Kerry McCarthy
MP for Bristol East · Labour · United Kingdom
“We see that in four main ways: physical risks, including floods, wildfires, droughts and storms; transition risks as economies move away from high-carbon industries; nature-related risks affecting food production and natural resources; and systemic risks, where shocks spread rapidly across sectors and markets.”
“The glaciers of the third pole function as Asia’s water tower, feeding major river systems that support nearly 2 billion people. When rising temperatures accelerate glacial melt, the consequences extend far beyond the mountains.”
“Following the heatwaves and wildfires across Europe this summer and the destruction caused by the glacier collapse and catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet, the message is becoming impossible to ignore: the consequences of climate change and environmental degradation are real, not some distant future threat.”
“Personally, I cannot see that Rosebank is compatible with meeting our climate objectives, but I recognise that the process should be followed. Green Alliance has reported that the gas being wasted in the North sea would be enough to heat 570,000 homes.”
“I too worked in the financial markets, although I think I have done a better job of hiding it in my 21 years in Parliament. I was more on the debt market side. In fact, I am so old that I was part of the salvage operation for Barings bank when it went under. That brings me to the right hon. Gentleman’s point about regulation.”
“My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I very much agree with the point that he just made. We have some excellent, innovative businesses in Bristol that came up through the Science Creates innovation hubs and attracted private capital.”
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“I thank the Minister for his positive response. He will be aware of the ecological disaster at Lough Neagh, which supplies 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water. It is partly caused by the run-off of agricultural fertiliser, climate change and the spread of the invasive zebra mussel, but has been exacerbated by sewage dumping. Can he say a bit more about this issue? In the past, I have found that his Department and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have not been willing to work with Stormont to address environmental issues in Northern Ireland. What can he do to address them?”
“When I speak to my constituents in Brislington, they tell me they have to wait an inordinate time to get through on the phone to their GPs at the Brooklea health centre, and wait over two weeks for appointments. Constituents in Fishponds have been told that it is over an hour’s wait for prescription medication at the local pharmacy—and we all know the situation with dentists. The other thing my constituents are waiting for is a general election. Does the Minister agree that that is the only way we will sort out these problems in the NHS?”
“One of the most upsetting aspects of this whole tragedy is the thought of those pupils at Treloar School being experimented on like “lab rats”, as one of the pupils said. They included brothers Michael and Bill Payne, and I met their widows Cath and Margaret over the Easter recess in Bristol. I accept that the Minister is trying to give detailed answers and that there are complexities, but what it really comes down to is the deep, deep wrong that was done to those little boys at Treloar’s, and compensation and apologies are owed to those people. Can I ask what the Minister is doing to communicate as clearly and effectively as possible with the families of those affected, so that they feel they are not being swamped by bureaucracy and that answers are close at hand?”
“An increasing number of constituents are coming to me because they are struggling to access childcare when they need it, which is partly exacerbated by staff shortages and sickness and overstretched providers. However, I want to press the Minister on this point. He said in his statement that the estimated £500 million of additional funding will “ensure that rates keep up with provider costs pressure”. What modelling has been done to ensure that that is the case, particularly with reference to places such as Bristol, where we know that a lot of overheads will be higher than in many other places outside London? I do not expect him to have the figures at his disposal today, but will he promise to write to me to give me an assessment of what has been done in relation to Bristol?”
“As I said to the Prime Minister in his statement on Monday, the mother of James Kirby, one of the other aid workers who lost his life while trying to deliver aid through World Central Kitchen, is my constituent. The family want answers, and I would appreciate it if the Minister passed on that message while the Foreign Secretary is in the region. Given the attacks on healthcare workers mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), as well as the attacks on people trying to deliver food aid, will he explain what the pleas for guaranteed deconfliction actually mean, because they do not seem to be working?”
“I welcome the Minister to his post. I think he is struggling a little bit to get with the programme, but hopefully he will soon be on message. [Hon. Members: “Oh!”] That was in terms of his answer to the question about being anti-net zero. The Department confirmed last month that curtailment payments cost a whopping £1.4 billion last year. That is bill payers’ money being used to pay providers to switch off wind power and switch on gas. Why should people be paying even more on their energy bills to switch off cleaner and cheaper energy because the Government have failed to deliver the net zero capacity that we need?”
“I look forward to hearing the Minister’s predictions of what the curtailment payments will be in the coming year, because they were up for the previous year. In a survey of energy industry leaders, nearly 90% said that we need new policies to make the UK more attractive to investors. Nearly two thirds are moving investment out of the UK, and three quarters blame a lack of clarity from this Government on net zero. Is it not time for Ministers and Back Benchers to drop the culture war and put British industry and jobs first?”
“Jacqui, the mother of murdered aid worker James Kirby, is my constituent. I am sure that she will agree with the Prime Minister’s description of her son as a hero. There is a real danger—I am already seeing this, as events move on—that his death will end up being chalked up as collateral damage in this conflict. Will the Prime Minister show that he understands the family’s need to see justice done, and will he keep up the pressure on Israel about the review? The family want to know why James was killed, and that someone will be held responsible.”
“He was like a little boy with a new toy, it has to be said—I think he greatly enjoyed it.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a very valid point. Some in favour of trophy hunting argue that it lends itself to supporting conservation in the country, which seems to me an entirely spurious argument. We have just seen really promising figures on tigers; there are 5,574 in the wild now. That is actually a tiny number; there should be many thousands more, but it shows that conservation efforts can pay off if we focus on certain species. Trophy hunting is not about conservation. As my right hon. Friend said, it is about people shooting animals, taking pictures of themselves parading around the corpses and cutting the animals’ heads off to take home. It is an abhorrent act.”
“I am following the hon. Gentleman’s arguments with interest. In Bristol we have experienced the first year of a clean air zone, which was actually imposed on us as a requirement by the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), because the Government had been taken to court by ClientEarth for being in breach of air pollution limits and therefore insisted that we should adopt the scheme in Bristol. If I have a chance to speak later, I will comment on how successful it was, but in any case that seems slightly at odds with the hon. Gentleman’s argument about local autonomy.”
“This goes back to what I was saying about the fact that the Government insisted that Bristol had a clean air zone. Obviously that will have a significant impact on people from Bath, for example, who drive down the A4 into my constituency, causing a huge amount of congestion and air pollution, but that is basically how politics works. I entirely agree with what my hon. Friend just said: the duty of politicians is to look after people in the patch they represent.”
“I pay tribute to groups such as Asthma + Lung UK and Mums for Lungs, which has been doing some very good campaigning in my constituency, while St George Breathing Better has been pushing for school street schemes to restrict the entry of high-emitting vehicles, especially when children are going in and out of schools.”
“Children are more vulnerable in this regard because their airways are smaller and still developing, because they are closer to traffic fumes because they are small, and because they breathe more rapidly. They are also more likely to develop more serious lung conditions in later life—although of course asthma can be very serious. Moreover, air pollution affects the lung development of foetuses in utero, and increases the chance of miscarriage. If a mother is exposed to a large volume of air pollution during pregnancy the baby is more likely to be born prematurely and with a lower birth weight, which is correlated with the development of certain health problems as a child grows up.”
“I spend far too much time sitting in car parks doing Duolingo and practising my very bad Russian while charging my car. It is quite sad when constituents spot me doing that. Although we need more charging points in our cities, including London, this is national infrastructure and we must roll it out to other parts of the country. As I have said, I believe that the immediate imperative is not reducing transport emissions with the aim of reaching net zero but dealing with air pollution, which we know has a significant impact on people’s health and on children’s health in particular. When I was at school there was just one girl in my class with asthma, but nowadays the majority of kids in any inner-city primary school probably have it.”
“We also need action on EV charging infrastructure. I will say thank you to the Government for providing some new money for charging infrastructure in the west of England—I think that Bristol is the best place outside London in this regard—but what is lacking is a national strategy to put the infrastructure into places where the market will not meet the need because there is not the necessary footfall, or whatever the driving equivalent is, particularly in our rural areas that depend on tourism. Those travelling down to Devon and Cornwall can use Exeter services, but after that it is pretty difficult to find somewhere to charge a car. As I have an EV and cannot charge it at home because I live in a block of flats, I welcome the public charging points in Bristol.”
“It had made the switch and was producing EVs; it is still bound by zero emission vehicle mandate, so it is making the new electric vehicles. The most important thing we can do—this goes to the points about people not being able to afford cleaner vehicles that are compliant with the ULEZ—is to develop a second-hand electric vehicle market as quickly as possible. We do that by increasing new EV sales. The figure has gone down a bit, but it was the case that of new EV sales, 80-something per cent were fleet vehicles. We know that they then come on to the second-hand market pretty quickly. We have to bring down the cost of buying EVs—I can see the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) nodding—and we do not do that by pushing the ban back to 2035; we need to bring it in now.”
“Reducing emissions from transport is obviously very much part of our ambition to meet net zero, but the immediate driver is the need to clean up our air. We have heard mention of the switch to electric vehicles. It is obviously the long-term objective that we want to ensure that all the vehicles on our roads reach safe emission standards. It was therefore disappointing that the Government rowed back the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles. The signal that that sent to the market and consumers was entirely counterproductive. Although initially there was some resistance to a 2030 target—rather than a 2035 target—within the car manufacturing trade, the trade then got with the programme and was critical of the Government for that row-back, because it affected sales.”
“Perhaps some Conservative Members ought to be out and about, talking to voters on the doorstep, rather than taking up our time here today, if they really want to influence the result of that election. The hon. Member, who has left the Chamber now, may not feel that ULEZ is an air pollution issue, but I very much feel that it is because low emissions are a public health issue. In my role as shadow Climate Change Minister, people often come and talk to me about air pollution as though it is primarily a net zero issue, and we have seen some depressing attempts to make net zero part of the anti-woke culture wars by saying that net zero comes at a cost. We saw the Secretary of State for Transport buy into the whole conspiracy theory about 15-minute cities at party conference, which is incredibly depressing.”
“As a Bristol MP, I suppose I have to apologise for daring to take part in a debate that is primarily about our capital city, but millions of our constituents visit as tourists and come here to work, and as a nation we all want to see it as a healthy, safe and pleasant place for people to visit, and to live and work in, regardless of which constituency we represent. I want to challenge the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson), who brought in the Bill, for saying that this is not an air pollution issue. It is clearly not an air pollution issue from his point of view. We know why he has brought the Bill forward: because of the elections coming up on 2 May. It is a desperate last-ditch attempt to try to boost the Conservative vote—and I think we know how that will turn out.”
“I think that is true, and it is also connected with poor housing conditions. We have talked in this place before about the need to ensure that homes are fit for human habitation. A young boy tragically died recently because of the mould in his home. All these things are connected.”
“I have already made the point about the irony, perhaps, of demanding local autonomy in some cases and demanding not to be told what to do by the Mayor of London, but in Bristol the Secretary of State told us we had to do that.”
“I suffer from hay fever virtually all the year round. I would have thought it would be worse in the countryside, but it is terrible when I am in London. I was in Paris in January and the hay fever took off suddenly because of the air pollution levels. Hay fever is not lethal in the way that asthma attacks can be, but it is a pretty grim condition to have to live with. It affects people’s ability to do their work and to study, for instance. As I said earlier, the Government were forced to act on air pollution after being taken to court by ClientEarth, to which I pay tribute for its continuing efforts through the legal system to hold the Government to account in respect of their environmental targets. As a result of that court case, Bristol was asked to act.”
“I defy anyone to tell me that such big improvements in air quality in areas where there are very sick and vulnerable people, including sick children, is a bad thing. It has been really successful.”
“The scheme came into effect in November 2022, and in January this year we had the first annual report on its effectiveness. It was judged to have been highly successful. The headline figure was that air pollution across all measured sites had declined by 9.7%. The success of the CAZ is measured by whether it lowers nitrogen dioxide levels below the legal limit of 40 micrograms per cubic metre. In November 2022, when the scheme was introduced, there were 18 sites across Bristol above the legal limit. Just 12 months later, that was down to just six zones. The scheme was particularly effective outside the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the Bristol Children’s Hospital, which are bang in the middle of the city centre. Air pollution was down by an incredible 26.9%.”
“London has the Greater London Assembly, a Mayor with devolved powers and Transport for London, so this issue is looked at on a London-wide basis. There is an issue in Bristol with people coming into the city centre from places like Bath, but the boroughs are not so interwoven that we cannot see the borders between them, and we do not have the interconnectivity that London has. In Bristol, we were told that we had to bring air pollution levels within legal limits as quickly as possible. We went to great lengths with the modelling to deal with concerns about the economic and social impact. As the Minister said, making the zone as small as possible was one of the factors in that. It is relevant to talk about the Bristol scheme because it shows what can be achieved by similar measures in London.”
“I was on the Environmental Audit Committee and the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee at the time, both of which took part in that inquiry. It was difficult to bring those Committees together, but the inquiry produced a really good, significant report, which we should still pay heed to when we as House think about what to do on this issue going forward.”
“That tax is not about raising money because lots of people are sending stuff to landfill. If a landfill tax is effective, the revenues go down and down, year on year. There is actually an issue with the fact that the tax is not keeping pace with inflation at the moment, but assuming it is effective, the revenues will dwindle—it is the behaviour change that we want to make happen. As I said, ideally we would not have introduced a clean air zone, but we have made it work. It is also worth noting that the Government take £2 from every £9 CAZ charge, which we would very much like to be able to spend in Bristol instead.”
“I appreciate that people cannot always afford to make that shift in vehicles, but it has happened. Another concern raised by opponents was that the CAZ would harm the local economy and communities by discouraging people from coming into the city centre. In fact, the opposite happened: retail footfall across four major retail hotspots in central Bristol actually rose from the previous year. There was also an argument that people would become isolated and stuck at home because they could not afford to pay the £9 charge, but again, that was not the case: the number of journeys into or through the CAZ per month was higher at the end of the year than at the start of the scheme, and the percentage of compliant journeys rose every single month. That is what we want to achieve. It is the same with the landfill tax, for example.”
“I could not make it up the hills in Bristol without a bit of extra help from an e-bike, but when it comes to delivery vehicles, one of the issues is deliveries inside the areas covered by zones. If we can have hubs outside the city centres and electric vans or e-cargo bikes making those deliveries, that could have a huge impact. Obviously, everybody making food deliveries and similar things really ought to be using clean modes of transport. I am conscious of time, so I will finish my point about the Bristol scheme. There were concerns that it would lead people to take diversions and increase pollution outside the clean air zone, but air pollution outside the zone has also been measured as down: it has reduced by 7.8%, because the CAZ has encouraged a modal shift among people.”
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I did have an e-bike; it was stolen from inside the Houses of Parliament. One would think that there would be nowhere more secure, but when the Queen was lying in state, whoever was acting as her security removed all the bikes and took off a £130 lock—presumably with an angle grinder or something—and my bike was not seen again. Try explaining to the insurance company that it was people from Buckingham Palace or from the Queen’s lying in state who took the lock off! That is another story, though. My right hon. Friend is entirely right. I used to hold the shadow green transport brief, and e-bikes are hugely important in allowing people to do those longer journeys.”
“Exactly—there is very complicated modelling involved. Also, if we can use measures such as these to take some cars off the road, that increases the attractiveness of public transport, because the buses can get to where they are meant to be without being stuck in traffic.”
“I was thinking in the context of the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) saying that he does not have a tube station in his part of Greater London, as though the only alternative to the tube is driving. London has a pretty decent bus system, but we need to make sure that people have that alternative. Again, I am going to say something nice: we have had confirmation today that First Bus has received funding under the next wave of the zero-emission bus regional areas scheme to turn all of our buses into electric vehicles. We have been experimenting with biogas, but that funding will do an awful lot. We do have some clean biogas buses, and my right hon. and learned Friend the leader of the Labour party got to drive one on one of his previous visits to the city.”
“Although there has been some opposition, groups such as St George Breathing Better—which was founded by a group of parents whose children are suffering because of the city’s air pollution—are very much behind the pilot. I return to the Secretary of State’s disappointing remarks about 15-minute cities. As well as bigger measures, such as ULEZ to address Greater London’s transport problems, we need to consider local solutions such as liveable neighbourhoods and school street schemes to encourage people to walk to school and work, and to make it as easy as possible for people to get around without resorting to their car. This should be about giving elected politicians the right to implement such solutions in consultation with the people they represent.”
“My hon. Friend is right, and she brings me on to my final point. Her borough of Waltham Forest hosts the mini-Holland scheme, which I have cycled around on an e-bike. Each week, the council’s transport lead takes people on a tour so that they can learn from the scheme. These local schemes can transform neighbourhoods by designing out some of the traffic and making them pleasant places to live, by building things like sustainable urban drainage schemes and areas where people can sit and talk. A liveable neighbourhood pilot is just about to start in my constituency. It is important to engage the local community, to explain how it will work for them and to listen when they say how it might cause problems in certain areas.”
“It has been three years since the Government published their national bus strategy, but we are still waiting for the promised guidance on what constitutes “socially and economically necessary” bus services for which local authorities can provide subsidies. While we wait, people in Stapleton, in my constituency, are having to walk a mile to get to a bus stop to catch a bus to the city centre, because First Bus says it is not commercially profitable to run a service through Stapleton and there is no money to subsidise it. Last July, a Minister told me that guidance would be issued in this Parliament, which is clearly close to coming to an end. When will we see that guidance?”
“A point was made about the impact on the health of children, older people and people with disabilities. People with disabilities have higher energy costs.”
“Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) described. The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey said that a third of people are living in fuel poverty, and a fifth of people are living in extreme poverty. One of the things that I am grappling with is the debate about prepayment meters. We know about forced disconnection, when people simply cannot afford to carry on paying for their electricity. What is more difficult to ascertain is the extent to which people, while not going to those extremes, are living in very cold conditions because they have cut back on paying bills. We know that when there is energy bill support, and when prices come down, their energy use will go up, which implies that they were using less energy than they needed to keep themselves warm.”
“Obviously, in areas such as the ones represented by the Members present, home insulation is even more of a challenge. That is partly because of the nature of the homes—they are older buildings that are difficult to retrofit—but also because there is a much smaller retrofit-skills market. The scattered nature of the housing and its isolation means that the economies of scale from rolling out an insulation scheme would be far more difficult to implement. Unless local skills and finance can be mobilised, the areas are unlikely to be first in the queue to benefit from national schemes. All Members in this debate have spoken eloquently, partly about the conditions that mean that fuel poverty is more of an issue: the longer darker nights, the cold, and the rain that “comes straight at you”, as the right hon.”
“It is a pleasure, as always, to see you in the Chair, Mr Paisley. I thank the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) for bringing forward this debate, as well as all four Members who have taken part and highlighted the specific circumstances that mean fuel poverty is even more of an issue in their constituencies than in the rest of the UK. We know that overall the average fuel poverty gap increased by 66% between 2020 and 2023. We know that 3 million people are in debt to their energy providers. We know that the Government are struggling to roll out their home insulation scheme; we saw figures the other day showing that in the first eight months of the Great British insulation scheme, only 2,900 houses had benefited from measures meant to benefit 300,000.”
“There is some talk— I think we have actually heard most of the Budget already, which is not normally the case—about movement on a windfall tax on oil and gas. Labour is calling for an increase in the rate on the energy profits levy to 78%—”
“However, I can appreciate how absolutely galling it is to be somewhere where so much energy is generated—I think the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber talked about an economic renaissance for the highlands and islands linked to renewable energy—yet to be last in the queue to actually benefit from that. We absolutely need to tackle that unfairness. I do not know whether anyone wants to intervene on this, but my understanding is still that the SNP is opposed to a windfall tax within our proposal. It is telling that we have this debate today, with the upcoming Budget; I hope that we see firm action from the Chancellor on tackling fuel poverty and recognising many of the unfairnesses that have been raised.”
“Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) asked, where is the benefit for Scotland from that? I was reading through a report from Changeworks on fuel poverty in the region in advance of this debate, and there was a quote from an energy adviser that really stood out: “The annoyance of being a 321% net generator of green electricity to the rest of the UK, all from renewables, yet we have no access to the polluting fuel which is mains gas and the price of energy is four times the cost.” Again, we know that renewable energy is going to be way cheaper than fossil fuels, and that is one of the reasons why Labour is committed to the “clean power by 2030” mission—because we know that that will help bring down energy prices.”
“However, some places are almost entirely off grid, as I think the hon. Member said. That obviously leads to significantly higher costs because oil is often then used as a fuel, or heating is entirely electric. Again, we have very much taken on board the point about decoupling from gas prices, but this all means that those people do not benefit immediately when wholesale prices do come down. I have figures here from Lochalsh & Skye Housing Association, which says that households in the area pay an additional £1,000 a year on energy bills compared with an average-sized home in the rest of Scotland, amounting to a 76% premium. That is just one figure illustrating the problem. The point was very well made that Scotland is home to a huge amount of old and new generation energy generation. As the right hon.”
“I would say that we do need to look at this in the round. Hopefully, the Minister will enlighten us a bit more, but Ofgem did a call for input on standing charges, which I think closed at the end of January. As far as I know, the outcome has not yet been published, but I think that it is for the Minister to give us some more details about the balance between standing charges, unit prices, and indeed the discussions about the social tariff. We are certainly looking at all those things. As the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey has said, the fact that the highlands and islands lack access to the gas grid means that they are in a particularly difficult situation. It was mentioned that 62% of properties in mainland Scotland were off the gas grid; I think I have that figure too.”
“Sorry, I will just finish what I was saying. And we are calling for an extension of the sunset clause to 2029, which would raise billions of pounds for the green transition, cutting household energy bills in the process.”
“To do justice to the issues that hon. Members are raising, I will not go down the path of having an argument about the windfall tax, because we want to focus specifically on fuel poverty in constituencies.”
“I suspect that the Minister will tell us she cannot say anything about what is being announced in the Budget today, but I would like some reassurance that she recognises the geographical disparities whereby some parts of the country are being hit harder by fuel poverty. There is an overarching need to tackle the fuel poverty that affects millions across the UK. Could the Minister say something about the geographical disparities? Could she also give some indication of where the Government are on the fairness of pricing, on the impact of standing charges versus unit prices, and on prepayment meters? I look forward to hearing from her.”
“What Joe Biden has done with the Inflation Reduction Act in the States very much demonstrates a place-based approach to the green transition. I think that about 70% of the investment has gone into Texas, which is traditionally an oil-producing state but has been keen to embrace the benefits of the green transition not just for jobs, but for the community. Labour’s local power plan is partly about community energy generation and how communities can directly benefit from renewables and use them to serve their needs, but an element of it is about lifting places up because they have made a contribution to the rest of the country.”
“We have been calling for a windfall tax for quite some time. We have also been challenging the generosity of the investment allowance that goes to oil and gas companies, which I think is 91p in the pound. Not least because my voice seems to be slightly failing me, let us keep to the topic— [ Interruption. ] I will draw my remarks to a close. Scotland’s huge potential for renewable energy generation shows the need for a place-based approach that allows people to feel that they are part of the transition and are directly benefiting. It is particularly galling that Scotland is responsible for so much of the new renewable energy generation, but is not benefiting. In some ways, it should be benefiting more than other parts of the country because it is doing the generation.”