Speeches by Gardiner.

“You were the Chief Economist at the National Infrastructure Commission. Can you explain to the Committee what is required to meet the resilience standards for our national infrastructure and which parts of our critical infrastructure—our power supplies, our hospitals—are currently at risk, given the projections that yo…”

“I am just interested in what you were saying about the tree planting being so important. We often talk about the right tree and the right place, but you were specifically talking about the time it takes for those trees to sequester carbon. We can look at this from a biodiversity point of view, in which case we might go…”

“The answer may be provided by my colleague, Sarah Gibson, whose constituency has just felt the impact of it. I take the point. Thank you very much.”

“Last July, the previous Government issued its third national adaptation plan, and this March the Climate Change Committee issued its independent assessment of NAP3. It said that it falls far short of what is needed, that it lacks the pace and ambition to address growing climate risks—which we are already experiencing—a…”

“I will pick straight up on that. Land banking is clearly a problem. Cut the profit from the uplift that you get from agricultural to developed land and you would undermine how developers game the system at the moment, would you not?”

“You were in the room when I was speaking with the witness from Green Alliance earlier. We talked about document Z and the whole business of assessment of whole-life carbon emissions and embedded carbon in construction. Would you like to see that taken forward and put front and centre in our approach to this?”

“Let me put this back to Councillor Wright. What I was pushing for was more something about the regulatory powers that local authorities have and whether you feel that you require further powers to enforce the environmental protections properly when the NPPF comes in.”

“Mr Stafford, do local authorities have the regulatory and legal powers that they need to ensure compliance?”

“Thank you very much. Councillor Wright, I would like to come back to you and perhaps also to Mr Stafford to talk about the resources that local authorities have, particularly if you look at what the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management has said about the availability of ecologists in planning dep…”

“That was the point of my questions earlier about the Sendai framework and disaster risk reduction. Would you like to see this Committee making recommendations on those things in its final report?”

“You were in the room when I was speaking with the witness from Green Alliance earlier. We talked about document Z and the whole business of assessment of whole-life carbon emissions and embedded carbon in construction. Would you like to see that taken forward and put front and centre in our approach to this?”

“I will pick straight up on that. Land banking is clearly a problem. Cut the profit from the uplift that you get from agricultural to developed land and you would undermine how developers game the system at the moment, would you not?”

“I promised the Chair a short question, but you have given me a long answer. I am sorry, Chair.”

“You are just pressing my soft spots now.”

“I was just beginning to think that.”

“Thank you. Finally, Dr Ellis, am I right in interpreting your earlier remarks that basically we should start with the national strategic spatial plan and work up from there—so working in one direction from the national strategic plan, and in the other from locally based plans coming up to meet it?”

“Sorry, I did not mean to say that there was a contradiction here. What I was pressing you for was whether you felt that in the proposed reforms these things were taken into the same account as the other parts of the reforms—whether the mitigation element or the adaptation and resilience element was in some way losing o…”

“Thank you. Finally, Mr Breach, I know one of your research areas is the lessons we can learn from other cities around the world. You have done research into that, I think in Japan and other places, including Russia. Valencia has been in our focus over the past few weeks after it received 343 mm of rain—three quarters o…”

“And just to get your confirmation on the record, that is aligned with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors professional statement, and it is endorsed by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, yes?”

“To be clear, document Z, which I referred to, would set out the requirements for the assessment of whole-life carbon emissions and limit the embodied carbon emissions for all major building projects. Sophie O’Connell indicated assent.”