Barry Gardiner MP: speeches

Speeches

• 24 Mar 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  The work done by the Conservative party on the NPPF was welcome, particularly in respect of its views on incorporating nature into the structure of the build, but it was unsuccessful. The hon. Gentleman will have heard my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister talk about a win-win for nature, so can he give the House an assurance that the Conservatives will back the implementation of measures such as swift bricks? Swifts are cavity-nesting birds that have no other place in this country and are declining at a great rate. Will he back the incorporation of those as a mandatory requirement in new builds?

• 16 Jan 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  The good news is that 185 apartments around Wembley Stadium in my constituency are ready to be occupied. The bad news is that nobody can move into them, because the Building Safety Regulator has sat on its gateway 2 applications for six months and its gateway 3 applications for two months. We have a housing shortage. Can the Leader of the House ensure that we have a debate on the delays and dysfunctionality of the Building Safety Regulator?

• 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.

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

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  It is troubling that many owners, who, according to the Act, are responsible for fire safety in these blocks, are seeking to establish themselves in foreign jurisdictions, often in tax havens. How can the Government take action to ensure that those who are responsible—often those who were responsible for the defects in the first place—and who are now seeking to evade jurisdiction in this country, can be brought to justice? Will the Government have to appropriate these buildings to do the remediation work that is so badly needed, and not at residents’ expense?

• 4 Sept 2024 · Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report · Hansard source

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  I do not think I have ever heard my right hon. and learned Friend speak more powerfully, more personally or more movingly than he did in this statement. I know that the more than 20,000 residents in my constituency who are still living in high-rise blocks with the nightmare of fire risk constantly upon them will welcome what he said about the Government taking a consistent and measured view of the recommendations, and moving to implement them systematically. They will also welcome what he said about the prosecution of those responsible for what Sir Martin called “systematic dishonesty” and “deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes”. I reinforce what the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) said about remediation. Many of the owners of these blocks have sold on to further owners, and to further owners beyond that. The Prime Minister spoke about subcontracting, but there has also been on-selling. Some of those owners live in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands, and they are simply not complying. They are not even applying to the building safety fund to get this remediation work done. Will my right hon. and learned Friend consider very carefully what powers the Government can take in order to take control of these buildings, get the work done and then recover the costs, if necessary by acquiring and selling the buildings themselves?

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

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  I am delighted to have given way to the hon. Gentleman, who makes a fair and important point. The way that we are incentivising farmers and land managers, and the financial resources that we put behind that through the environmental land management scheme and others, is vital. The previous Government put a number of objectives in place for the environment. I always commended their work on natural capital, the Environment Act 2021 and the Office for Environmental Protection. The Minister will know, however, that although the objectives were commendable, the implementation was often lacking. Indeed, the Office for Environmental Protection’s latest assessment of 40 individual environmental targets, which were set under the 2021 Act, is that we are on track to achieve just four. We are partially on track to achieve 11; we are off track for achieving 10, and 15 others lack sufficient evidence to make an assessment. Let me outline some of what I hope to see in our revised NBSAP when it is published. Although our commitment to COP15 is to protect 30% of our land, seas and inland waterways by 2030, only 5% of our land is effectively protected for nature. At sea, only 8% of the network has effective management measures in place. All four UK Administrations need to act on the recommendations of the latest special protection area review to protect threatened bird species. At sea, a special protection area sufficiency review is required to ensure that the current gaps in our marine protected area network are filled. The previous Government did well to set legally binding targets to increase species abundance and decrease extinction risk. However, all the devolved Administrations need to do so too. Most important, those targets must be matched by costed delivery plans, which should be published to support the UK NBSAP. A nature positive, net zero future can be delivered only if actions for nature and climate are hardwired into decision making. All public bodies must have a legal duty to help recover the natural environment. We must ensure that Government and industry take a strategic approach to planning for new energy infrastructure, which puts nature at its heart, and introduce mandatory reporting against the taskforce on nature-related financial disclosures aligned with global nature preservation and restoration targets. In the new Government’s first spending review, I would like a new UK nature fund to corral private sector funding to address the finance gap for nature. The Government should also commit to pressing forward with the forest risk commodities regulation and the renewal of important species recovery programmes such as Darwin Plus and the species survival fund. The UK is highly unusual in the United Nations in that 93% of all the biodiversity for which it bears international responsibility lies not within the UK itself, but in its overseas territories and Crown dependencies. Those regions—incredibly rich in biodiversity though they may be—do not have the financial resource to effectively conserve their own biodiversity, yet only 5% of the money that the UK spends on biodiversity actually goes to them. That is 5% of spend for 93% of the biodiversity for which we are the international guardians. That cannot go on and must be addressed in our NBSAP and the long-awaited publication of the UK overseas territories biodiversity strategy. It is crucial that the NBSAP be published before the COP16 deadline, and ideally before of the 1 August deadline, which comes up next week, for inclusion in the COP16 documentation. That is important to show that the UK is taking its commitment to implementation of the global biodiversity framework seriously. The plan must not be a ceiling on ambition and it should be open to revision, always in an upward direction. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister what steps the UK is taking to ensure that our NBSAP is submitted by the early deadline of 1 August and is a robust and ambitious contribution to the delivery of the global targets. The Nagoya protocol and access and benefits sharing are now encompassed in the convention by the work on digital sequence information on genetic resources. The truth is that the pace of discussion is unacceptable. We are now a decade on from Nagoya and there is almost no agreement. There is agreement only that a fund should be set up to share a tiny fraction of the benefits made by sectors such as pharmaceutical and food production. The fact that the co-chairs can find agreement among the parties only to such a fund contributing to target 19 is a joke. Target 19 talks of $200 billion a year by 2030 being mobilised to support biodiversity conservation. That is in six years’ time, yet at this point—10 years on from Nagoya—we cannot agree whether the trigger for payment of such moneys should be at the point of access of the genetic data, the point of use, or the point of commercialisation. There is no agreement as to how the scale of contributions to the fund could be determined—whether they should be 1% or 0.1%, or whether the levy should apply to profits, turnover or revenue. It is an absolute mess. I hope that the Minister will make progress on digital sequence information, a signature of the UK’s work at COP16 this October. But more than that, I hope she will speak with our Chancellor and our Secretary of State for Business and Trade to arrange for a high-level summit to haul in the chief executives of big pharma who are dragging their feet on this issue and encouraging their sponsor Governments to do the same. We have four years in which to deliver this target. It requires a whole of Government commitment to ensure that we succeed. The issue links to one of the specific features of COP16 in Cali, where I know the Colombian Government wish to make greater progress. Framework target 22 aims at ensuring the full, equitable and inclusive representation and participation of indigenous peoples and local communities in decision-making processes that are related to biodiversity, and it aims to foster inclusive, participatory and rights-based approaches to conservation. I am extremely grateful to the Colombian ambassador, who joined us on Tuesday evening and spoke movingly about the need to ensure that those peoples who have, for eons, been the guardians of so much of the planet’s biological diversity should not find that their traditional knowledge is commercialised for others’ gain as they are left impoverished, their territories polluted, and their way of life stolen from them. I hope the Minister will make space in her diary at the COP to meet the leaders of those communities in Cali. That brings me to the question of who in Government will be attending COP16. I know the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers have been invited. What an amazing signal it would send to the rest of the world that the UK is back, seriously engaged on the international stage with the most critical threats facing our planet, if the Prime Minister were to lead our UK delegation and if not only the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs were to attend, but the Foreign Secretary. The CBD has sometimes been seen as the Cinderella COP to the Climate Change Convention. In truth, they are twin crises in which each turbocharges the other. The loss of biodiversity will deplete all of the provisioning resources and ecosystem services on which human life depends. This is not just an environmental problem, but an economic and a security problem. I have another reason for wishing that the Prime Minister would go to Cali. I hope he will announce that the UK is willing to host the next CBD COP—COP17—in London in 2026. The fourth goal that was set in Montreal at COP15 was the goal of finance and resource mobilisation. Where better to make progress on the financial framework for delivering our 2030 and 2050 targets than the City of London—the world’s financial centre? Governments cannot do everything on their own. The role of the private sector in mobilising the resource of business and industry is vital. I refer the Minister to the “Financing Nature” report produced by Henk Paulson, the former US Treasury Secretary. He talks of the “clear and compelling economic case” for financing nature conservation. Although it is important that business recognises the value of ecosystem services, it must appreciate that it is far cheaper to prevent environmental damage than to repair it afterwards. That is why it is important that the Government make it mandatory for companies to report against the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures. London is the centre of the green bond market. It is the right place and this is the right Government to mobilise the financial flows on which the sustainability of our planet depends. COP17 will take place mid-way through the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—possibly the most important moment for taking stock of progress towards 2030, and a chance to work in partnership with all 196 countries that are party to the CBD to ensure that we are moving at the necessary speed and scale to meet our 2030 goals. The Government were proudly elected on a promise to ratify the global ocean treaty, improve access to nature, expand nature-rich habitats such as wetlands and peat bogs, take steps to clean UK waters, meet UK Environment Act targets, and improve animal welfare by banning trail hunting and the import of hunting trophies. We should be proud of that ambition. As we make good on those promises, we can proudly resume the global leadership role that so many around the globe are urging us to take by hosting COP17. By doing so, we will become even better placed in the future. We often think that rights are things that apply only to people. That is not true. Companies have rights. Trusts and institutions have rights—rights safeguarded by their guardians and trustees. At the heart of the convention on biological diversity is the idea that nature has rights, and we are but the guardians and trustees of those rights. I am confident that the Minister will be an exceptional guardian for nature, and I look forward to her response.

• 19 Jul 2024 · Covid-19 Inquiry · Hansard source

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  The Minister spoke of resilience. He is aware that Northwick Park hospital in my constituency was the epicentre at the start of the pandemic, and the lack of resilience meant that nurses there had to wear bin bags to protect themselves. I noted that he spoke of Grenfell in his statement. That was fundamentally important, because this is not simply about resilience in health. In that regard, I ask him to look at the issue of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. The same RAAC that caused problems in our schools was used in many housing developments at the time. We need to be resilient to any potential disasters in that respect, too.