Barry Gardiner MP: speeches

Speeches

• 23 Jun 2025 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  As the Member of Parliament for the largest Jewish school in Europe, may I thank the Foreign Secretary for his earlier assurances on safeguarding the community in this country? May I also commend the way in which he has diligently pursued a negotiated outcome to this destabilised situation? He knows that it used to be said that the Israeli Prime Minister jumped to the tune of America. Now that it seems to be the other way round, what action will he take against Prime Minister Netanyahu specifically, in order to stop the destabilisation of the middle east?

• 8 May 2025 · Environmental Audit Committee · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to speak in support of the Committee’s report, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee on the way in which he has led the Committee and on how he took up the remnant of this report from the last Parliament as the first report for our Committee in the new Parliament. He is right to recognise that natural capital is the foundation of our economy. With the spending review next month, does he agree that the Government should set out precisely how they have taken a natural capital approach to the evaluation of spending decisions? Does he agree that the new national wealth fund should be empowered to invest in the natural capital project, as highlighted in our report?

• 27 Mar 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I was proud to be in this House when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown established the Department for International Development, and when they established the Drop the Debt campaign. I was proud when the Leader of the House and I stood for election on a manifesto that committed us to restoring the international aid budget to 0.7% of GNI. May we please have a debate in Government time on how it might be possible to find a lost moral compass?

• 24 Jan 2025 · Climate and Nature Bill · Hansard source

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  From one old fogey to another, I presume. I have never enjoyed a speech by the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) as much as the one he has just delivered; he did not bore the House in any way. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for introducing the Bill; it has had a very long gestation, involving many Members on both sides of the House, but it is good that it has cross-party support. Indeed, the first thing I want to focus on is the importance of cross-party support. These issues had cross-party support in the House for many years following the Climate Change Act 2008, and that continued until about 2015. That was tremendously important in the progress that not only we but the world were able to make. People saw that it was possible for Parliament to come together and do things that were considered radical to tackle climate change. Latterly, unfortunately, that consensus has broken down somewhat, and it is important—it is the duty of all Members of the House—to try to repair that consensus and to build on it. Unless we do, we will face the sort of future that the hon. Lady and the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich outlined. I am conscious that many people want to speak in the debate, so I will pick up quickly on just three issues in the Bill. First, clause 2(2) states: “The strategy must include annual interim targets consistent with the achievement of the objectives”. Those objectives are the climate and nature targets, and it is great that the Bill makes the link between the two; that is fundamentally important. However, I want to counsel against annual targets in this regard. As we know—it is well documented in the OEP report that the hon. Lady referred to, as well as in the Climate Change Committee’s reports—there is natural fluctuation annually in what happens around us. Sometimes that is because of the El Niño effect, and sometimes it is for other reasons—nobody in the House will be more familiar with the El Niño effect on the oceans than the hon. Lady. It is important that we understand that sometimes an annual target, to be consistent with the five-year targets and the overall long-term target, will look like it is going backwards. We need to look at that very carefully in the Bill. Another issue I want to pick up on is clause 3, on the establishment of the climate and nature assembly. In the last Parliament, six Select Committees came together to convene a people’s assembly on the climate. That was a wonderful moment for the House, because instead of our telling the people, “This is what you have to do,” the people were telling us, “This is what we want you to do on our behalf.” It was really important that that took place, and it is great that the hon. Lady has included that measure in the Bill. I gently point out, however, that the climate assembly disagreed with some of the things that the Committee on Climate Change told us were essential to do. The 66% figure in the clause is actually quite a low threshold. Sometimes the report from the climate assembly was clear that people were not prepared to go as far as the Committee on Climate Change and other nature organisations, such as the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, believed was imperative. On who is in charge, there is a failure to connect things up, because the clause says that if something is recommended by 66% of the assembly, it must be included in the strategy. We will need to go through those areas in serious detail. Finally, it is important that the Bill talks about the impact of climate, biodiversity and nature on each other. I pick up on what the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich— the grandfather of the House, as he styled himself—said about Drax. We are going down the wrong road with Drax. I understand the reasons why: Drax power station provides 4% of UK electricity in the power sector. It seen as an important area, so the question is, if we take it away, how will we fill it? But we cannot allow the damage to old growth and to virgin forests that we know is happening in Canada. More than that, as has been said by the noble Lord Birt, who has also seen some of the whistleblowers’ accounts, as I have, those accounts make it clear that the Ofgem investigation was correct in saying that the sustainability of the feedstock had been not only misreported but deliberately misreported. That means that the people concerned in Drax are not fit and proper to run the company, and we should not be paying them—at the moment—£9 billion. We have now to decide whether we will subsidise that even further. The impact on biodiversity is disastrous, and although they say it is renewable, it is not within the timeframe to meet the 2050 climate target. It is salient that the previous Secretary of State, after she ceased to be the Secretary of State, said, “We knew all along that this was not sustainable.” If that is the case, perhaps she should have done something when she was Secretary of State, but it is this Government who must now act to ensure that no further subsidy is paid to Drax.

• 2 Dec 2024 · Bangladesh: Attacks on Hindu Community · Hansard source

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  Thank you for allowing this urgent question, Mr Speaker. Since the fall of the previous Government in August, Bangladesh has seen more than 2,000 incidents of violence, most of which have been targeted against the minority Hindu community. Hindus make up less than 10% of the population of Bangladesh. As my hon. Friend will be aware, anti-Hindu violence has been a recurrent event in Bangladesh. Indeed, earlier this year, the Jamaat-e-Islami party was banned after riots in which 200 people were killed. While Bangladesh no longer has the secular constitution of 1971 and became an Islamic state in 1988, there are none the less supposed to be protections for minority religions under the constitution, including articles 28 and 39. However, these appear not to be being enforced. There are reports of police and army standing by, as more than 20 places of minority Hindu and Sufi worship were vandalised and their worshippers attacked. This came to a head on Friday, when extremist groups from the Jamaat-e-Islami party attacked two Hindu temples in Chittagong and conducted a campaign of orchestrated violence against the Hindu population. A leading Hindu monk, Chinmoy Krishna Das, a former leader of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness has been arrested. ISKCON is a worldwide branch of modern Hinduism with its UK headquarters at Bhaktivedanta Manor in Bushey, many of whose worshippers live in my constituency of Brent West and the surrounding areas of north-west London. People are concerned that while he was engaged in exclusively peaceful protest, he has been denied due process, charged with sedition and refused bail, yet none of the individuals who attacked the temples has been apprehended or charged. On Saturday, senior Bangladeshi journalist Munni Saha was taken into police custody following an attack on her car by a large mob in Dhaka, and released only under the provisions of the criminal code. The situation is clearly on a knife edge. With such large diaspora populations in the UK and large Hindu communities with strong links to the community in Bangladesh, I ask my hon. Friend what more she can do to have discussions with the Bangladeshi Government and other partners in the region to ensure that tensions are lowered, the rule of law put into effect, and calm and order restored.

• 6 Nov 2024 · Draft Barnsley and Sheffield (Boundary Change) Order 2024 · Hansard source

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  How good it is to have your guidance, Mrs Harris, for our first legislative duty of the day. Today will be a busy one for all of us, with votes on the Budget and the ramifications of the US election competing in our minds for attention. While boundary changes may seem like minor political fare in comparison, it is important that we recognise that we are dealing with the fine grain of politics. People are affected at the most local level by the decisions we make. I want to express my profound gratitude to our Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough and Rushden, for thinking of me as someone who just might be interested in the draft Barnsley and Sheffield (Boundary Change) Order 2024. I know that many colleagues would willingly have supplanted me and usurped my duties on this Sixth Delegated Legislation Committee. I can only guess at why she so singularly favoured me with the appointment, but I trust that the length of the speech I am about to make will be sufficient to express to her just how appreciative I am that she allotted me this task. Inevitably, boundary changes can be controversial. Sometimes we risk separating a region from its history. I do not know whether this is an old saying or just something I have been saying for a very long time, but scratch history and you find geography. Our history is moulded by our natural environment. Each region has its own that depends entirely on the fertility of its land, its proximity to the oceans, and trade routes and its access to fresh water and natural resources such as coal or precious metals. The boundary commission has the serious job of keeping our democracy relevant and connected to people, but sometimes, quite without wishing to, it can end up dividing the community and confusing future residents, all at the expense of the taxpayer. The Minister made much of the fact that the draft order would affect only 12 households, and the final recommendations of the Barnsley and Sheffield principal area boundary review say: “Our final recommendation to change the district boundary in this area currently affects 12 households”. However, the recommendations also say that that figure will rise to 284 households by the time the development has been built. That is about 800 to 1,000 people. The Minister also said that no representations were made. Well, of course they were not; people have not yet moved into those 284 households, so how could they have been? That is why it falls to us here in Parliament to consider what those individuals, when they move in, might wish to know. Let us look carefully at what will be at stake for those 284 families. Of course, we should be just as concerned were the draft order to affect only the current 12 families, but let us consider precisely what will divide those future families from their nearest neighbours in the other part of Oughtibridge Mill. The local authorities’ argument is that it would be more convenient administratively for them if the whole development came under Sheffield, but we ought to be more concerned with the families and what that might mean for them; the decision we take today will have a profound influence on their lives. Any hon. Member who has looked carefully at the map of the area will have noticed that the part of the Oughtibridge Mill development currently under the jurisdiction of Barnsley council in the Penistone East ward is not only by far the larger part of the site—I would say it is about three to four times the size of the part in the Sheffield area—but actually separated from the residential area of Oughtibridge village by not one, but two major physical barriers. The first barrier is the River Don, with only one narrow river crossing available to the whole Barnsley side of the estate. Any resident travelling from the eastern part of the development at the far end of Aspen Road who wanted to walk to the post office in Oughtibridge village would face a 1½-mile journey—a 3-mile round trip. But the River Don is not the biggest problem; there is also the A6102. Langsett Road North is a major road—in parts a four-lane highway—and runs parallel to the River Don. It is not a shared artery that binds the people on one side of a community to the people on the other; it is a road that forms a natural boundary and separates people. No doubt that double barrier was what the boundary commission was accounting for when it made its original proposal. We must not assume that some of the 284 families would not rather enjoy being residents of Barnsley council and appreciate the vision of individuals such Councillor Sir Stephen Houghton CBE, who chairs the Barnsley 2030 strategy board, and Bob Kirton, his vice-chair. Their strategy is about “celebrating and championing” the borough as it progresses to 2030 and sets out some bold ambitions. In developing the Barnsley 2030 strategy, they have worked closely with communities, businesses and organisations across all sectors and with local councillors. In the strategy, it was confidently stated that “our borough’s vision and ambitions represent everyone who has an interest in the future of Barnsley.” When it was written, that included the people in the Oughtibridge Mill development. Who are we to deny those residents access to the bold and ambitious plan that these councillors speak of? The strategy concludes: “We truly believe that together we can tell a better and shared story of our borough and we have a real opportunity to turn Barnsley into the place of possibilities.” In passing this order, we would deny those possibilities to 284 families. I live in the London borough of Brent, but I am only too aware of how many families in Brent prefer to say that they have a Harrow address. Indeed, many of them have a Harrow postcode to justify their little white lie. We have seen no impact assessment of what such a boundary change might do to the value of these properties in Barnsley and Sheffield.

• 11 Sept 2024 · Building Safety and Resilience · Hansard source

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  On regulation, my hon. Friend will know that Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report made very strong statements about the difficulty of reconciling the role of maintaining standards with the competitive environment. It was when building control ceased to be the responsibility solely of local authorities and became privatised building control functions that things started to go wrong. What action will my hon. Friend and the Government take to ensure that one set of standards is applied in one particular way and is not subject to trading? Saying “We will give you a shortcut if you come to us” is what went on, but it is wrong and needs to stop.

• 25 Jul 2024 · Convention on Biological Diversity · Hansard source

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  May I add my voice to the concatenation across this House welcoming you to your new role, Madam Deputy Speaker? I also welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry East (Mary Creagh) back to this House. I am delighted to see her at the Dispatch Box as the Minister for nature. She was a most distinguished Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, and I look forward to supporting her and our Government in championing nature in this critical decade for the natural world. I thank her for joining, just a day and a half into her new post, the meeting of the international conservation caucus, which I chaired in Parliament on Tuesday. Her enthusiasm for her brief, and for all that we hope this Government will deliver for the environment, was an inspiration to the dozens of MPs and campaigners who crowded into what was, I am afraid, a much too small room on a very hot evening. Nature is the source of life. It is the foundation of everything we have and everything we value, yet some economists talk as if the natural world is a subset of the economic one—something to be accounted for separately. In fact, the opposite is true: the economists’ world is a subset of the natural world. When did we last receive an invoice for pollination services from a bee? When did the forest last invoice us for its flood protection? However, a decline in our forest cover can affect everything from our food security to the destruction of our homes. A decline in insect populations can affect the yield of our crops. We use nature because it is valuable; we abuse nature because it is free. Because classical economics treats the services that nature provides as externalities, it fails to properly represent either the non-market benefits of ecosystems or the environmental costs of growth. More than a decade ago, I gave a speech at the Berlin summit on natural capital. I said then that the time when the Earth could support human communities without difficulty was coming to an end. The truth is that it has ended. We live in an age of planetary boundaries and tipping points. Natural capital has been eroded to such an extent that the complex mechanism of ecosystem services that nature provides has been compromised, and we now need to repair and restore the Earth’s ability to support us. In simple terms, that is what the convention on biological diversity has sought to do since it opened for signatures at the Earth summit in Rio in 1992. It has been ratified by every member state of the United Nations, with the appalling exception of the United States of America. Its aims are the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. It has two supplementary agreements: the Cartagena protocol, adopted in 2000, which seeks to protect biological diversity from the potential risks posed by living modified organisms created by modern biotechnological practices, and the 2014 Nagoya protocol, which aims to share the benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources in a fair and equitable way. If the CBD was established 40 years ago, why on earth is our biodiversity in the state that it is? The most comprehensive report ever compiled on biodiversity and ecosystem services by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services told the United Nations: “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history—and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating”, and that the impacts for people around the world are grave. We have not made the progress that we need to. The CBD set important goals and targets to halt this frightening state of decline. I pay tribute to the Canadian Government who, at short notice, hosted COP15 and established the global biodiversity framework. It set in place four goals: to halt human-induced species extinction, to use biodiversity sustainably, to share its benefits equitably, and to implement the finance of $700 billion a year necessary to achieve the first three goals. It also agreed 23 vital targets, including the 30 by 30 target to conserve and protect 30% of the planet’s land, seas and inland waterways by 2030, and the reduction of perverse subsidies by $500 billion a year. Talk is cheap. Targets are easy to set, but difficult to implement and even more difficult to police and enforce. That is why every country needs a plan—specifically, a national biodiversity strategy and action plan, or NBSAP. Revised NBSAPs must be submitted in advance of COP16 in Colombia this year. The UK Government originally committed to publishing the NBSAP in March and then May, but I am glad that they did not, because the change of Government should have afforded officials in the Department time to radically revise the draft. It was intended by Conservative Ministers to be merely a restatement of what the UK was already doing, not the urgent and transformative action plan that is required to deliver on the four goals of the GBF.