Caroline Lucas: Last Wednesday, the Business Secretary tweeted his winter energy security update, a plan that fails even to mention energy efficiency, despite the BEIS Committee, the CBI and charities all calling for immediate action on insulation to keep homes warm and to cut bills. The Minister did at least mention efficiency in his statement, but there is still no sense of urgency and no plan at the scale...
Caroline Lucas: If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.
Caroline Lucas: This Government are planning to remove refugees to Rwanda who sought sanctuary in the UK from torture and trafficking. This is a new and despicable low even from this Home Office. Can the Home Secretary confirm whether she has read the medical analysis from the charity Medical Justice, and will she find some moral backbone, immediately release from indefinite immigration detention all those...
Caroline Lucas: The long-term effectiveness of COP26 outcomes derives at least in part from the credibility of pledges made in Glasgow and the serious implementation of climate policies at home, especially while we still hold the presidency. Does the President of COP26 share my concern about yesterday’s High Court ruling that the UK’s net zero strategy was unlawful because it failed to meet the...
Caroline Lucas: The motion is right in one respect. The debate we need to have was never just about one lawbreaking, Parliament-proroguing, office-abusing Prime Minister; it was always about this tawdry, toxic Government as a whole. Every single MP on the Government Benches who stood by the current Prime Minister while he dissembled and denigrated his way through two and half years is implicated in his...
Caroline Lucas: On a point of order, Mr Speaker. On 22 June at Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister agreed to look at the urgent case of Afghan nationals who I am trying to help, and whose lives are at daily risk; they include Chevening alumni. I immediately sent him the details of our four cases, and I have chased him repeatedly and asked a written question. Today I did receive a reply, but it...
Caroline Lucas: (Urgent Question): To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office if he will make a statement on the Government’s preparedness for the extreme heat in the UK.
Caroline Lucas: I thank the Minister for his response. As he says, this week the UK is likely to have its hottest day on record, with the Met Office issuing its first ever red warning for extreme heat for England, and Wales already recording its hottest day. These brutal temperatures pose a very real threat to life and infrastructure, as well as to education, travel and, most importantly, health. It is...
Caroline Lucas: I am hugely grateful to all hon. and right hon. Members who have taken part in this debate. What we have not had in quantity of contributions, we have certainly more than made up for in quality. One theme that has come out is individuals’ love for nature. The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) talked about how it is central to our souls—nothing less. That, to me, is hugely...
Caroline Lucas: Just to be clear on the record, I absolutely agree that people in developing countries who would otherwise be deprived of their livelihoods if current unsustainable practices are not stopped should be supported into more sustainable practices. We have an absolute responsibility to do that, but the idea that we should go out there and treat increasing GDP as an overall abstract aim is wrong....
Caroline Lucas: I beg to move, That this House has considered protecting and restoring nature at COP15 and beyond. I am delighted to open today’s debate and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for its support in securing this important debate. I also welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) to his new post....
Caroline Lucas: I could not agree more with the right hon. Lady. In fact, I will come on to say a few words about peat very shortly. It sometimes feels that with all the focus on planting trees, which is very important, people sometimes forget that, actually, there is far more carbon sequestered in our peatlands than we will replace with our trees.
Caroline Lucas: I am delighted to agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the Westbury incinerator in particular and about incineration in general. He is absolutely right. The sooner that we can move towards a genuinely circular economy, where we are not producing the waste in the first place, the better. I was talking about the progress at the pre-meeting of COP15 in Nairobi just a few weeks ago....
Caroline Lucas: I am genuinely struggling to know how to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question. I want to say yes, and in a sense awareness is greater now and the general public’s anger at seeing nature decline before their eyes is perhaps stronger. However, although there are some good words, unless we get rid of all the brackets in the texts and get them agreed, and unless, crucially, we have both the...
Caroline Lucas: I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He is absolutely right: that connectivity is crucial to a thriving natural environment. Unless we ensure that we have not just isolated protection areas, but a genuinely joined-up corridor of environmental improvement and even widen out from that, we will not be successful in our aims. I will just wind up by saying that as...
Caroline Lucas: The UK already has the lowest tax take anywhere in the world from an offshore oil and gas regime, so it is perverse that the Government’s new investment allowance will essentially incentivise yet more oil and gas exploration at a time when we know that we absolutely need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Given that the Secretary of State himself has said that it will take up to a decade...
Caroline Lucas: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), whose new clause 1 I am happy to support. I rise to speak in favour of new clauses 8 to 10 tabled in my name. First, new clause 8 would require the Government to produce an assessment of the revenue that would be generated if the level of taxation on oil and gas companies were permanently raised to the global average...
Caroline Lucas: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, particularly since it helpfully highlights a party policy of the Greens, who were, as he knows, in coalition Government in Germany. It has absolutely been their policy to introduce those kinds of incentives, and they are being massively taken up because they are incredibly popular. I was talking about the investment allowance and just...
Caroline Lucas: Again, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Those are precisely the kinds of forward-looking policies that we need rather than the backward-looking, dinosaur policies that seem to think that digging out more and more fossil fuels is the way forward.
Caroline Lucas: The hon. Gentleman puts it perfectly succinctly and I very much agree. It has been estimated that existing decommissioning relief deeds could enable the extraction of the equivalent of 1.7 billion barrels of oil that otherwise would have remained unextracted, and that will only increase if we continue with the vicious cycle of handsomely subsidising fossil fuel companies to exploit oil and...
