My Lords, my speech follows rather neatly from that of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I will begin not by being churlish but by turning this around the other way and declaring my position as a member of Peers for the Planet and paying great tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who has so led the Government in the right direction on this Bill—as on the Financial Services Act, to think of a recent one before this. I would like to think that maybe it has got a little easier this time than it was on the Financial Services Act, so maybe we are progressing to the point where a Bill will
arrive in your Lordships’ House with climate and environment already there, and we can just focus on trying to strengthen and improve it.
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The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, has obviously been hugely important in the progress we have made. He referred to the IPCC report yesterday, which relates to an earlier group we were discussing. The IPCC—I think it is the first time I have seen this—is really explicit about the impact of the climate emergency, and all the events associated with it, on people’s mental health. If we look around the globe at this moment, we see that southern Paraguay is enveloped in a giant ash cloud from fires in Argentina. Queensland and northern New South Wales have record floods, and the city of Brisbane has its second enormous flood in 11 years. That has massive impacts—understandably, through the stress, worry and suffering—on physical and mental health.
I want to particularly pick up the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I noticed, like her, that the Minister said climate and then added environment as an afterthought. Anyone who looks at the Hansard from Committee will see that I very much majored on environment and a couple of aspects of it. Biodiversity is obviously huge, but there is also the issue of antibiotic resistance. The debates between the Minister and me on the Government’s inadequate approach to antibiotic resistance go back to the passage of the Medicines and Medical Devices Act. I also raised in Committee the issue of PFAS—the forever chemicals —and these are huge issues for the NHS.
One final area I raised in Committee was plastics. Before the pandemic I chaired an excellent event seeing some really good progress in the NHS on seeking to reduce the use of single-use plastics. Understandably, that has stalled in the light of the Covid pandemic—for reasons we can all understand. It is really important that that goes back as a focus. There is so much plastic use in the NHS that is easily avoidable, and I would like to ask a very simple question: why is anyone anywhere in the NHS having drinks in plastic bottles? It is the kind of thing that is very easy to get rid of.
I focus on that because I spoke a little in Committee about microplastics. I am going to cite three studies that have come out since then. Microplastics have been found in the placenta and the bodies of newborn babies. Chemicals from microplastics have been linked to obesity; there are studies with mouse fat cells where chemicals from microplastics are promoting the growth of fat cells. Some studies out of China show relative gut health being very closely related to the level of microplastic in people’s bodies. These are studies in the last month.
We have a world choked with plastic. We have a world wildly overheating. We have a world—as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said—where biodiversity is in collapse. I think the NHS is starting to focus on these things, but we need to see, as the IPCC said, that health and environment are not two separate issues. We live in the environment, and we have to look after it in every part of our activities.