Helen Hayes MP: Climate-Related Speeches In Parliament

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Helen Hayes's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 29 Parliamentary debates in which Helen Hayes has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 20 Mar 2023: Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

  20:56

  The state of our economy is deeply linked to our response to the climate crisis. Household energy bills have increased because of our dependence on fossil fuels. Yet the Conservatives have wasted a decade failing to invest in onshore wind, crashing the market for domestic solar, and comprehensively failing to deliver a retrofit programme to insulate homes and decarbonise domestic heat.

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• 6 Sep 2022: Oral Answers to Questions

  8. What diplomatic steps the Government are taking ahead of COP27 to work with partners in the global south to tackle the climate emergency. ( 901308 )

  [Source]

  The Minister references the deadly drought in the horn of Africa and the catastrophic floods in Pakistan, which clearly show the reality and urgency of the climate emergency. Last November, at COP26, developing countries across the global south were promised further discussions on loss and damage climate compensation. In the context that she has described this morning, why was the UK backtracking on the promises made at COP26 in the Bonn talks this summer? What message does she think that failure of leadership sends to our allies and partners in the global south?

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• 15 Nov 2021: Water Companies: Sewage Discharge

  19:12

  We face a climate emergency and ecological crisis. Nature recovery is a vital part of our response to climate change, and river water quality is critical. Privatised water companies are not fit for the task. They already face competing priorities—the need for investment in both clean water and water treatment infrastructure—and are trying to face in those two different directions at the same time. They also have to face in a third direction: to deliver the returns for which they are under constant pressure from shareholders. That is not a responsible way to run such critical infrastructure, and it simply is not working.

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• 1 Nov 2021: Budget Resolutions

  21:11

  After almost two years of the gruelling covid-19 pandemic, with the economic consequences of Brexit starting to bite hard, and on the eve of the COP26 climate summit, our best last chance to save our planet from the consequences of catastrophic global warming, we needed a Budget fit for the task—a Budget to deliver a net zero economy, a just transition, skills and jobs fit for the 21st century, fair taxation and public services to provide support for everyone who needs it. The Chancellor’s Budget fell far short on every one of those measures.

  First, in relation to the climate emergency, this needed to be a Budget to make tackling climate change a prism for all economic decision making and all public spending. The Government could have entered their COP presidency leading the way on a just transition to a net zero economy, harnessing the opportunities to create new high-quality green jobs and deliver better public health and wellbeing, and ensuring that no part of the United Kingdom was left behind. Instead, we have the embarrassment of a Government rushing out their net zero strategy at the 11th hour before COP26 got under way, refusing to rule out new fossil fuel extraction in the North sea and in Cumbria, lowering air passenger duty for domestic flights, and failing to invest in retrofitting at anything like the scale required to decarbonise our homes.

  The theme for today’s debate is levelling up—an incoherent, ill-defined concept that has now been honoured with its own Department. Our experience in London is that levelling up almost invariably involves cutting funding from our hard-pressed public services and from some of the most deprived communities anywhere in the country, and handing it to areas where the Tories find it politically expedient to do so. A coherent approach to levelling up would not pit north against south, or city against village. It would be underpinned by an industrial strategy and a net zero strategy for the country as a whole, and would fund and empower local councils and communities to tackle disadvantage wherever it is found.

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• 21 Oct 2021: COP26: Limiting Global Temperature Rises

  14:46

  The climate emergency is the single biggest issue we face both nationally and globally. In order to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of global warming by limiting the increase to 1.5°, the climate must be a prism through which every political and economic decision is taken, yet it is clear that this Government are very far from where we need them to be in both leadership and action.

  COP26 is a critical opportunity to secure a global agreement on the scale of climate action needed to limit global warming to 1.5°, but the UK Government risk squandering the precious opportunity we have as the host nation. There is scant evidence of a concerted diplomatic effort by the UK Government over the past two years to secure the attendance and commitment at COP26 of the most polluting nations, many of which are set to be absent from Glasgow. There is no evidence of a concerted effort to give confidence to the countries of the global south that the UK is committed to a just transition. Cutting UK aid in the run-up to hosting the COP is a disastrous approach to negotiation on carbon reduction measures.

  The Government’s approach to the UK’s own net zero challenge is also falling far short. Publishing a net zero strategy at the last minute because hosting COP26 without one would be an international embarrassment is not the act of a Government sufficiently committed to climate action. Continuing to permit the exploration of new oilfields in the North sea and a new coalmine in Cumbria is not the act of a Government sufficiently committed to climate action. Failing to commit anything close to the scale of the investment required to deliver the speed of transition we need is not the act of a Government sufficiently committed to climate action.

  In contrast, our local councils are delivering at pace. I am proud of both Lambeth and Southwark Councils, which were among the first in the country to declare a climate emergency and are both making climate action a top priority. But they need both additional resources and powers to make the scale of change that the climate emergency demands, including in relation to the planning system, where tackling the climate emergency must become a core aim.

  When I was first elected in 2015, I brought together organisations and individuals in my constituency who care about climate change and we formed an organisation called the Dulwich and West Norwood Climate Coalition. Next week, we will deliver our letter to the Prime Minister ahead of COP26, signed by hundreds of local residents and community organisations. We ask him to secure the agreement we all need to tackle the climate emergency and secure the just transition that we need. My constituents across Dulwich and West Norwood understand the scale and the gravity of the climate emergency. Many are already doing everything they can to reduce carbon emissions. They are desperately looking to the Government to show leadership on the international stage, and secure the scale and ambition of agreement necessary to secure the future of our planet for our children and grandchildren.

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• 6 Jul 2021: Solar Energy

  Community energy is vitally important in delivering renewable energy and engaging communities in contributing to net zero, but the sector has suffered since the Government cancelled the urban community energy fund in 2016 and excluded it from the social investment tax relief in 2017. This evening I am meeting Sustainable Energy 24 in my constituency, which is working hard to deliver new solar installations and engage our local communities, despite the Government’s lack of support. Will the Minister commit to meaningful support for community energy?

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• 21 Jun 2021: Planning Decisions: Local Involvement

  17:49

  Planning has a vital role to play in our response to the climate emergency, both in achieving net zero and in adapting to climate change which is already happening. It is critical in delivering the homes we need to end the housing crisis, and in delivering the infrastructure and services to support new residents. It is vital for economic development and the delivery of green jobs. At its most basic level, planning should be a framework for fairness. It should ensure that new development delivers what communities need, not what makes the most profit, and it should safeguard the things that they hold most dear. There is no doubt that our planning system is in need of reform, but this White Paper takes entirely the wrong approach. Locking communities and local councillors out of planning decisions on individual applications will not deliver more homes, better design, or zero-carbon development. It will create a developers’ charter for identikit places. Deregulating the planning system by expanding permitted development rights will mean that instead of protecting character and quality in our town and city centres they will be eroded, as shopping streets are pepper-potted with homes, and roofscapes become a mess of ad hoc two-storey extensions.

  Instead of treating the planning system as inconvenient red tape to be swept away as much as possible, the Government should be seeking to make it fit for purpose for the challenges of the 21st century. From 2010, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government embarked on a bonfire of planning regulations, which removed many of the design standards intended to ensure low-carbon development, including the zero-carbon homes programme. That has resulted in more than a decade of lost time to deliver net zero, a decade in which new homes have continued to be built, which will now need to be retrofitted in the future when they could have been built to zero-carbon standards in the first place. The Government have been utterly negligent on low-carbon building, and making the superficial and subjective concept of beauty the core principle of their planning policy will do little to address that.

  In the short time that is left available to me, I urge the Government to think again and place climate change at the heart of the system, people at the heart of the process, zero carbon and genuinely affordable homes as the key priority for delivery, and land reform to stop windfall profits as a core concern.

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• 17 Jun 2021: Topical Questions

  Further to the previous question, the Climate Change Committee warned this week that the area of land suitable for peat-forming vegetation in the uplands could decline by 50% to 65% by the 2050s through the effects of climate change alone, potentially dramatically increasing UK carbon emissions. How is the Secretary of State planning to amend the “England Peat Action Plan” to bring forward plans for peat protection and restoration in light of the Committee’s damning report? ( 901368 )

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• 13 May 2021: A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

  14:22

  Children and young people in my constituency care passionately about our planet and about their peers elsewhere in the world. They know the importance of the UK’s contribution through international aid to tackling climate change, global poverty and supporting women and girls across the globe. The children and young people in my constituency do not understand why the Government would choose to make swingeing cuts to aid during a global pandemic and a climate emergency, the consequences of which are being most severely felt by the world’s poorest nations.

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• 19 Nov 2020: UK Trade Policy: US Presidential Election

  One of many sources of hope at the US election result is that after four years of climate change denial, President-elect Biden is talking about the global climate crisis and the action we must take to address it. Will the Secretary of State support him in those endeavours by guaranteeing to put climate change co-operation and green technology at the heart of any US-UK trade deal?

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• 8 Oct 2020: Planning and House Building

  12:11

  I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. Our planning system is critical to delivering on some of the most important challenges that we face: the desperate need for new homes to address the housing crisis and the urgent need to tackle the climate and ecological emergency, decarbonise our economy, and protect and enrich our natural environment. To meet those challenges, our planning system must establish a clear and ambitious vision for our country, set high standards for design and environmental performance, give strong protection to the buildings, spaces and landscapes that people value, and actively support the involvement and engagement of a wide and diverse range of voices in decision making.

  We need a vision for every part of our country, based on high-quality, low-carbon jobs, distinctive and special town centres at the heart of every community, good public transport connections and genuinely affordable homes. We need a planning system with the core purpose of addressing the climate emergency, delivering the new homes we need, improving public health and involving everyone in shaping the future of their neighbourhood to deliver those vital outcomes. The deregulated, identikit, box-ticking, algorithm-generated mess set out in the White Paper will not do that.

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• 3 Mar 2020: Housing and Planning

  14:46

  Finally, our planning system has a vital role to play in combating climate change. The relationship between the built environment and climate change is substantial, and unless we fully resource our planning system and enable local authorities to play the fullest possible role in place-making and in driving up standards of insulation and carbon reduction in new development and in new housing, we will not achieve the level of carbon reduction that we need to in order to resolve the climate emergency, and we will still be building homes today that will need to be retrofitted tomorrow. I end with that point, calling on the Government to resource our planning system properly and to recognise the role that it has in facilitating and delivering the high-quality homes we need to build, at scale, in order to resolve both our housing crisis and the climate emergency.

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• 26 Feb 2020: Environment Bill

  17:54

  The Bill provides an opportunity to demonstrate that the Government are serious about the climate emergency and ecological crisis. As currently drafted, it does not do so, and there are critical weaknesses that, if left unaddressed, will prove to be fundamental flaws. I ask the Government to commit today to ensuring that the Bill cannot result in our regressing from EU standards; to strengthening many of the provisions; and to giving teeth to enforcement. The emergency we face demands nothing less.

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• 24 Feb 2020: New Homes: Carbon Emissions and Energy Efficiency

  The Government’s future homes standard would prevent councils from setting higher energy efficiency standards than national building regulations demand, while also watering down the impact of building regulations by allowing homes to pass the standard if their carbon emissions are reduced by general decarbonisation of the national grid, which will mean that homes can still be poorly insulated and meet the new standard. In what way does the Secretary of State think this is remotely fit for purpose as a response to the climate emergency? Will he rethink these proposals to equip our councils to go further and faster in reducing carbon emissions and to ensure that new homes will not have to be retrofitted in the future?

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• 7 Jan 2020: Oral Answers to Questions

  The UK Government currently offer more financial support than any other European state for fossil fuel industries. The oil giant Shell paid no corporate income tax last year due to tax rebates, despite making a £557 million profit in the UK. This situation is unsustainable and unacceptable in the context of a climate emergency. Can the Minister explain how a Government who continue to subsidise fossil fuel extraction to such a degree can ever be trusted to deliver net zero?

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

  12:48

  Our values lead us to be concerned about the protections people are afforded in their workplace, the protection of our environment and our response to the climate emergency. They lead us to prioritise human rights and to be concerned about how Governments are held to account for human rights abuses which happen on their watch. And they lead us to be concerned about refugees and to want the UK to play a full role in responding to the global refugee crisis by welcoming people who have lost everything and helping them to rebuild their lives. Indeed, many of my constituents are already playing their part through community sponsorship groups and they want to see the Government doing the same.

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• 17 Oct 2019: The Climate Emergency

  16:37

  It has been galling this afternoon to listen to Government Members welcome the environmental commitments in the Gracious Speech as a step change in our commitment to the environment. In reality, those commitments are partial and incomplete, and they sit in the context of a decade of failure and a climate emergency. We already have legally binding carbon reduction targets, and the Government are failing to meet them—indeed, we are currently predicted to miss the fourth and fifth carbon budgets.

  Finally, the Government talk in the Gracious Speech about a world-leading approach, but the UK is already world-leading because of our role in the EU. Within the EU, we have helped to weight the balance of power towards greater ambition on climate change, and we will have helped to push EU states that are reluctant to do more. If we leave the EU, that ability to lead will be lost and the UK will be stuck between a European Union where we have no seat at the table and the America of Donald Trump, one of the greatest climate vandals of our time. Dressing up some minimalist commitments after 10 years of failure and negligence, in a policy context in which whatever we do will be diminished by Brexit, is simply not an adequate response to an emergency.

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• 13 Jun 2019: High Streets and Town Centres in 2030

  13:58

  Our report is right to identify the critical nature of strong local authority leadership in supporting healthy town centres, but planning departments have been cut to the bone under nine years of austerity. Thriving town centres need a strong vision, effective partnerships between councils, businesses and the community and investment in the public realm, increasingly with a focus on sustainability and climate change at their heart. We need to clean up the air in town centres, deliver safe routes for walking and cycling and create pleasant open spaces resilient to hotter summers and wetter weather. That simply cannot be done with current resources. Government must invest in and empower local authorities to play the leadership role on behalf of our towns centres that we know can be so effective.

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• 22 May 2019: Pension Funds: Financial and Ethical Investments

  15:25

  I commend the climate change protesters who have taken to our streets in recent weeks, including many schoolchildren from my constituency who will be out again on Friday. They have succeeded in putting climate change where it should always have been, at the top of the political agenda. They are right to protest and they are right not to rest until the action that we need is taken and carbon emissions are falling.

  It is good that Parliament has declared a climate emergency, but we need action now that is commensurate with an emergency. Divestment is critical to that. One of the essential systemic changes that we need to make is to look at the big flows of investment finance in our economy, divert them away from harmful, polluting and exploitative fossil fuels and reinvest them to scale up sustainable zero-carbon change.

  The parliamentary pension scheme remains invested in fossil fuels. Five of the top 20 investments of our pension fund are in fossil fuel companies. The pension fund trustees have been far too slow to react to calls for divestment and are still refusing to do so, despite the fact that more than a third of MPs have written to them about it. The divestment of our pension funds is a straightforward leadership action that Parliament should take. No increased risk is entailed and in fact the opposite is true. The climate change emergency demands it.

  Finally, we need the law to drive a further change in divestment. Although arguably the law currently requires pension fund trustees to invest in line with the Paris agreement, new legislation is needed to clarify and strengthen the duty. Reporting of fossil fuel-based investments should be mandatory and there should be a duty on all investors to report on the alignment of their portfolios in relation to the Paris agreement. This cannot be left to chance. We will not tackle climate change by retaining the status quo and fiddling around the edges. We need systemic change and it must start with our own leadership and a legislative framework that drives investment finance nationally and globally away from fossil fuels and towards the sustainable investment we need.

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• 1 May 2019: Environment and Climate Change

  18:38

  I pay tribute to Greta Thunberg and the school strikers, including those from my constituency, and to the protesters whom we saw outside Parliament last week for ensuring that climate change is once again at the top of the political agenda, where it must be. Under this Government and in this global context, their actions are necessary.

  The Government have failed on climate change. Since 2010, a raft of policies and initiatives that were driving progress have been scrapped. Today, Conservative Members have called for action on energy efficiency, yet the Tory Government’s cancellation of the green homes scheme means that the retrofitting of insulation is 5% of its level in 2012. We should have been building on those initiatives to make further progress, not talking about the extent to which we have moved backwards.

  We need the Government to act comprehensively at the scale required by an emergency. Climate change demands that it is the prism and the underpinning principle of all our political and economic decision making. We must act to address this emergency.

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• 21 Feb 2019: Pollution: Schools and Hospitals

  In my constituency, parents, schools and our local councils are working hard together to introduce school streets: timed road closures and a drop-off and pick-up time close to schools to reduce pollution, encourage cycling and walking and increase awareness of the urgent need for action on air pollution and climate change. Will the Secretary of State commit to a fully funded nationwide programme of school streets?

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• 30 Jan 2018: Oral Answers to Questions

  Southwark Council confirmed last week that it has invested its £150 million pension fund in a low-carbon investment, concluding that continuing to hold significant investments in fossil fuels in the context of climate change would present a long-term financial risk to the fund. Will the Minister tell me what conversations she is having with private firms with large pension funds to encourage and facilitate divestment from fossil fuels, which is now clearly the most responsible decision for pension fund members and the future of our planet?

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• 19 Jul 2017: Climate Change Objectives and Obligations

  19:00

  Declares that there is widespread concern that the Government is not on track to meet the fourth or fifth carbon budgets; welcomes the Prime Minister’s continued verbal commitment to the Paris Agreement; notes that in order to meet the UK’s commitment to achieve the carbon budget action is necessary; further notes that the Committee on Climate Change reported in June 2017 and concluded that the UK can successfully navigate the transition to a growing, low-carbon economy but new policies to deliver that transition are overdue; and further notes that much domestic legislation for reducing emission and tackling climate changes is neither contingent on the UK’s membership of the European Union or ends in around 2020, including but not limited to the levy control framework supporting low carbon power, fuel efficiency standards for new cars, renewable heat incentives, capital funding for flood defences to protect homes and businesses, and targeted biodiversity plans to help build the resilience of the natural environment to climate change.

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• 31 Jan 2017: European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

  22:59

  We see our Prime Minister so desperate to secure trading relationships outside the EU that she has apparently lost any moral compass at all in our relationship with the US. Let me be clear: the people of Dulwich and West Norwood do not share Donald Trump’s values. We do not believe that the world can be made safer by excluding people based on their religion or nationality. We condemn torture and human rights abuses. We do not believe in abolishing environmental protections or denying climate change. We do not believe in limiting access to healthcare for the most disadvantaged groups; nor do we believe in the denigration of women, disabled people and Muslims, or the appointment of white supremacists to high office or, indeed, any office. Without the European Union, we are left with far fewer close international partners who share our values and we are diminished in many ways as a consequence.

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• 12 May 2016: Oral Answers to Questions

  Domestic solar installers in my constituency report that demand for their services has plummeted over the past year, and domestic solar installations across the country are down 80% on this time last year. Will the Minister now acknowledge that the new tariff is too low and that the disastrous approach that this Government are taking to solar energy is effectively stopping individuals who want to make a contribution to combating climate change in their own homes by installing solar panels from doing so?

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• 3 May 2016: Housing and Planning Bill

  21:45

  I am also conscious that Taunton Deane, much like other parts of the country, has seen a massive, rapid increase in house building, which I applaud, because we do need it. I fully support the Government’s proactive house building plan, but I call on the Minister to give due consideration to the water run-off from new houses so that that does not add to the flooding risk. Developers are currently encouraged to install SUDS, but they retain the legal right just to connect new properties directly to the sewerage system, which probably makes more economic sense in many cases. Lords amendment 110 has much support, including from water companies, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, and the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change.

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• 2 Mar 2016: Draft Renewables Obligation Closure etc. (Amendment) Order 2016

  15:00

  I met recently with a small-scale solar installation company in my constituency. The proprietor told me that since the announcement the bottom has dropped out of the solar market part of his business. He does a number of other things—he installs windows and so forth—so that did not directly translate into job losses for his business, but he said that interest from domestic consumers in installing solar panels had simply dried up. That has the effect of stopping individual households who want to do the right thing and do their bit towards combating climate change from doing so.

  We have no more pressing challenge than climate change and central to addressing that is a fundamental shift in how we produce energy in this country. This measure damages the progress made towards a shift to renewables. It is short-sighted, bad for business and bad for the environment. I oppose it wholeheartedly.

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• 17 Sep 2015: Oral Answers to Questions

  This week I had a meeting with Sustainable Energy 24, a community benefit society established to deliver solar panels on public and community buildings in my constituency. It told me, in relation to the cut in the feed-in tariff and the ending of pre-accreditation:

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• 25 Jun 2015: Oral Answers to Questions

  T5. There is a huge opportunity to increase renewable energy production and save public money by installing solar panels on public buildings such as schools. This has the added benefit of providing an opportunity for children to learn about climate change and to see at first hand how it can be addressed. Given the up-front cost of installation at a time when school budgets are already under pressure, what additional assistance can the Secretary of State provide to make it easier for schools and communities to generate their own clean energy? ( 900530 )

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