Great British Energy Bill

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet. I thank the Minister for his interaction before this Second Reading debate and for the very clear and positive way in which he explained the Bill.

I look forward to both maiden speeches, and it is a particular pleasure for me to speak before the noble Baroness, Lady Beckett. We celebrated last month the fact that it is 50 years since we both entered the House of Commons, in 1974. She, of course, had a much longer career in the House of Commons—and a very prestigious one—than I did; I spent much more time in your Lordships’ House. It is an enormous pleasure to be reunited in the discussion of this important Bill.

I welcome the Bill and the opportunities that it presents in accelerating progress towards the Government’s clean power ambitions and delivering emissions reductions. The objectives the Government have set out for GBE are laudable, but it will be a large, complicated agenda, with a short runway to achieve it.

I do not share the gloom of the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield; I think that there are opportunities here. I certainly do not take the view that this is cost, cost, cost that we should not indulge in. We have all known, from the day that the noble Lord, Lord Stern, reported and from the reports that have gone through ever since, that the costs to this country and the costs to this world of not taking action on climate change are, in 10, 20 and 30 years, far higher than the costs of action.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, that, as currently drafted, the Bill is very broad-brush—a skeleton without much flesh. It is clear that much will depend on the statement of strategic priorities and plans, which will be given by the Secretary of State under Clause 5. I hope that, as the Bill progresses through your Lordships’ House, we will be able to see the draft statement of strategic priorities. We need to have clarity here, as there will undoubtedly be some difficult decisions and difficult trade-offs to make as we progress.

In its 2024 progress report, the Climate Change Committee said that in order to make greater progress in decarbonising energy,

“British-based renewable energy is the cheapest and fastest way … The faster we get off fossil fuels, the more secure we become”.


It is really important that the projects that GB Energy participates in, facilitates or encourages—in the words of the Bill—are those which will be most effective in helping to deliver emissions reductions and the decarbonisation of energy.

At present, it is not clear how projects will be assessed and prioritised. Despite what the Minister said at the beginning, the accountability to Parliament that he suggested was there is, in fact, very thin indeed. It consists of the Secretary of State having a responsibility to publish the reports and accounts submitted to Companies House by GBE; frankly, I do not think that is good enough for such an important issue.

Apart from consulting with the devolved powers, which is welcome, there is no requirement for the Secretary of State to consult with any of our expert bodies, such as the CCC, the NESO or the wider energy sector in producing the statement of strategic priorities.

I have no doubt at all about the intentions of the Minister or the Secretary of State, but I gently ask them to reflect on how they would have approached a Bill as skeletal as this one when they were in Opposition. We need to set up GB Energy to be an organisation that is future-proof, robust and sustainable for the next 50 years, not just the next five.

On its funding, it is welcome that GB Energy is receiving £8.3 billion of government funding in this Parliament. However, the crucial question is how this will be split between the different objectives. There will need to be an assessment of what proportion should go to, for example, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or improvements in energy efficiency, and some clarity on how competing funding options will be prioritised as necessary. While £8.3 billion sounds like a lot of money—and it is—it can be very quickly spent, and there needs to be hard-headed discussions on how it should be spent. It would be helpful if, in his response, the Minister could say a little about how the Government plan to assess and prioritise projects to ensure that they benefit communities and offer best value for money for the taxpayer.

Energy UK has highlighted that it is important that GB Energy avoids conflicts of interest and market distortions by crowding in to areas where the private sector is already active. There is a real issue as to whether, if there are projects which can easily attract private sector funding, it would be appropriate for a government-owned company to compete. To ensure that it delivers additional emissions reductions, it will need to prioritise areas which are more nascent, need greater investment to scale up and will be less likely to happen without government partnership and support. Equally, it would be a real missed opportunity if a large proportion of the £8.3 billion were to find its way to fund projects already receiving significant public subsidy.

There are a few issues that are not mentioned in the Bill. We know that it is crucial we take the public along with us on the journey to net zero. One of the ways to do that is to give the public a real stake in progress. This is precisely what community energy projects do—or, I should say, could do, if there was a proportionate and fair playing field for them to operate in. I am sure that other noble Lords will raise these issues, which were debated at length during the passage of the Energy Bill 2023. I hope the Minister will be able to give some detail tonight about how GB Energy will be able to help remove the blockages that currently exist.

In his opening remarks, the Minister made it clear that the Government hope that GB Energy will bring in its wake new highly skilled jobs across the UK. Again, there is nothing in the Bill to explain how this will be implemented and how we can ensure that the skills of workers in our oil and gas industries are not lost, and that those workers are supported to transition to new green jobs, should they wish to do so. We also need to ensure that younger workers are being skilled-up to join the new green economy.

NESO’s advice to DESNZ highlighted the huge challenge ahead to achieve a clean power system by 2030 and concluded that this is possible with the right interventions, in a way that does not overheat supply chains and can offer

“Opportunities for local growth and good jobs”


and for

“positive impacts on nature, the environment and public health”.

Before I end, I will focus briefly on those positive impacts on nature. As the Minister knows, we are in a double-headed crisis. Climate change and biodiversity loss are two sides of the same coin: one exacerbates the other. In establishing a new company that will control substantial assets, there will be in many cases an opportunity for it not only to reduce emissions but to work to restore our native biodiversity and towards our mandated Environment Act targets—for example, by incorporating nature-based solutions and habitat restoration in the building of renewable infrastructure. Again, I am sure that is an issue which other noble Lords will wish to debate during the passage of the Bill.

The Bill and the creation of GB Energy offer real opportunity to move forward on the aspiration of achieving a zero-carbon grid, freeing us from the volatility and unpredictability of fossil fuel prices. I look forward to working with other noble Lords to ensure that, when we return the Bill to the Commons, it will establish an organisation that is effective, transparent and accountable, and equipped to take on the challenges it will undoubtedly face.

King’s Speech

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet. It is obviously on topics related to that role that I will mainly speak today, but I hope the House will indulge me on just a couple of sentences on House of Lords reform, as evidently I will not be able to participate in Tuesday’s debate.

I am glad that the Government’s manifesto set out a commitment to a smaller House and to ensuring that those who populate it will be appointed because of their ability and commitment to making a real contribution to our work. The Bill we were promised yesterday will obviously help those commitments by reducing the size of the House and ending a pathway to membership which simply is not acceptable in the 21st century. But when we look at the issue of the contribution which Members make, the effects of that Bill will inevitably make us consider whether some nuance may be needed, and that need to balance objectives will become even more apparent if we look at a hard-stop age limit on membership.

I much welcome the tone of the Leader of the House’s remarks yesterday. I hope that the House will be given an opportunity to work out the best and most effective way to reduce its size further, the need for which I am in no doubt, but without damaging its effectiveness as a scrutinising and revising Chamber or sacrificing expertise and experience. I am tempted to pursue the analogy of babies and bathwater, but in discussing an age limit of 80 that is perhaps not appropriate. What is essential—I hope the new Government will look urgently and seriously at this—is a cap on the overall size of the House and the concomitant reduction of the absolute power of prerogative which currently lies with the Prime Minister. That cap and a statutory appointments commission are, in my view, essential building blocks to ensure an effectively functioning second Chamber in which we can justifiably take pride.

Turning to the substance of today’s debate, I have a list of welcomes: a welcome for the recognition in the gracious Speech of

“the urgency of the global climate challenge and the new … opportunities that can come from leading the development of the technologies of the future”,

and for what has already been announced by the Government in lifting the de facto ban on onshore wind developments, an issue on which cognoscenti of debates on it in this House will know I have been campaigning for many years. I give congratulations on reviving the solar power task force and the much needed co-ordinating mechanism to ensure the achievement of the Government’s 2030 target for clean electricity. Equally, I welcome the legislative proposal to establish Great British Energy and

“to help the country achieve energy independence and unlock investment in energy infrastructure”.

There will be plenty to get our collective teeth into in the forthcoming Session of Parliament, so I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who I congratulate on his speech, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, to the formidable workload outlined. We have worked constructively together in the past. I look forward to continuing to do so and of course, if necessary, keeping their feet to the non-fossil fuel fire. I also want very sincerely to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Swinburne, and the noble Lord, Lord Roborough—who we recognise, from his speech, has tremendous and wide-ranging lived experience in these issues—to their position on the Front Bench, and to express my hope to work constructively with them as well.

It is almost exactly five years since the UK became the first G7 nation to legislate legally binding targets on net zero under the leadership of the then Prime Minister, Theresa May. The impressive progress that this country has made, of which I think we are all proud, would not have been possible without a broad and deep consensus in Parliament, and way beyond it, on the importance of tackling climate change. That consensus has, in the words of the Climate Change Committee’s report published today, “begun to fray”, but there is an opportunity for it to be rebuilt. Of course there will be differences of approach and debate about mechanisms, costs and timescales, but consensus on the seriousness of the issue and the urgency of taking effective action are prerequisites to creating opportunities for growth, for jobs, for cleaner air and rivers, and for global leadership on this most global of issues.

We cannot pretend, as some do, that the UK’s performance on climate change does not matter because it accounts for only a small percentage of global emissions. Half of all global emissions come from countries like us, responsible for less than 3% of the global total. If all those countries took that attitude then, frankly, the world would not make any progress on this issue. Without a sense of urgency at home, we cannot credibly lead from the front in combating international climate change as countries prepare to submit updated plans ahead of COP 30 next year.

We know that we must transition away from fossil fuels and need a clear and transparent plan for that transition which recognises the need to support affected workers and for them to be equipped for the new jobs of the green economy. I hope that the Government will pick up on our discussions from the end of the previous Parliament on continued exploration of taking fuel from the North Sea, and end the wasteful and polluting practice of venting and flaring. I also urge the Government to publish a land use strategy sooner rather than later to underpin the contested decisions that will inevitably need to be made in this area.

As well as building that cross-party approach, the other necessity to our work is urgency. The science is warning us that we are running out of road to make the changes needed to avoid climate tipping points. This Parliament needs to be the Parliament of climate delivery. Globally, we have seen records broken for extreme weather events. The eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2014 and we have just experienced the wettest 18 months ever recorded in England. But recently UK policy has stalled in critical areas, from improving the energy efficiency of people’s homes to readying our national grid for electrification, and to restoring nature and cleaning up our waterways.

Restructuring our economy to tackle climate change will not be straightforward and it will mean balancing off multiple factors. The challenge will be to make sure that, on each of these issues, we have the strategic focus but also the careful analysis to make informed decisions about how best to manage the risks and seize the net-zero opportunities before us. I suspect that the phrase already being used—trade-offs—will be a recurrent motif of debates in this Parliament.

It is really important that, five years out from the scientific and symbolic climate milestone of 2030, we make sure that the next stage of transition will be more visible to people and communities. This will therefore demand a new approach to secure public consent on how we implement it, but if people understand the detail and are engaged in discussion on the trade-offs and the benefits that change can bring locally and nationally, we will be much more likely to win hearts and minds. With renewed leadership and science-led decision-making, we can deliver on the issues that are vital today and will be critical to the legacy we leave for the future.