Cost of Living

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I shall try not to turn this into the Oxford Union but the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, put some direct questions to me and, in responding to the debate, I will also provide some answers to those. His comments about lifestyle change are really quite insulting to the people who are struggling so hard that food banks are having to make up parcels of no-cook food because they simply cannot afford to cook. The noble Lord said that some people around him were investing in their homes. We are talking about the cost-of-living crisis. There are very large communities where very few people have any money at all to maintain their homes, let alone invest in them.

However, I will agree with the noble Lord that we cannot do it all with renewables. Indeed, the powerful and informative speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, covered that very well. The cleanest, greenest energy is the energy we do not have to use. The quality of our housing stock is disastrous, and saving energy is the other side of using renewables.

I will go back to where I was planning to start, which is by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for securing this debate and, as many others have, congratulating him on his extremely good timing. What we are seeing today is pretty well the rest of the country following where the Green Party has led. Back in the autumn of 2021, we called for a payment of £320 to every household—a winter fuel payment to help people through the winter. Voilà: today we have a payment to most households of £350.

As the noble Lord said, a lot of this, effectively, is expected to be paid back. It is a debt. Households enormously laden with debt already are using debt to pay their grocery bills because they simply do not have the money, and the Government are effectively putting more debt on them. There is a very large question to be asked about the process.

I referred to what we were saying in autumn 2021, when we called for a temporary cut in VAT on domestic energy bills. It may have been a Boris Johnson promise in 2018, and Her Majesty’s Opposition, I believe, are now calling for that. Also in autumn 2021, we called for a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, which I understand is also now Labour policy. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, made very clear, it is obviously the time for that windfall tax on oil and gas companies.

Yesterday’s Financial Times had the headline: “Big Oil groups regain swagger with largest profits in years”. In the climate emergency the last thing we need is fossil fuel companies swaggering around the world, using their windfall profits to seek out even more oil and gas fields, building the carbon bubble even further. It is a huge threat to our financial security as well as our fragile, overheated planet. Returning to what the noble Lord, Lord Young, said about fracking, creating a new industry that you are going to have to immediately shut down makes no sense at all—and no, we should not be shipping LNG, but we are doing that because we did not invest in home energy efficiency or renewables.

The Motion refers to the role of the consumer protection regulatory regime in energy markets. For my final period I want to focus on that and in particular on what that regime cannot do. The fact is that, while we rely on gas, we will be at the mercy of world markets, even without the other environmental considerations about using that gas. I will cut down what I say on this, because the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, has already covered it so well, but we are now building homes—people are picking up their keys for them today—that immediately need to be retrofitted, not only for environmental reasons but also so that people can afford to live in them. That is an absolute disgrace and a huge government failure.

There are also renewables. I was talking about oil and gas profits. How much better if people in the more prosperous communities that the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to were able to invest in community energy schemes, putting solar panels and local wind turbines up and fuelling schools, doctors’ surgeries, factories and homes through that? Yet I keep asking the Minister: where is the funding for that and the plan for it that was promised last June? I got a Written Answer, which pointed to a bit of money going to farms. That is the only thing that the noble Lord could point me to.

I also want to look at the structural issue of privatisation. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, said that competition is not working and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, spoke in his introduction about the absolute mess of the privatised utilities. The last figure that I have been able to find is from November—I would be interested if the Minister could update me on this—when the cost of the collapse of those privatised energy companies was £3.2 billion, or £120 for each household. That is the cost of ideology going on to those heavily indebted, struggling households. If we could just run these essential services, such as our energy and water companies, for public good, not private profit, we would take some of the pressure off our heavily indebted households.