Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

So, according to the Government, we are to have GM crops commercially grown in Britain from 2009, and if you don't like your food being GM contaminated, too bad. That's the clear message of Defra's latest consultation paper proposing absurdly small separation distances between GM and other crops, a voluntary system of compensation for ruined non-GM farmers, and permission for GM crops to be grown at secret locations (rejecting a public register of sites as sanctioned by EU law).

All of this begs the question: is genetic modification of food safe? The question remains unanswered, but a pile of new scientific evidence has produced some worrying results. Within the last few months a Russian scientist, found that an astonishing 55 per cent of the offspring of rats fed on GM soya died within three weeks of birth compared with only 9 per cent in the control group.

Then an Italian researcher found that mice fed on GM soya experienced a slowdown in cellular metabolism and modifications in liver and pancreas. A third study, in Australia, showed that genes from a bean introduced into a pea created a protein that caused such serious inflammation of lung tissue in mice that the research was halted.

Enough, you might think, for the Government (or the EU, for the Commission is now in charge of GM policy) to stop the import of GM processed foods until exhaustive tests had been carried out. Not a bit of it. The EU, under pressure from the US, has pushed through the approval of seven GM foods over the past two years, despite a lack of support from member states, and has commercialised 31 varieties of Monsanto's maize for cultivation in the EU.

Yet we now know from leaked documents what the EU really believes. On human safety it says that "there is no unique, absolute, scientific cut-off threshold available to decide whether a GM product is safe or not". And, it goes on, "it is a reasonable and lawful position" that insect-resistant crops (the GM crops being grown in the EU) should not be planted till all the effects on the soil are known.

Despite its own misgivings, the Commission has previously required member states to vote twice on proposals to lift national bans on GM products in five countries, and when it was defeated in both votes, it used its powers to force through the lifting of the bans anyway.

It is a scandal that an unelected body is empowered to determine what a nation may or may not eat, and that it did this because it was leaned on by the Bush administration in support of US agrochemical interests such as Monsanto. The US was able to exert this pressure because the WTO allows trade interests to override domestic food policies.

Nor does the UK Government come out of this much better. Despite knowing how hostile public opinion was to GM, ministers voted to give approval to six of the seven GM foods when other countries voted against. And despite a public consultation on GM cultivation that showed 85 per cent of the population against, they went ahead until, unexpectedly, environmental trials blocked this option.

The strong pro-GM bias of the Government is manifest in another area too. It does not sit easily with Lord Sainsbury's position as science minister that his companies promoting GM foods have been awarded more than £12 million by his own Department of Trade and Industry.

The key question remains for GM: should the public interest prevail, or that of some of the biggest US companies?

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:04 AM | Permalink

One aspect of the Government’s drive to ‘reform’ public services has gone little noticed. It isn’t only in health and education that the private sector is being given a preferential role. The same pressures are now being exerted against Council tenants to force them out of local authority housing.

A fortnight ago the Department of Communities and Local Government announced that this was now the last time that local authorities could bid for funds to reach the decent homes target. The Government had given a commitment, in the Labour Party 2005 manifesto, that “by 2010 we will ensure that all social tenants benefit from a decent, warm home with modern facilities”.

But the money would only be forthcoming for this if Council tenants opt for either a stock transfer to a private landlord, or to an Arm’s Length Management Organisation (ALMO) taking over a Council’s estates, or for a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme. Moreover, the current bidding round ends on 31 July, and after that there will be no money available at all for modernisation or repairs. This is manifestly unfair.

The Government’s argument is that using the stock transfer and PFI route has levered in £7.4bn of private funding, and is therefore the most economic means to reach the decent homes target. But it isn’t. The Commons Public Account Committee found that PFI work costs on average £1,300 more per home than if the Council did the work. Furthermore, the public loses the asset – and the continuing value from it after 30 years which is not included in the transfer price calculation. Also, the Treasury pays more in Housing Benefit costs as tenants’ rents increase, and there are increasingly hefty early redemption charges on loans before the sell-off can take place. Even that still leaves out the army of consultants paid out of the public purse to advise and facilitate.
The private sector route is almost certainly in the long run more expensive.

Nor is the ALMO route obviously preferable either. Good and excellent performing Councils, as audited by the NAO, have unnecessarily spent tenants’ money on setting up a new private company – often acquiring new posh offices, expensive re-branding and increasing senior managers’ pay – just to meet the Government’s arm’s length criteria to access the additional money on offer to ALMOs. Forcing Councils to jump through these hoops is not value for money.

Despite these pressures, not all Councils have gone down the Government’s chosen routes. By this year less than half of them will have transferred their stock, while of the remainder the majority – after tenants’ ballots turned down the options – are retaining their homes, and the rest are setting up ALMOs. The key question is now: how will repairs and improvements of Council properties be financed where tenants have voted to stay with their Councils and when the Housing Green Paper of April 2000 identified a £19bn backlog of repairs and modernisation work needed for Council homes?

This is not a demand for a big increase in expenditure on Council housing, only that Council tenants be allowed to retain the benefit of the money they have contributed in rent and not have it siphoned off for wholly extraneous purposes. For despite the widespread view that Council housing represents a vast repository of public subsidy funded by wealthier sections of the community, the reality is precisely the reverse. A Parliamentary Answer of 25 May shows that Council tenants pay £1.55bn more a year in rent than they get back in Management and Maintenance and Major Repairs Allowance. Through large sums extracted annually from local authority Housing Revenue Accounts by ODPM, Council tenants have been subsidising Government (i.e. other taxpayers) to the tune of some £800m a year, not the other way round. In addition, Government has been taking 75% of the capital receipts from ‘right to buy’ sales, amounting to some £550m a year, rather than allowing it to be re-invested in more Council housing.

The predictable result has been a massive under-investment in social house-building in the last 15 years leading to sharply rising homelessness. In 1990-1, 13,000 local authority homes were built; last year it was just 100. In 1994-5, over 31,000 Housing Association homes were built; last year it was less than 17,000. An NAO study last December found that out of a survey of 50 local authorities in areas of high housing demand, only 1 considered it would be able to meet the need for new social rented housing over the next 3 years, mainly because of insufficient funding. The result has been a doubling of the number of homeless families in temporary accommodation, particularly in the South-East.

It invites the question whether the enormous build-up in investment in health and education hasn’t now gone so far as to crowd out the much more modest build-up in social house-building which would alleviate far more poverty. In particular I would question whether it is really justified for the Government to spend £5bn on building 200 Academies rather than 50,000 additional new homes in the social rented sector in areas of greatest need.

The way out of this impasse is surely clear. Council tenants should have the right to choice, as the Government constantly advocates, and if they reject the 3 opt-outs promoted by ODPM, they should not be penalised by losing their entitlement to repairs and improvements funding. To deny them this if they do not vote the ‘right’ way is simply ideological blackmail. For if Government has extra money for authorities who set up ALMOs, they could equally give the money direct to the local authority if that is what the tenants want.

No extra money would be needed for this policy, merely a change of policy. If the national Housing Revenue Account were ring-fenced, the huge sums annually drained off for other purposes would be retained for investment in Council housing. Ending transfers would save Government the cost of writing off Council debts to make the sale attractive. There would also be a saving on Housing Benefit bills since higher Housing Association rents cost the Treasury more. Receipts from the right-to-buy sales of Council housing, which have so far yielded £45bn, would be recycled in full into more and better Council housing. Gap funding schemes to subsidise transfers into the private sector, on which the Government is spending £180m, would be withdrawn.

All this money would be more than enough to fund an ‘investment allowance’ for Councils to bring their properties up to modern standards and to begin to jack up the social house-building programme to meet today’s desperate shortages. When that is what 3 million existing Council tenants demand, not to mention 1.5 million households on Council waiting lists, Government would be wise to listen.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:43 AM | Permalink

In their Energy White Paper of February 2003the Government concluded that the looming energy gap – as the old nuclear power plants are closed down, reducing nuclear-generated electricity from 19% now to 7% by 2020 – should be met by a combination of a major expansion of renewables (windpower, biomass, wave and tidal power, solar power) plus much enhanced energy conservation. Tony Blair has now clearly resiled on this. But he is wrong.

First, nuclear is more expensive. The Government’s own expert Performance and Innovation Unit calculated that by 2020 offshore and onshore wind could generate electricity at 1.5-2.5p/kWh and 2-3p/kWh respectively, but nuclear would be significantly more expensive at 3-4p/kWh. And taxpayers are already saddled with the costs of decommissioning existing nuclear plant which the Government itself has estimated at a staggering £70,000 millions, equivalent to some 6% of our entire GDP. Given that the nuclear industry has thus generated the biggest losses of any industry in history, is it sane or rational to re-invest in it further?

The nuclear industry’s answer to all this is that the new AP1000 series reactor would be cheaper. But not a single prototype has been built or operated anywhere in the world. So how do they know? But the reason they say it will be cheaper is that they propose to build new nuclear power stations without a containment shield (as at Chernobyl) and to build them close to population centres, to save transmission costs. But is it rational to try to cut costs at the expense of safety?

Second, nuclear generates colossal amounts of highly toxic waste which nobody knows how to dispose of safely. We already have 10,000 tonnes of intermediate and high-level waste stored around the country, and even with no new nuclear build DTI has estimated that as a result of necessary future decommissioning and waste management this will rise 50-fold to half a million tonnes by 2100. Is it really sensible to generate huge additional heaps of extremely dangerous waste, which remains lethal for tens of thousands of years, until we have found a safe method of long-term disposal of the giant piles we already have?

Third, after 9/11, nuclear plants represent the biggest risk of terrorist attack, and the consequences of any such action could be dire. A recent US study estimated that an attack on a nuclear reactor could cause 44,000 immediate deaths, with 500,000 afflicted by long-term illnesses including cancers.

Fourth, more generally, the health effects of nuclear energy are disturbing. As Environment Minister I set up an advisory Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters (CERRIE) to look into the large amount of evidence that releasing radioactivity into the environment may be far more dangerous than was previously thought. In the 20 years since the Chernobyl disaster spread fallout round the globe, hundreds of studies have shown increased rates of many diseases. These range from cancer and leukaemia, through congenital deformity to general life-shortening. They are particularly apparent in areas near Chernobyl, but are also seen in northern Sweden, where cancer increased by at least 30% in the years up to 1996. Within months of the accident, leukaemia diagnosed in infants less than a year old increased sharply in several European countries and even in the USA. The nuclear industry’s favourite explanation for this is that leukaemia is caused by (however absurd it may seem) population mixing! But population mixing cannot affect unborn children. Obviously it was caused by radioactivity.

But even if there are these enormous downsides to nuclear, is nuclear energy nevertheless still necessary to keep the lights on? It clearly isn’t. Even the DTI, traditionally very pro-nuclear, has predicted that renewable energy technologies could cost-effectively provide one-third of our electricity requirements by 2025, far more than is necessary to fill the gap left by nuclear. We need nuclear like a hole in the head.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:08 AM | Permalink