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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the Labour leader has set out to exploit division at the top of the coalition about climate change. He says unless politicians act together, then national security could be at risk. In a moment I’ll be speaking to his Shadow Transport Secretary, Mary Creagh. Let me tell you more about what Ed Miliband has said today, he told the Observer newspaper that… “in 2012 we had the second wettest winter on record and this winter is a one in 250 year event. If you keep throwing the dice and keep getting sixes then the dice are loaded. Something is going on.” Well that’s what Mr Miliband said and earlier, the Defence Secretary speaking to me, agreed with that.

PHILIP HAMMOND: Ed Miliband isn’t saying anything new, we have already identified climate change as one of the strategic threats that we have to deal with, we have a Threats and Resilience sub-committee of the National Security Committee that looks at these things regularly and the impact of climate change both domestically and internationally is one of the strategic threats facing Britain.

DM: Now with me is the Shadow Transport Secretary, former Shadow Environment Secretary as well, Mary Creagh. Good to see you Mary. Is your leader politicising this? He’s attacked the Prime Minister about this yet the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, is saying look, we agree with Ed Miliband, yes, climate change is one of the biggest threats to our society.

MARY CREAGH: No, I don't think he’s politicising it at all. I think what Ed’s calling for is the national leadership that we need to sort and tackle climate change together. There was a political consensus in 2008 with the Climate Change Act which he passed when we were in government, only five people voted against but sadly that consensus has fractured over the last four years, David Cameron perhaps in hock to his back benchers. There is an opportunity for Britain here to create the green jobs, a high wage, high still economy. We’ve seen investment in that low energy infrastructure more than halve over the last four years.

DM: So what? Is it more investment or more green taxes? You’ve got to force people to change their behaviour haven’t you?

MARY CREAGH: What business needs is the certainty to invest and there was certainty after the Climate Change Act, what’s happened since then is that there’s been political uncertainty, whether that’s green tariffs, insulation …

DM: Well there are penalties, there are big penalties for being an excessive CO2 emitter, is that the kind of thing that Labour is going to do, clobber high energy companies?

MARY CREAGH: What we want to do is to create the new clean green energy that reduces our dependence on greenhouse gases. We don’t want to put heavy energy users out of business but what we do want to see is a national consensus. This is a threat to our national security, it’s not just an international issue where we could see migrations of people down in sub-Saharan Africa, droughts, those types of things. What we are seeing is the effects of climate change very much brought home to us in our country. You know, we had floods in 2007 both in my constituency and Ed Miliband’s constituency were flooded, over 50,000 homes flooded. That was the wake up call, we invested in those flood defences, when we left government spending was at a higher level on flood defences than it is today.

DM: But you do think, don’t you, in your party that there are plenty of people within the Conservative party who don’t believe in climate change? They’re deniers, that’s what you’re trying to do aren’t you, put them on the spot.

MARY CREAGH: What we saw with David Cameron when he voted for the Climate Change Act and did his trip to the Arctic was him saying, you know, a belief in climate change, the fact that the climate was changing, was part of his irreducible core and I think a lot of people believed that, certainly the environmental groups believe that. What we’ve seen over the last four years is a fragmenting of that consensus. What we need is the leadership politically to get it back, to take the long term action that our country needs to build a resilient infrastructure, to protect people’s homes from the misery of flooding and to get us all on to the low carbon energy that we need.

DM: Can you say about this event with certainty, we’re not scientists are we, that this event, the last eight weeks or so, has been caused by climate change?

MARY CREAGH: Well the chief scientist at the Met Office has said it looks like that is the case and Sir David King who is the government’s own envoy on climate change, also said that these events are more likely. Don’t forget that…

DM: That’s one voice thought, we’ve got Professor Collins today, from the Met Office, haven’t we, saying yes, he believes in climate change, yes climate change is happening but the jet stream altering its course is not part of climate change.

MARY CREAGH: I’m not a scientist …

DM: Neither am I but if you just listen to what the experts say.

MARY CREAGH: It’s not about believing in it, it’s not an act of faith, it’s about listening to what scientists say. The scientific consensus globally is that our planet is warming up and has been warming up over the last … DM: Indeed but this particular event?

MARY CREAGH: This particular event, extreme weather events are made more likely by the fact that the planet is warming. If you think about your own child, if your own child has a temperature of 38, 39 degrees, you get worried. If it gets to 40 degrees you take them to A&E. Tiny rises in an organism can actually be very, very serious but when people say we know that the temperature has risen by 0.7 of a degree, that is already causing some of the changes that we’re seeing.

DM: We talk a lot about resilience, don’t we, building in resilience now to our society. On your brief, on transport, we’re seen how effective that has been with the railway to the south-west, sink holes appearing in major motorways, how much of our budget … are you beginning to cost that as you look at your alternative plan for government, are you beginning to cost that, how much we’re going to have to spend on that resilience? It’s billions upon billions isn’t it?

MARY CREAGH: I was out on Friday with Network Rail looking at the flooded signal boxes and talking to the signalling engineers. We’ve gone back to the Victorian days where you have to manually signal trains through the flooded part of tracks because the signals are down. Obviously they are optimistic they will be able to get something up and running, twice the level of current service by tomorrow but it is going to be very problematic on that western, Great Western line, for some weeks to come, again the problems in Dawlish as well. We need to be looking at how we maintain our infrastructure and Network Rail are working on a resilience plan, looking across the country. This affects Scotland, it affects the north-east where it runs very close to the coast, we’ve lost a railway on the west coast of Wales which hasn’t been as reported as Dawlish but there’s a big railway been taken out there, £30 million to repair that. So the immediate repairs are going to come to somewhere in the region of about £120 million.

DM: Okay, so we’ve got that, then we’ve got the resilience so we’ve got billions more to spend, does it look like a good time to be talking about building another massively expensive line in the form of HS2? Haven’t we got enough to spend on what’s already there?

MARY CREAGH: If you look at the railway disruption, one of the few lines that hasn’t been disrupted is High Speed One which is that line going out to Kent, that’s because it’s a relatively new railway line and it is built with the latest engineering methods, built high and is running fine. So it’s not an either/or, we need to get the capacity on the railway but we obviously also need to repair and replace what’s already there but you cannot rely on a 150 year old railway to keep going forever and eventually there comes a time when you have to build something new because otherwise the costs of just repairing and upgrading it would outstrip what a new one would cost.

DM: You talk about the cause, you’ve done your analysis but we need to know where that money would come from? Is it going to be borrowing or taxes? There’s no two ways about it.

MARY CREAGH: We’ve got to get through the flood recovery effort and see what comes out of that and we have to see what the national infrastructure looks like at the end of that and we have to plan for resilience on that national infrastructure so we have to be looking very carefully. We’ve got our zero based review going on in the Labour party at the moment, we’re looking at every line of government spending and we will do what it takes to make sure that we keep the country running and that we invest in that low carbon infrastructure.

DM: Can I just ask you about that £5000 grant that the Prime Minister announced in his money no object statement about flood relief, £5000 for affected households and businesses. Do you think all the households deserve it or, as your colleague John Mann says, some of it will go to bailing out the rich? Some of those houses particularly along the Thames, well they don’t need £5000 do they?

MARY CREAGH: Well I’m not clear about how many of those homes have insurance and how many didn’t have insurance. When we had the floods in 2007 there was a grant and it was about £200-300 to every householder because what we didn’t want was people to be going to the hands of the loan sharks to buy a new settee or to get bed and breakfast accommodation …

DM: But those who will never go near a loan shark, do they need the money? That’s what John Mann was saying, that some of these houses are owned by millionaires, they’ve had a tax cut, they don’t need £5000.

MARY CREAGH: Well I think that’s a question for afterwards but I think the fact that the government has finally looked and said we’ve got to do something for these people, the other thing is that these people are going to be out of their homes for a very long time. The flood water has not yet gone down in some of these areas and the longer the flood water is in the house, the longer it takes to get back in the house so there are going to be a lot of expenses for those families and a lot of disruption in the months to come.

DM: Shadow Transport Secretary, thank you very much indeed. That’s Mary Creagh there.