Caroline Lucas: Will the hon. Member give way?
Caroline Lucas: I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving way—I am intervening on a previous point on which he was intervened on. Is he aware that the 65% tax that the Government are proposing is still below the global average? The figure in Angola is actually higher at 70%, so there is not any real logic to what he is saying. These oil companies are already operating in places where the tax is higher.
Caroline Lucas: First, the hon. Member seems to think that just because gas is exploited in the UK, it will get used in the UK, yet he must know that it gets sold on global markets and therefore might get used anywhere. Secondly, he talks about our environmental standards being higher than others. He will know that we get most of our gas from Norway, where, actually, its carbon footprint is significantly...
Caroline Lucas: We sell it on international markets.
Caroline Lucas: The Government are introducing this Bill in response to the extraordinary profits being made by the oil and gas sector—profits that are not earned but are a consequence of high global gas prices, fuelled by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. As families across the country are struggling to make ends meet, faced with rising energy bills and a cost of living scandal, energy companies...
Caroline Lucas: The issue is not just that the Government are not bringing forward good stuff fast enough—in other words, the delivery gap that the Committee on Climate Change referenced. The Government are also doing bad stuff. The Committee on Climate Change said that the Government’s plans for more new oil and gas projects in the North sea did not make economic sense. Will the Minister listen to that...
Caroline Lucas: indicated dissent.
Caroline Lucas: The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case. Does he share my surprise that in a debate on energy costs there has been no reference yet to nuclear power, which is eye-wateringly expensive? We are just hearing that Hinkley Point is going to be a year late and cost yet another £3 billion. Does he agree that the money that is being sunk into nuclear could be much better spent in exactly the...
Caroline Lucas: I am all in favour of fossil fuel companies creating funds, but would not another way of achieving that be for the Government not to give oil and gas companies such an extraordinary subsidy, as part of the windfall tax—the so-called 80% investment allowance, which incentivises precisely the opposite kind of behaviour that the hon. Gentleman is speaking so eloquently about?
Caroline Lucas: rose—
Caroline Lucas: I certainly agree that incentives and greater financial support will be crucial. However, does the hon. Gentleman agree that another way of tackling the issue that the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) raised would be to make very sure that there was a requirement to up the energy performance certificate rating before the house next changed hands or was put on the...
Caroline Lucas: The right hon. Member is talking about the recalibration that is needed in the Department. Does he agree with me that one area where that is extremely true is the need for a proper home insulation programme? We have never seen this Government get that right, in spite of the £11.7 billion allocated to the energy bills support scheme, which is of course welcome. What we need is a proper home...
Caroline Lucas: Just two months ago, the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box at Prime Minister’s questions and told me: “of course sexual harassment is grounds for dismissal.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 759.] Yet in 2019 he kept the right hon. Member for Tamworth as Minister, and this year he gave him powers over MPs’ welfare as Deputy Chief Whip, despite knowing that a...
Caroline Lucas: rose—
Caroline Lucas: Does the Secretary of State understand why so many people would accuse this Government of the most rank hypocrisy? First, this is a predictable outcome of the agreement that they negotiated when they did not give a fig for the situation in Northern Ireland, frankly. Secondly, if they were serious about negotiations, they could be using article 16. Thirdly, at the very same time that the Prime...
Caroline Lucas: It has emerged that there is a backlog of 23,000 applications under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy, with just two of 3,000 applications for refuge by Afghans who worked for Britain having been processed since April. At the same time, since December, staff working on the ARAP scheme have been slashed by a quarter. This is an incredible betrayal of the Afghan people who put their...
Caroline Lucas: I believe that this is a flawed Bill—it is not strategic, it is not clear and it does not do what it says on the tin. Ministers breezily assert that it will deliver access to wonderful new markets, while failing to acknowledge that it actually risks hindering access to our closest significant market, the EU, as we create a divergent regime for regulating genome-edited products. As we have...
Caroline Lucas: I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. As has been said, she clearly has expertise, but I am looking at the scientific evidence that has been put before me, and it is being suggested that the mistakes that can be made in this area, especially when it comes to nature, appear very different from those that are seen in nature. I move on to the principle of properly defined criteria. Using a...
Caroline Lucas: I am not making a blanket statement in that way. I am saying that if a whole load more safeguards were built into the Bill and if it were not based on a set of definitions that are being criticised by the scientific community, I would have rather more confidence in it than I do right now. As we have heard, several learned organisations have challenged the Government’s creation of this...
Caroline Lucas: The Secretary of State keeps using this language about precision breeding, but he will know that that is neither a specific technology nor a scientific principle. It relies on the creation of a hypothetical class of GMOs that could have occurred naturally. He will know that there is opposition to that definition from everyone from the environmental non-governmental organisations right through...
