My Lords, I declare my interest as a co-chair of Peers for the Planet. I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for tabling these amendments and for the way in which they introduced them, and for the speech of my noble friend Lady Boycott in favour of them.
I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate about how climate change obligations and aspirations can be integrated into the UK’s trade agreements going forward. As has been stated, if the Bill remains silent on these issues we could risk offshoring our environmental impact, increasing emissions and undermining UK producers by allowing goods produced to lower environmental standards to be imported into the UK. But by being clear about our commitments on climate change in the Bill, we can do more than simply preventing harm.
In the last two weeks, we have heard a great deal about building back better and greener. The Government have published their Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution. The Committee on Climate Change’s report on the path to net zero has set out a detailed plan to take us to 2050. The energy White Paper was published this week, as was the report of the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House on post-Covid economic recovery. All these reports point to the opportunity and the urgent need for that green industrial revolution, and for it to be on a global scale. The need to ensure our future economic well-being and the need to address the climate crisis are not in conflict or extraneous to trade policy.
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In their 10-point plan, the Government made clear their aspirations:
“As the world goes green, we will seek to put the UK at the forefront of global markets for clean technology.”
The CCC has estimated that the economic opportunities that low-carbon goods can bring amount to more than £1 trillion a year, so it is doubly disappointing that the Bill remains silent on climate issues. The only hint of recognition of the importance of addressing climate change came, as the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, just said, in the Written Ministerial Statement on 7 December, giving the commitment that:
“When a signed treaty text is laid in Parliament, it will be accompanied by … an independently verified impact assessment which will cover the economic and environmental impacts of the deal.”
When we discussed this last Monday, I think that the Minister signalled informally that I was correct to infer that “environmental” encompassed climate, and that the assessment could therefore include looking at the effects on the UK’s net-zero commitments. He gave me a nod when I said that then, but it did not make it into Hansard. Rather than asking him for a wink today, can he make that explicit when he comes to wind up this debate? I would be very grateful.
The UK’s contribution to the fight against climate change will be measured not only in the quantity of the emission reductions that we make but in the quality of the leadership that we give. We need to lead by example in every piece of legislation that we pass and every policy that we endorse in the run-up to the G7 and COP 26 next year, and beyond. We can do that by making it clear to our current and future trading partners that the UK wants to grow in a way that allows economic benefits to flow—which means a growing market in low-carbon goods—but that also does not hinder our net-zero and environmental obligations and ambitions. The climate crisis is a global issue; what better place to align with our goals than in the context of our global trading relationships?