Mike Amesbury MP: Climate-Related Speeches In Parliament

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Mike Amesbury's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 10 Parliamentary debates in which Mike Amesbury has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 9 May 2023: Energy Bill [Lords]

  19:59

  It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke). Like many across the Chamber, particularly those on the Labour side, I rise to call for a more robust response to the climate emergency. My definition of “emergency”—and, I am pretty confident, that of most people in the Chamber—is to do with getting a move on and doing things at pace. Of course, it has been some considerable time since Parliament declared a climate emergency, yet the Government’s track record has been woeful at times.

  My constituency and the surrounding areas have energy-intensive industries such as Ineos-Inovyn; Stanlow, which is just up the road; and Tata Chemicals. Hydrogen can provide a solution in terms of decarbonising at speed—I understand that, and it is recognised in the Bill—but I am fundamentally opposed to hydrogen for use in domestic premises. The evidence is crystal clear. My opposition is based not on emotion but on scientific evidence. A major peer review of 32 independent scientific studies found that none of the pilots and research supported widespread use of hydrogen for domestic heating. Indeed, MCS, a company based in Daresbury, has expressed evidence-based concern as well. The Select Committee concluded the same. The use of hydrogen for domestic use would mean 70% to 80% more on consumer bills, if we look at current gas-based consumer bills, and could result in 45% more gas importation. We should surely be moving away from that. The focus must undoubtedly be on investment in heat pumps—air and ground—for domestic use. That would provide energy at less than half the cost of the current market.

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• 6 Jul 2022: Home Energy Efficiency: North of England

  15:00

  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Robertson. I thank the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) for giving us all the opportunity to be here to debate and ask questions of the Minister on this vital subject. Retrofitting homes, and ensuring that new homes are built to meet energy-efficient standards, is one of the most important things we can do to meet our net zero commitments by 2050. It was only in 2019 that Parliament declared a climate emergency. To reach net zero, we have to insulate Britain and if we do not, we will miss those targets by a mile.

  In conclusion, I have three questions for the Minister. How will he respond and focus on the long term—despite the current challenges—rather than on the short term, in getting to net zero by 2050? What support will be given to the private rented sector and landlords on retrofitting? What investment is going into stimulating green hydrogen, beyond blue hydrogen, with our various projects, whether in the north-east or in the north-west, which are fantastic for energy-intensive industries? We need that investment, and we need it now.

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• 8 Jun 2022: Solar Farms and Battery Storage

  17:10

  The justified concerns about the local impact of solar farms must be weighed against our inescapable need to build renewable energy, and lots of it, over the coming years in order to meet our net zero target by 2050. Renewable energy, including solar energy, must be built, and it must be built somewhere. It is always easy for someone to say that they are in favour of renewable energy in principle; it is much harder to say that they are in favour of renewable energy in a specific location. Members from across the Chamber have made very considered speeches about the circumstances in which we should build solar farms, and I agree that we need to be clear about the need for a strategic approach, so that we can understand exactly what we need and where it needs to go. However, it certainly needs to go somewhere, and that should be our starting point.

  With the costs of fossil fuels soaring, wind and solar power are the keys to bringing down costs for customers, ensuring energy security in the face of the Ukrainian war and fighting climate change, yet the Government are intentionally limiting access to the cheapest, quickest and cleanest forms of new power by stopping the production of enough onshore wind and solar energy to power 3 million homes. Members have today made some great suggestions regarding where that energy capacity should be built. Instead, we have a Chancellor who has just handed a £1.9 billion tax break to producers of oil and gas that could pump nearly 900 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. Our climate and our constituents will pay the price for the Government doing the unthinkable and backing the fossil fuel industry, despite claiming to have the admirable target of reaching net zero by 2050. What assurances can the Minister give that the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s apparent green light for the fossil fuel industry will be revisited with a sense of urgency and with funding redirected to renewables, developed in the right places? Why not incentivise, as people have said? We simply cannot reach the kinds of targets that we need to be reaching by limiting ourselves to small-scale urban solar farms. That will involve larger-scale projects over the 50 MW rate that at the moment qualifies a proposal as a nationally significant infrastructure project.

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• 30 Mar 2022: Disposable Barbecues

  16:46

  As my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax and, indeed, the hon. Member for Keighley, mentioned, not selling or using disposable barbecues also has the added benefit of saving huge amounts of plastic, foil and metal that are used to make each barbecue and which are not always disposed of correctly or respectfully. However, it should not be up to individual retailers to decide what protection to give our natural environment. Given the scale of the current problem and the fact that the climate emergency means that, sadly, we may have more devastating wildfires, we need greater intervention from the Government. Can the Minister tell us what consideration she has given to banning disposable barbecues? I am uncomfortable with banning things—I think we all are—but it would be useful to have an update from the Government.

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• 24 Jan 2022: Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Bill [Lords]

  19:47

  We are all united in wanting to stamp out abusive practices with ground rents, but is the defect of the hon. Gentleman’s amendment not that it amounts effectively to a confiscation of existing property rights? That in itself has fairness issues, but it also deters future investment in our building stock. That future investment is needed, for example, if we are going to insulate against climate change and turn our buildings into more carbon neutral ones for the future.

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• 15 Nov 2021: Water Companies: Sewage Discharge

  18:37

  The recent Government-inspired amendment is nothing short of the “Blah, blah, blah” that came out of COP26. To put it bluntly, a vague statement of progressive reduction is talking crap, while giving the green light to more crap in our rivers and communities.

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• 15 Dec 2020: Planning for the Future

  15:49

  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani. I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this important debate and for putting net zero—there is a big gap—at the heart of her argument. I agree wholeheartedly with that.

  The proposals in the White Paper come at a time when we hear much talk about building, not just to solve the housing crisis but as a way to boost the economy, create new sustainable jobs, help us to meet the net zero goals and, very importantly, respond to the covid crisis. Some of the proposals, at first glance, are reforms that we on the Labour Benches welcome and have called for in the past—timely local plans, moving from the analogue, paper-centric world to the digital world, while not excluding others, and improving the quality and design standards. Yet people do not have to scratch beneath the surface to discover that the very heart of the proposals—the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire referred to the details—is a huge shift of control and influence from communities and local democracy to well-resourced developers and Whitehall. People across the Chamber have certainly said that.

  If we are serious about maximising housing delivery and meeting building targets, the Government need to stop ignoring the answer that is right in front of them and build a new generation of social housing—and, yes, make it net zero. Just 6,500 homes for social rent were built last year. The White Paper on social housing, which was published recently, has some good things in it, but the key thing that it was lacking was a plan to build more social homes.

  In conclusion, we cannot cheat our way out of the housing crisis; building healthy and sustainable homes should be the response to this pandemic. However, clear and measurable targets for net zero are currently missing from these proposals. We should put communities at the heart of good place-making, strengthening and resourcing our planning system, and extending local democracy, to build good-quality housing for all.

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• 8 Oct 2020: Planning and House Building

  14:05

  These proposals have come at a time when there is a lot of talk, and rightly so, about building not just to solve the housing crisis, but as a way to boost the economy, create that stimulus and sustainable jobs and move towards a net zero target. The oft-peddled Government mantra during this covid and economic crisis is “build back better”. As has been echoed across the Chamber, some of the proposals, at face value, such as design standards, codes and quality, and neighbourhood plans being on a statutory footing, were outlined in Labour’s planning commission in September 2019, so there are some positive steps. Yet Members across the Chamber, and certainly many of our constituents and people in the housing sector, do not have to scratch far beneath the surface to discover that the very DNA of these proposals is a shift of control, power and influence from our local communities to developers. It is a developer’s charter.

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• 13 Jul 2020: Draft Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield Combined Authority (Functions and Amendment) Orde...

  16:37

  I have examples of real difference on the ground. The Liverpool Households into Work programme provides one-to-one support—a household approach—to tackle long-standing issues of unemployment to prevent people getting into unemployment and removing barriers over time. This will be more important than ever because of the national and international health, and undoubtedly economic, crisis. The Mersey tidal power project, which it was announced today will be directed by the industry veteran, Martin Land, will provide enough energy for 1 million homes, supply thousands of jobs and contribute towards a net zero target. Expansion of the Merseyrail system will not only provide the public transport that the region deserves but the infrastructure that it needs to—again, I will use the words—level up. This is a genuine example of how we can do that.

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

  15:35

  It is not every day that I agree with the Liberal Democrats, but we certainly have common ground on this issue. We are in a climate emergency, and when we talk about moving towards a greener economy, we must be clear that the time for debate and discussion alone has passed. It is now time for clear, concrete and urgent action. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) so powerfully argued, we must make no mistake: this is a climate emergency; this is a crisis.

  One could argue that climate change has never been so prominent in public consciousness and political discourse. Despite the Brexit-related dramas in Parliament, which still continue, between 15 and 25 April, climate change was high on the news agenda in response to Extinction Rebellion protests in London, a major BBC documentary presented by Sir David Attenborough, and the visit to London of a Swedish schoolgirl. They led the way for many of us.

  Over the past 12 months, according to pollsters, the environment has risen in public concern. In a YouGov poll conducted on 29 and 30 April, 24% of people placed the environment among the top issues facing the country—about the same level as concern about the economy and immigration. That is a stunning development. We know from our postbags the levels of concern among the public about the climate emergency. Nothing short of a major transformation from fossil fuels to renewables will be good enough. Changing the ways that pension funds invest will not solve the crisis on its own; it must be part of a much wider approach—a new green deal, or a green industrial revolution. We have made some progress but, my God, we need to make considerably more if we are genuinely to tackle this emergency.

  My hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) highlighted the fact that the Labour-led Southwark Council has moved £450 million into passive funds that track low-carbon and fossil-free indices. It has also invested £30 million in Glennmont’s green energy fund, which invests in western European wind and solar companies. Many trade unions—I declare an interest as a member of Unison—have produced excellent and accessible guides to divesting away from fossil fuels, and I know that has been welcomed by representatives on local government pension committees and schemes up and down the country.

  Parliament has started to take this issue more seriously and put its own House in order. In June last year, 11 hon. Members, including the shadow Chancellor, called for Cambridge University to remove its £377 million fossil fuel investments. In addition, 244 serving and former MPs have signed the Divest Parliament pledge, calling on the trustees to phase out investments in fossil fuel companies. The trustees are developing a climate change investment policy, but not quickly enough, as highlighted powerfully by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire). We want that policy to commit to phasing out investment in fossil fuel companies in the earliest timeframe possible and to reinvest the money in funds aligned to the Paris agreement.

  This country’s pension assets, as highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington, total some £2.8 trillion. Pension savings should be at the forefront of the fight against climate change. Pension savers have money invested for the long term, so it is particularly exposed to climate risks, as powerfully argued right across the Chamber. This concern is now relevant to more of us than ever.

  Given the clear threat that climate change poses, we would all hope that it would be the norm for pension schemes to manage the risks. Unfortunately, research from the charity ShareAction finds that, for many, their retirement savings are unlikely to be sufficiently protected against climate risks. In a survey of some of the UK’s largest defined-contribution corporate pension schemes, just two of the 15 participating schemes had changed their default investment strategy specifically to reduce the exposure of employees’ savings to climate change risks. Although ShareAction found that a handful of schemes are considering further policy developments in this respect, the fact that a gulf exists in the strategies of schemes means that workers face a lottery from one job to the next as to whether their savings are sufficiently protected against climate change.

  As the Minister stated in an intervention, the new pensions investment regulations, in force from October 2019 and to be strengthened in 2020, go some way towards addressing the issue. Scheme trustees will need to update policies to show how they take climate change into consideration as a financial risk. However, as my hon. Friends the Members for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) and for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) argued powerfully, we need to go considerably further.

  We need to send clear signals that tackling climate change and other environmental, social and governance risks is not distinct from the core purpose of financial markets, but an integral part of it, as the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham) argued in his intervention. Of course, as we divest from fossil fuels, we must ramp up investment in clean and green technology. Labour has set out plans to fit 1.75 million homes with electricity-generating solar photovoltaic panels, creating thousands of quality skilled jobs across the UK. That is a Labour green deal that will shift energy generation via renewables to 85% by 2030. It will provide a major boost to an industry that is still recovering from the effects of the coalition Government’s ill thought out slashing of feed-in tariffs, which was such a blow to a growing and vital industry.

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