Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)

Thank you. I am so sorry I was not at Second Reading. This is very much the sort of thing that I feel very strongly about. My three amendments in this group are on three different topics. One is transport, one is sustainability reporting and the third is on climate duty, all of which I feel very strongly about. I am going to find it hard not to bring these back if there is not progress. It is extraordinary that this week, the hottest June day ever for the UK has been measured in Surrey. We are hotter here than California’s Death Valley, and that is saying something. We really are not weatherproofed and we are not heat-proofed. We are very lucky in this Chamber. I sat in Portcullis House at 9 am this morning: it was baking. We stewed in there. Of course, a lot of people do not have the advantage of air conditioning like this in their offices and in their public places. I find it extraordinary that, in a week where parts of Britain have once again seen record temperatures, when red warnings have been issued because of extreme heat, and when climate change is impossible to ignore, we are debating a Bill that contains detailed provisions on transport planning for major sporting events but does not mention climate impact once. Schedule 5 goes into considerable detail about transport plans. It tells organisers what they should consider, how they should co-ordinate and what arrangements should be put in place. Yet there is absolutely nothing about the environmental impact of those transport arrangements. For major sporting events, transport is often the biggest source of emissions. At the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, spectator travel accounted for more than half of the event’s carbon footprint. At Euro 2024, fan travel accounted for almost 80% of emissions. We need to be serious about reducing the environmental impact of major sporting events, and transport is the obvious place to start. This amendment has two components. The first is that transport plans should have regard to sustainable travel options, “including public transport, walking and cycling”, and should seek to “minimise greenhouse gas emissions”. I am sure the Minister is well aware of all the work that happened in Ken Livingstone’s period at the London Assembly: we achieved a lot. The Government already tell us that rail is one of the greenest ways to travel. The Government’s own active travel investment strategy tells us that walking and cycling help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So we need to tell event organisers to take account of what the Government already recognise to be the lower-carbon options. Parliament has gone much further before, such as in the London Olympics, the majority of which was planned in the period of Ken Livingstone in London, and I am suggesting that we can do that in my later Amendment 88. The second element concerns integrated ticketing. If we want people to leave their cars at home, we need to make the alternative the easy option for them. Again, we have a very recent and very successful example. Every match ticket for Euro 2024 came with a 36-hour public transport pass built into the ticket price. The result was a success, because more than 80% of fans travelled to venues by public transport and fewer than 5% travelled by car, and hundreds of thousands of rail journeys were made between host cities. This was achieved by making the sustainable choice the convenient choice. Integrated ticketing also benefits spectators. It is easier, cuts costs, and helps avoid congestion around venues. It improves the experience of fans while reducing emissions. That seems a rare example of a policy that is good for the climate, organisers and the public. If there were ever an example of why we need to be adding in these amendments and preparing for climate resilience travel, it is today, when trains are cancelled due to heat and people are being asked not to travel. The Climate Change Committee has warned that climate risk will increasingly affect the operation of major events. When tens of thousands of people are trying to reach a venue within a narrow timeframe, those risks become particularly acute. What would it look like if we had today’s weather on the day of the Euro 2028 final? Asking those preparing transport plans to think about sustainability and resilience is absolutely vital. The Government’s own impact assessment argues that legislation is necessary because voluntary arrangements alone do not provide sufficient certainty and consistency. If legislation is needed to ensure transport plans work effectively, why should climate impacts and climate resilience be left entirely to chance? Given the climate challenges we face and the examples of best practice we have already seen across Europe, that seems the very least we can expect. On Amendment 87, on sustainability reporting, we hear the same language every time a major sporting event is bid for, such as world-leading sustainability, greenest games ever and low-carbon legacy, and it all sounds incredibly impressive at the time. But I get a bit fed up with the gap between the promises made and what actually happens. The Paris Olympics, for example, set itself up as the lowest-carbon games yet. In some respects, it did better than previous Olympics: emissions were lower than London or Rio, largely because they reused venues, cut down on new construction and made some sensible choices about energy and materials. But when you look a bit closer, the picture gets more complicated. Transport still dominated emissions; international travel still drove a huge carbon footprint; and, in the end, we are talking about millions of tonnes of CO₂. Yes, there was progress, but it also showed something else very clearly: without proper reporting, it becomes very hard to know what was genuinely achieved, what was just assumed and what was simply good marketing. That is the point of this amendment. We should not be relying on glossy bid documents and press releases to tell us whether promises have been kept. If we are serious about sustainability being part of these events, then we need to be just as serious about checking afterwards whether it actually happened. Right now, too often, the pattern is this: big promises at the bidding stage; celebration at the event; and very little scrutiny afterwards. This amendment says that, if you make environmental commitments before the event, you report on them afterwards—accurately, obviously—so that we can see what was delivered and was not. Of course, there are already sustainability requirements for major sporting events, but they are patchy and inconsistent. Some bids are strong, while others are vague; some report properly, while others barely report at all. That makes it very hard to know what is actually being delivered. We need something more uniform: clear expectations that commitments are measured properly and reported before and after the event. Without that consistency, we are not tracking progress; we are just collecting promises—and, quite frankly, people are getting tired of empty promises. Amendment 88 is on climate duty. We have had this kind of duty at past events—for example, in the London Olympics framework, where sustainability and wider environmental considerations were explicitly built into delivery. What we are seeing here in the Bill is a step backwards from that approach, just at the point when climate risks are more immediate, not less. We are told, including in the Government’s forthcoming major events strategy, that major events will continue to drive economic growth, enhance the UK’s soft power across the globe and strengthen social cohesion. Of course, they can do those things, but they cannot only be about that, and they certainly cannot deliver those benefits at the expense of our climate and environmental responsibility. At the moment, the Bill is built around delivery, organisation and facilitation, but it is silent on sustainability. We need to put in place something that should already be clear here: a clear duty that, when exercising functions under the Bill, we must have regard to greenhouse gas emissions, sustainable transport, waste reduction and the UK’s climate and environmental targets. We can continue with a system where climate is assumed to be somebody else’s problem, or we can put in place a basic duty that ensures it is properly considered every time decisions are made on these events. I beg to move.