strategies about our economic future, particularly 10X. I am not sure where we can start on health and education, and I hope to be able to explore those areas in more detail in a Westminster Hall debate next week.

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• 23 Jan 2023: Northern Ireland Budget Bill

  19:06

  We know that it is not just in health that we are failing people. If the climate targets that we finally agreed in the dying days of the last Assembly are not mainstreamed and given effect through Budgets and plans, they are not going to mean anything. The labour shortages that employers across Northern Ireland are facing are not going to be mitigated by, for example, parents, and particularly women, coming back to work, because there are no Ministers in place to finally get a grip of childcare. Adults with some vulnerabilities but who have plenty of ability to work will no longer be supported by the many European social fund projects. They will fall by the wayside in a crude Darwinian process that seems to be happening at the moment. Projects are failing, and we will have to see which ones survive. Without ministerial intervention, we will keep exporting thousands of students because of a cap on numbers, to say nothing of the challenges in schools that many colleagues have raised.

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• 25 Oct 2022: Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

  17:02

  Of course, my key concern is for Northern Ireland, including the impact on the non-diminution of rights provisions in the trade and co-operation agreement and the protocol. Our region is already one of the most nature-depleted on the planet, with more than 10% of species at risk. We only just agreed in the dying days of the last Assembly very basic climate targets. The absence of an Assembly now because of the veto of the Brexit fans and vetoholics who usually sit in front of me means that there is no opportunity for Northern Ireland’s elected representatives to try to design replacement legislation. Even if and when the Assembly returns, this Bill makes good governance all but impossible for Northern Ireland, because the ability to know precisely which legislation applies to us, which is still to be spelled out, and which gaps might suddenly appear in law, is not available to us.

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• 14 Jun 2022: New Wealth Taxes

  15:04

  Tax is a fundamental and necessary tool of the Government and, from my perspective as a social democrat, one that is not being adequately levied by the Government to address the huge and parallel challenges of poverty and wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is one of the most defining issues of our time and, like other seismic challenges, such as climate change, it will only be addressed by concerted, co-ordinated and internationalised action. It is being driven, first, by failures in the tax system to levy tax, and secondly, by evasion and avoidance, which is not just about short-changing the public purse but also has a distorting effect on decent, compliant and locally anchored businesses.

  The Government need revenue and they turn to tax—so far, so fair—but who or what they choose to tax reveals a mindset. A state can choose to tax either wealth or income and this Government have chosen to tax income—to tax work, when a wealth tax would garner more resource for the state and, in parallel, help address the issues of income disparity that are driving a lack of cohesion and hampering social solidarity. Taxing income alone will not raise the resource needed to be genuinely transformative in those issues of poverty and climate change or, for example, the challenges within the health service. It will also do nothing to address the widening gap between the richest and the poorest, which, as others have outlined, is part of what is driving populism, fundamentalism and people feeling lost within the political system.

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• 20 Apr 2022: Human Rights: Colombia

  09:50

  Coal is over. Everybody knows that that mine and many others will close in the coming years, but it is important that we use our influence to ensure a just transition for those communities and other communities whose rights have been abused. We must ensure that these issues are not lost in the implementation of the peace deal. I have tried not to do that Northern Irish thing of overlaying and viewing every single international issue through the prism of where we grew up, but I must say that it is encouraging and courageous that Colombia is dealing upfront with the issues of truth and justice as a pre-requisite for reconciliation. It is courageous that those issues are being confronted head-on, and I say that as someone who lives somewhere where for 25 years we just tried to keeping closing the door on the truth, allowing the perpetrators on various sides to move on with their lives, and the victims not to have clarity and the release of justice.

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• 30 Nov 2021: Climate Goals: Wellbeing Economy

  17:26

  As with addressing climate breakdown, we know what has to be done; we just have to decide to do it. While it is tempting and valid to protest and rage against the machine on this, it is very encouraging to see some of the practical initiatives that people are taking across their constituencies and in other regions. I pay tribute to groups such as the Carryduff Regeneration Forum, the Conservation Volunteers, Open Ormeau, Repair Café Belfast and many others in my own corner of the world who are showing what is possible when people try to slow down, clean up and build cohesion, and what is possible through care, education and creativity.

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• 26 Oct 2021: Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill

  14:42

  When we last debated this Bill in June, the context was that Sinn Féin had just threatened the collapse of the institutions. Fast forward back to groundhog day, and we are here again with the DUP dangling the future of those same institutions before us. The context of both those threats is the same: the pandemic is still rampant, there are issues in the education service, we have the worst health waiting lists in these islands by a mile, and, without a climate change plan, Northern Ireland is a laggard with no binding targets at all. That seesaw of instability and stop-start governance is the last decade and a half in microcosm, with each of the two lead parties replicating the same tactics and threats, and criticising each other for doing the same, with each particular episode draining away the confidence and belief of the people of Northern Ireland in power sharing.

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• 26 May 2021: Environment Bill

  14:15

  The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, in particular Northern Ireland, with more than 11% of indigenous species at risk of extinction. This is the price being paid for a fairly obsessive approach to economic growth and expansion at all costs. To date, the UK and others have continuously and consistently missed targets in relation to biodiversity recovery, including any of the 20 Aichi targets agreed in 2010. Although this is by no means a failure of the UK Government alone, as one of the largest economies and a major contributor, directly and indirectly, through activities across the world, the UK must take seriously its leadership role, particularly in this year when it hosts the G7 and COP26. I welcome the commitment to conservation strategies in the Bill and believe that they can be strengthened by amendment 45, which seeks to avoid a repeat of the IT failures and to ensure that those targets are meaningful and met.

  The changes being debated today are important to the residents of Truro and Falmouth, because Cornwall is on the frontline of the UK’s battle against climate change. With respect, I disagree with the shadow Minister, because in my opinion this is a landmark Bill. It is not the end of the story or even the beginning of it, but it is a landmark moment. It puts in place a world-leading framework for environmental improvement and governance, including legally binding targets and environmental improvement plans; an independent green watchdog which will help Parliament and more importantly, my constituents to hold the Government to account on their commitments; and measures to reverse the decline in nature at home and overseas and to tackle waste. Ministers know that this is part of an ongoing process and that we Back Benchers will continue to press further, harder and at pace.

  I praise the Government on new clause 21, which Ministers set out previously. It amends the Bill to set additional legally binding targets for species abundance for 2030 to halt the decline of nature. That could be the “net zero” for nature, finally addressing the biodiversity decline, and I am pleased that that target will go alongside other legally binding targets for waste, water quality and air quality.

  To conclude, with the G7 in Cornwall next month and COP26 in Glasgow later this year, we hope that this Environment Bill, which is a truly groundbreaking piece of legislation, will signal to the rest of the world that this Government and this country are serious about protecting our environment for the long term.

  This year, the UK holds the presidencies of both the G7 in Cornwall and COP26 in Glasgow, and I hope we will use this Conservative Government’s landmark Bill to lead the way on global action to make long-term improvements for habitats and biodiversity worldwide. If we achieve nothing else, let us give Wilfy and his class- mates on Anglesey a natural environment that improves as they get older, not one that continues to decline.

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• 13 Apr 2021: Finance (No. 2) Bill

  19:33

  That was a fair point well made about contributions earlier, Madam Deputy Speaker, and as I am mostly going to address climate change, I will try to be aware of the levels of hot air I am producing myself.

  I rise to speak in favour of the reasoned amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas)—my name is also on the amendment—and to say that Social Democratic and Labour party Members will vote against this Bill. We spoke last month in the Budget debate to highlight the missed opportunities, including the opportunity to respond to the economic challenges and the challenges of inequality that have been exposed by the pandemic. However, while interim and half measures can perhaps be explained away with an economy in lockdown and in deep freeze, they cannot be justified for the live climate crisis we are facing at the moment. This Bill misses the opportunity to act on that ecological emergency because it lacks the ambition and the urgency required to meet the UK’s obligations under the Paris agreement. It does not deliver the transformational investment needed to create green jobs, particularly at a time when so many people have lost their work and when so many sectors will take time to recover. Opportunities also need to be there, not least here in Northern Ireland.

  This year, the UK hosts COP26, which provides even greater impetus than ever to be a leader in climate action, with meaningful cross-governmental action right at the very heart of the Bill and right at the very heart of this global inflection point that we are experiencing at the moment.

  We have been doing things differently necessarily for the past year and we should continue to do that and to follow a different ecological and economic course from the one that we would otherwise be on. The Government have repeatedly highlighted the importance of net zero, which is welcome, but the Bill does not reflect the urgency of what we are experiencing here and what we are seeing around the world. We cannot keep putting the meaningful actions into the “too difficult” piles. Recent moves by the Government, including approving a mine, granting new licences for oil and gas exploration, scrapping the green homes grant and cutting overseas aid to countries that are dealing with the impact of climate change and removing funding at a time when they need to transition to less carbon-intensive measures, is going in the wrong direction. These are not the signals of a Government who are serious about a green recovery or serious about the wellbeing of the planet or of future generations. There needs to be consistency in domestic policies and international objectives that we are not seeing here.

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• 9 Feb 2021: Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

  19:21

  In December, a report estimated that covid-19 would push a further 200 million people into extreme poverty, while, at the same time, commercial interests from the global north extract resources many times greater in value than those that we invest in aid and development. Climate change resulting from our overuse of those resources will have massive impacts on developing countries and could lead to mass displacement, natural disasters, instability and the potential for conflict and a refugee crisis.

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• 8 Dec 2020: Global Malnutrition: FCDO Role

  09:54

  The head of the World Food Programme has warned that next year there will be famines of biblical proportions. The Lancet has reported that the pandemic poses grave risks to the nutritional status and survival of children in low and middle-income countries, due to the decline in household incomes and interruptions to health and nutrition and social protection services. That is without dwelling on the worsening impact of climate change on the most vulnerable.

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• 20 Dec 2019: European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

  11:00

  Neither the EU nor the Good Friday agreement is about nations, and neither is about territory. They are about relationships and working together for the common good. They are about seeing challenges and finding solutions. But we know that the challenges of the present and the challenges of the next century are global: the climate emergency, tax justice, war and humanitarian relief. Those challenges need international co-operation, solidarity and partnership, not isolation and retreat. The world is getting smaller and our responses need to get bigger. Brexit prevents young people from creating a world with a big horizon; that is a generational injustice that we are overseeing.

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See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate