Energy Prices Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Monday 24th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading. I did listen to the Minister’s opening speech and I had made my views clear in an earlier briefing. My views sync very closely with those of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. Quite honestly, this Government are out of control—we have known that for months, if not years—and it is time they understood they are not acting in a democratic manner. This is a “something must be done” Bill, and I understand why something must be done. However, it has so little detail, and the Government are expecting us to take this on trust. I do not trust the Government, and so there is a big problem here for me.

There are two big issues. First, these energy price schemes will make the difference between people being able to pay their bills or not pay their bills, and whether they can feed themselves, clothe their kids and that sort of thing. We have to be sure of all this detail. The Government are proposing to fill in about 90% of the Bill’s details at a later date, and they expect us to just wave it through. We cannot know the impact of this Bill on ordinary people.

Secondly, the Government have been determined to protect the profits of oil and gas companies, which we all know is a piece of idiocy when we look at the climate emergency. That profit will probably be reinvested in creating more opportunities for the oil and gas industry. The Government take a different approach to renewables, and this will cause a long-term disruption to renewable development. I would argue that investors will be encouraged to invest more in dirty oil and gas, rather than in clean renewables. That is a huge bailout for all those stranded carbon assets, and seems to me to be a completely illogical way to move forward.

I sense that the Government might mean well—actually, I am being too generous. I understand that something must be done, but this is not it. I want the Minister to explain those two issues. Will people be able to pay their bills? Will this cause more investment in dirty oil and gas?

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 27, 31, 34 and 40. What I have to say is very much in line with the speeches that have already taken place and I will not detain the House for long, except to make this point again. We understand the urgency of the Bill, for the health of households and their heat and energy over the next winter, and that of businesses as well, but there is a lot else included in this Bill that need not be rushed through in the same way.

I turn to Amendment 27. On reading the Bill, I was quite shocked—the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, forensically went through this in principle—that it says on page 21, in Clause 22 (4)(a), that these directions “must be in writing”. These are key bits of government policy, where a Secretary of State or a person who is subject to directions under this clause—we do not even know who it might be—is able to just write what should happen. Our own amendment would substitute that with

“made by regulations subject to the affirmative procedure”.

Amendments 31 and 34, with Amendment 34 relating to Northern Ireland—it is great to see the noble Lord, Lord Rogan, here following his contribution during the Second Reading—would remove the powers of sub-delegation.

Amendment 40 is around the sunset clause, which again the Opposition has, quite rightly, majored on. Here, we have put down a two-year limit.

Clearly, the Bill goes way beyond the authority given to the Government and the Secretary of State, without reference to Parliament. Some of these amendments must be voted on for the Bill to be put right and sent back to the House of Commons.

Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Monday 5th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, and although we do not always agree on absolutely everything, I reckon that I agree with about 99.5% of her speech.

First, I declare my interest as chair and director of Aldustria Ltd, an energy storage company; I will try to avoid too much discussion of that area. On these amendments, I very much thank the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, for having opened our debate today. I very much agree with the principle of what the Opposition Front Bench is trying to achieve here. What this Bill does not have—the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, put it very well indeed—is great focus or coherence. It would be good to start trying to improve that through a type of preamble that puts context, including strategic context, at the beginning of the Bill. I hope that we can refine that more on Report; it may not be perfect, but perhaps we can find a way of doing that between us.

I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about the pricing of electricity and how that works. As he says, our European colleagues are looking at that very strongly now. There must be a better way of doing this; it cannot make sense to the public that we charge and price our main energy sources on the marginal cost of the last producer. Clearly, that does not make sense, and it does not do the reputation of the fossil fuel industry any good either. Yes, they might use their money to give back to shareholders—hopefully they will use it for different types of investment and diversification—but it besmirches the whole sector, and we need to find a way around that.

Where I would disagree very strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is around trying to game or look at alternative dates for net zero. It seems to me that in September 1939 the Cabinet probably did not look at whether to declare war on Germany this month or two years later or four years later. We may criticise Neville Chamberlain for all sorts of things in retrospect, but I guess that is not one of them. It was an absolute threat to our future security, and we made a decision. If we think of the costs to this country, and to us and consumers, of our right stand on Ukraine, I guess that we have not done those calculations either—because we know that Putin’s war has to fail and that, for European security and our long-term security, we in the western world need to pursue the tactics that we have.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for her amendments, particularly in mentioning rural aspects of oil—my own household is on oil, and we are not covered by a price cap—and in particular business. In all the media coverage that we have had on this very real energy crisis over the past months, it is funny how business has very much taken second place to households and consumers. Clearly, households and consumers are ultimately the most important, but business is completely fundamental to our economic performance and being able to solve this crisis in the long term.

I am not absolutely sure about energy from waste plants. Clearly, it does not make sense to export it, but the real challenge there is in starting to raise recycling again, or even AD in terms of other parts of household waste. I was so impressed by the forensic look by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, at investment need and the scale of the challenge, and also at how we need to measure that and put proper planning into how we meet it.

The one other area that I would like to mention comes back to 2013 and the then Energy Bill, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. At that time, one big thing that we discussed was the energy trilemma of security, cost and decarbonisation. The noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, brought that back up again. But what this crisis, and the almost a decade between these two Bills, has shown, is that it is no longer a trilemma—they all work in exactly the same direction. Renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels, as we know—it is why we have the huge price increases that we do. Our security is reinforced by having much more renewable generation on our own seas and our own land—and, as a result, we have lower costs and a decarbonised energy system as well. We have moved on since that time.

We need to have a focus in this Bill, and I support the amendments. We need to move on in this debate, but I am absolutely sure that we will need that coherence when we get to Report.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the whip, the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, has spoiled a lot of my fun today, because I was going to tell the Government exactly what they needed to do if they were going to produce an Energy Bill that deals with the crises that we are facing. We are facing three immense crises at the moment, and one of them is, of course, the climate crisis. There are strong whiffs of climate denialism in your Lordships’ House, which I find absolutely staggering, considering that the science is so very clear on it. However, it is a bit last century, that sort of attitude, so I understand why it might exist here in your Lordships’ House. But we have those crises—the climate emergency, the ecological crisis and the cost of living crisis—and this Energy Bill is so topical. It is exactly the sort of thing that we need to bring forward so that we can deal with all these crises, and I guess make life better for millions of people in Britain and the rest of the world.

I agree with a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said. He made the point that this does not do the job. Also, I am very sympathetic to Labour’s initial amendments. I understand why they are in there, but it reads a lot more like the sort of issues that a Labour Government would bring forward—hopefully not too long in the future.

I am concerned that our time is going to be wasted on this Bill, because we have a new Prime Minister—a climate-wrecking ideologue who will make it incredibly difficult for us to get the sort of issues into this Bill that we need. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, and other noble Lords also mentioned nuclear. We have to get real on the fact that nuclear is not the answer. Nuclear power stations take a long time to come online. There will be all sorts of problems even getting them started, so they are not the answer. We have to think faster than that; they just will not work.

Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my friend opposite, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I sort of see the point in her amendment; I had better not say that I support it, because I would probably get rude emails from the Green Party saying it has not been party policy, but obviously I would be happy to discuss it. On the issue of not being invited to meet the Minister, the Greens still have not been invited to meet him, and I cannot decide whether that is because we completely trust the Minister to understand everything that we are saying; I cannot think of any other option. We obviously trust the Minister completely to take our point of view back to Defra.

My amendment is on something that I care about very deeply, namely fracking. I have tabled it with a view to banning it once and for all. In doing so, I want to celebrate all the hard work of campaigners and activists across the country who delivered massive opposition against this dirty and dangerous polluting industry, often in the face of poor policy decisions by the Government and the fracking industry’s might-is-right attempts to quash them. In particular, I applaud the Preston New Road campaign in Lancashire. It was a thousand days of protest by the anti-fracking Nanas, a bunch of mainly older women led by Tina Rothery. They fought so hard in the face of well-financed and rather nasty, threatening behaviour by Cuadrilla.

In the 2019 general election, it was announced that we had won on this particular issue. The Conservatives, along with every other political party in Parliament, declared themselves to be against fracking. However, we in the UK are still supporting fracking in Argentina, which means we are offshoring the horrid stuff, so we do not have to count all the carbon emissions and so on, and Namibia is being exploited by a Canadian company. Ireland called for an international ban this year, and calls are now growing for an Irish-led global ban on fracking. I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether that is something that the Government might support.

Here in the UK, there are still legal loopholes that could allow fracking to be forced on communities. I am most worried that, even if the Secretary of State did reject planning permission for fracking, this could be overturned in a judicial review. The Government may have changed their policy to be against fracking but, if this conflicts with the law in a judicial review, their policy will be ruled unlawful. For this reason, we must change the law to reflect what is now common agreement: that fracking is banned in the UK. I hope that the Minister will agree.

[Lord Teverson (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and her strong advocacy, which I very much respect. I am going to speak to Amendment 280, to which I was very pleased to put my name, alongside that of its proponent, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. As the noble Baroness said, this is an area that the EU Environment Sub-Committee looked at. When we started looking into the areas of research, planning and the various impacts of wind farms, we found far more questions than answers. I look forward to the Minister coming back in this area.

I clearly welcome the renewable energy programme that we have. Obviously, offshore wind—whether it be floating or on the seabed—is going to be a very major part of that. However, it is important to make sure that that programme has the least negative impact on the environment, whether it be all the marine areas that the noble Baroness talked about, or birdlife—seabirds and migratory birds as well. There is not enough research in this area; there ought to be research for the future shared among all the countries around both the North Sea and the Celtic Sea, so that we can make sure that we locate turbines in the most favourable way to protect—and, in some areas, to encourage—environmental life at marine level. As the noble Baroness said, there might be positives in this area as well.

I want to ask the Minister about the fora that we deal with now on energy in the North Sea. We have been excluded—I think unreasonably—from one of the main European ones, which was not an EU institution, and included us in the past. However, I understand that there is a new forum that we might be involved in where these discussions are taking place. This is important because, clearly, the locations of wind farms in the North Sea and, in future, the Celtic Sea should be co-ordinated, if for no other reason than to make sure that as much infrastructure as possible is shared. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how we will ensure, as we start to develop the Celtic Sea as well, that we do not have multiple landing points and multiple cables put down, as has happened in the North Sea. We should have some co-ordination there to minimise damage.

Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Monday 12th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, as some of my amendments are associated with nature recovery network strategies, I once again declare my interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership.

I know the Minister has assured us that the marine environment is included in the Bill. It hardly has a high profile, yet our national waters, including the EEZ, have an area of 885,000 square kilometres, whereas the terrestrial landmass of the United Kingdom is a mere 242,000 square kilometres, so that marine environment is three and a half times larger. My contention is that it is just as important and should receive at least the same amount of interest. Last year we had the Fisheries Act, and the Government made it very clear that that was not a piece of environmental legislation. It dealt with fisheries management plans, but those were not environmental management plans. Indeed, we gave credit that the Fisheries Act had a number of objectives relating to the environment and climate change, but that was not the mission of that piece of legislation—yet nature recovery in our marine area is just as important as in our terrestrial environment.

I was interested to see that one of the Government’s targets is to have good environmental status for our marine environment. In 2019—two years ago—they published an appraisal of progress made on having good environmental status for our marine environment, looking out beyond our territorial waters to our economic zone as well. I am afraid to say that of the 15 areas the government report focuses on, in six we managed not to meet targets at all; in five we made partial progress on those targets; and in four we actually achieved them.

I will take the Committee through some of the areas where good environmental status targets were not achieved: commercial fish, non-commercial fish, benthic habitats, invasive species, marine litter and breeding birds. None of those was achieved. There was some improvement in pelagic habitats, the food web, underwater noise, cetaceans—primarily dolphins, as we know them—and seals. As far as I can see, things such as seagrass, which is hugely important not just for the marine habitat but for carbon capture, were not covered at all in that report.

We have a real crisis and challenge out there in the oceans that surround our island and islands, so that is why I have tabled these amendments. The first one is to ensure that local nature recovery networks include not just the land area but the adjacent territorial waters—that is, out to 12 nautical miles—of those areas. They have to be included in those plans. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said on another marine amendment some days ago, it is not just the fact that they are two different environments; they are connected—literally—so it is important for that reason too that nature recovery networks include marine, littoral and territorial areas.

But it would clearly be unreasonable to ask, say, Sussex or maybe even more so Cornwall to look at its whole EEZ stretching way out into the Atlantic, yet EEZs also require important help in terms of nature recovery out to the 200 nautical mile limit. So, to be practical, I have tabled separate amendments to propose that the Secretary of State should be responsible for creating, producing and revising nature recovery networks for those offshore EEZ areas. Indeed, it would make a lot of sense if they tied up with marine management organisations and marine planning areas, but, again, those plans are not primarily environmental ones. They are mapping and usage ones. They are not primarily environmental plans, but they should come together to do that.

In the other amendment I put down—Amendment 246—I tackle highly protected marine areas. I have to give good credit to the Minister and the Government in this area, because, since I laid down that amendment, at the early stages after Second Reading, the Government have opened a programme and asked for bids for pilots for highly protected marine areas. So there is progress on this already, and, to some degree, this amendment is now redundant—but I would be very keen to hear from the Minister the progress on that and how he sees the timescale in terms of rolling out beyond pilots.

At the moment, we have some 372 marine protected areas around our shores. They cover some 38% of our total waters. That sounds impressive, but the regimes for those marine protected areas are extremely weak in many cases and certainly do not protect the seabed and all the habitats. These highly protected marine areas absolutely have to be done in consultation with the fishing industry and other commercial interests, but it is so important they are rolled out quickly, effectively and as soon as possible. That is why these amendments are important.

In Cornwall, as I have said before, we were lucky enough to have one of the pilots for the nature recovery networks. When we started work on that, Defra may not have been “against” it—that is perhaps too strong a word—but it did not see marine as being included in that pilot strategy. We went ahead and included it anyway, because you cannot talk about the environment of the far south-west peninsula without including marine; it is just impossible. The Minister could hopefully make my amendments redundant—not the EEZ ones, but these amendments—by confirming that it is now government policy that nature recovery networks, when it is appropriate and there is an adjacent ocean or territorial waters, should be included within those nature recovery network strategies. That is my clear message and question. I beg to move.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, with all his expertise. The Government bring legislation to this House so that we can help them improve it—so the expertise in your Lordships’ House can be of benefit to the Government and of course the nation. So I really think that, if the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, were not a Lord already, he would deserve some future honour for all his hard work in contributing to our work here and to the Government. He has highlighted another example of how this Bill has passed a suite of legislative measures without reference to water—to territorial waters, to the sea.

We looked at agriculture and fisheries: they do not tie together in any coherent way, and I do not understand how we can keep on passing legislation that does not tie up. Without these amendments, we are at risk of seeing our seas and fisheries as being separate from the rest of our environment and all our ecological activities. This sort of silo thinking would undermine the realities of the inseparable ecosystems and natural systems. I would be particularly concerned and upset if an upland authority had a nature recovery strategy that failed to take into account what was happening to its downstream neighbours and, ultimately, to the seas where the watercourses will end up. An Environment Bill that allows for that eventuality is fundamentally inadequate and incoherent, with no basic understanding of the environment.

I am sure the Minister will take time over the Summer Recess to ensure that this Bill fits with the Agriculture Act and the Fisheries Act. I am sure that is going to be a priority, so these two important ecosystems can be integrated into the mechanics of this Environment Bill. The alternative is that, inevitably, in a few years’ time, the Government of the day will have to bring in new legislation to try to patch up these incoherencies, with perhaps a decade of lost opportunity to heal the environment in that time. It is much better that we work together now to get it right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I owe the Committee an apology, as I tried to change this amendment from one group to another—the first group we did today—but then I managed to de-group it totally, so it is my fault that noble Lords are all still here. I apologise for that.

This is a serious issue. It is often said that we know less about our oceans than we do about the surface of Mars. I do not know whether that is completely true, but there is certainly a strong element of truth about it. We lack information about the ecology, biodiversity, quantity and types of species there are in our waters. Yet, unlike Mars, which I think has at least three rovers trundling slowly over its surface at the moment, we have thousands of fishing vessels sampling the ecology of our oceans every day.

I was very interested to receive communications from the Shetland Fishermen’s Association a few days ago. I know that Shetland is clearly in Scotland, although it sometimes sees itself as independent of it, and that this is an English Bill, but I will take this as an example because one of the things it is complaining about is the data on fish coming from ICES—the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. We all know ICES; it is the key data provider for us and the European Union in setting quotas, TACs and that whole area. To quote Simon Collins, executive officer of the Shetland Fishermen’s Association, on the ICES recommendations about changes of TACs in the North Sea and off the west coast:

“These numbers bear no relation to what our members are seeing out on the fishing grounds every day … With such wild swings in both directions a regular occurrence in recent years, it is clear that ICES needs to take a good hard look at the process and consider whether its modelling is still relevant.”


I have really good news for the Shetland fishermen: using remote electronic monitoring with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and very cheap technology, we can have live data of what is in the ocean, what is being caught and what is discarded. We can really firm up on the data on our marine environment. It has probably escaped the Minister’s notice that I put down a similar amendment with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, to the Fisheries Bill—or he has perhaps forgotten. One of the things which we emphasised there was not the control aspect of fisheries regulation, but the fact that this provided plentiful hard data about fisheries, the marine environment and everything that happens to be caught. That is why I brought this amendment back into this Bill, because it is equally—if not more—an environmental issue as much as a fisheries management one. That is why this amendment is important.

Following Royal Assent to the Fisheries Act, I was delighted that Defra went out and undertook two consultations around remote electronic monitoring. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what the responses were, and when the Government are going to move those forward. I congratulate them on moving this process further forward. It is the way to sustain fisheries stocks, and it is the way, more importantly, to be clear and have hard data rather than the opaque and fuzzy data which we have on our fisheries at the moment, and our marine biodiversity and ecology more broadly. Again, here we can actually lead, and in such a way that all those nations that want to enter with their fishing vessels into our EEZ and our waters can be told, “You must do the same thing”. For those foreign vessels, most of them from the European Union, but also Norway and other Nordic islands, we can actually start the process, and have others start it as well.

This is a truly important way of moving forward. I welcome the fact that the Government took on these consultations. It would be a huge shame if they got no further. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s plans are for remote electronic monitoring. With this technology, we can really understand what is going on in our oceans. I beg to move.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for tabling this amendment, which I have signed. It is the latest move in his long and valuable campaign for the adoption of remote electronic monitoring of fishing vessels. I do not blame him at all for our being here late at night; I blame the Government. If they had written a better Bill, it would not have attracted 300 amendments and we would not still be here after seven days, with an eighth day in prospect.

We discussed remote electronic monitoring when considering the Fisheries Bill, and your Lordships were able to get the Minister to put a firm commitment in support of it on the record. The noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, stated:

“The Government are clear that we will be consulting on increasing the use of REM in the first half of 2021, with implementation following that. I am not in a position to give a precise date today for when this will be implemented, but I can absolutely say—and I want to put this on the record—that the Government are absolutely seized of the importance of REM.”—[Official Report, 12/11/20; col. 1174.]


That is great, isn’t it? We could all be confident that this would go in the Bill.

Unfortunately, things do not seem to be progressing particularly quickly. The latest update I could find on the GOV.UK website, from 7 May, says:

“We’ve considered all the submissions and will continue to use the evidence provided to inform further thinking on the use of remote electronic monitoring in England. We’ll engage more with stakeholders in the near future around the topics that were highlighted in this call for evidence.”


This language does not reflect the previous enthusiasm of the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, so can the Minister here today please confirm that the Government remain

“absolutely seized of the importance of REM”?

Can he please give details of the Government’s thinking that has been informed by the consultation? It would be wonderful to know how long it will be before this thinking turns into action. Given the long lead-in times for retrofitting all the existing fishing vessels, the sooner the Government can move forward on this and articulate a specific monitoring scheme, the better. We need to embrace this technology as a matter of urgency. If the Government continue to drag their feet, it would seem that the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, has been left hanging out to dry.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, for those of us who have spent decades advocating for human society to work with instead of against nature, the specific references to agroecology in these amendments represent a great success. These amendments would each expand the principles of agroecology and ensure that ecological outcomes were delivered.

In particular, I have attached my name to Amendment 7 from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, which would specifically support pasture-fed livestock systems and the improvement of landscapes and biodiversity linked to pastureland. This is all about a farming and ecosystem format that can help to move us towards some sort of food security.

Food security will be an absolutely huge challenge. Anybody who watched David Attenborough’s programme on Sunday will be aware that he mentioned several times that biodiversity is falling. We need biodiversity drastically. If we do not have it, growing food will become harder and harder. We are at a point in the world where some of it is burning, some is melting and neither of those things is good for the human race.

In addition, the world has not even fully met any of the 20 biodiversity targets set a decade ago by Governments globally. Nature protection efforts have been ineffective. We already have 1 degree of warming and are heading towards 3 degrees of warming. It will be a world that we simply will not recognise.

I am delighted to support Amendment 16 from the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and Amendment 11 from the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. Amendment 16 would ensure that agroecology was truly nature friendly. Amendment 11 would support farming opportunities for new entrants and young farmers, ensuring a healthy supply of innovative and motivated farmers ready to take on the challenges and opportunities of greening our farming and land management.

I hope that in his response the Minister will set out specific and deliverable plans for each of these issues.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 8, 21 and 23. I say again that I am very pleased that the Government have added a definition of the word “agroecology” to the Bill. That is a great step forward. I not only thank the Government but congratulate them on recognising this type of agriculture as something that is not just from the past—although it looks to the past for many of its methods and ethics—but is an important way to move forward. The motive of the amendments I have put forward—and I thank the noble Earls, Lord Dundee and Lord Caithness, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for their support—is to reinforce that message within the Bill.

The area that is not mentioned is agroforestry, which is equivalent. This is not the forestry that the Forestry Commission is into—not that I have anything against that generally—but is around integrating forestry into whole-farm management. Benefits from water management include biodiversity, crops from those trees, silviculture and even energy. So the motive of these amendments is to up a style of whole-farm management that looks to the future and entirely fulfils the reason for having ELMS and this new funding structure. I very much hope that the Government, having taken this one step forward, will be able to take it further forward as well.

My Amendment 21 adds to the word “agroecology” at the top of page 3 of the Bill, which states that

“‘better understanding of the environment’ includes better understanding of agroecology”.

I am just suggesting that we add “and agroforestry” to the Bill. I am sure that that is something the Government would wish to promote in the new financing structures and I can see no reason why it would change the meaning of the Bill in any way. If the Minister could do that, I would be hugely grateful to him, knowing of his commitment to the future of farming and ways of farming that promote biodiversity.

That biodiversity and quantum of nature, which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, just mentioned, are crucial to how ELMS rolls out. I will be talking about this later, so I will not say more about it now, but biodiversity is something that agroecology and agroforestry can promote to achieve what the Government want.

Feed-in Tariffs (Closure, etc.) Order 2018

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Monday 4th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, my regret Motion is against the Government’s decision to scrap the feed-in and export tariffs for people who install small-scale renewable energy systems in their homes. I should declare that I have already installed solar panels on my house and am therefore not affected by this measure.

I feel so strongly that it is a bad thing to do that I wanted to table a humble address, but the clerks advised me that I would create a constitutional crisis—and we probably have enough of those going on already. I want to emphasise that the word “regret” does not come anywhere close to my feelings on this issue. The Government have behaved with economic illiteracy and I hope that, towards the end of the debate, I will hear from the Minister that they will pause in the scrapping of the tariff until they have at least determined the level and the timing on the export tariff.

The Feed-in Tariffs (Closure, etc.) Order, currently before this House, will cause enormous damage to our fledgling green economy and wreck our already too slow attempts to deal with climate change. Over the past decade, solar panels have steadily been installed on rooftops around the country. People have saved huge amounts of money on their energy bills and made a significant reduction in their personal impact on the planet. Some local authorities, following the lead of Kirklees Green councillor Andrew Cooper, have been able to use the stability of the feed-in tariff to finance mass deployment of solar panels for some of the poorest residents in their boroughs. In the process, they have created thousands of jobs in a high-skilled, well-paid industry.

It is now undeniable that the world is in a state of climate emergency. Scientists have made it clear that we now have less than 12 years to make massive changes if we are to have any hope of avoiding runaway climate change. The switch away from fossil fuels to renewables is one of the essential changes that we have to make.

The Government’s response is that they have steadily cut away at the feed-in tariff scheme and have now finally scrapped it altogether. This is, according to the Government’s impact assessment, so that we can reduce people’s energy bills by £1 per year—I repeat, £1 per year. The Government suggest that this was the plan all along, and that this is just another step towards a market-based system of renewable energy that must compete cost-for-cost with other sources of energy. That sounds perfectly reasonable—except that it is a fallacy that requires us to pretend that other forms of energy do not receive huge subsidies from the taxpayer, society and the environment. The European Commission has recently published research that shows that the UK has the highest level of fossil fuel subsidies in the EU, and more subsidies for fossil fuels than for renewables. That is shameful and certainly not fair—as well as poor economics.

Coal and oil are not new sources of energy, but they still receive enormous tax breaks to keep them in business. Nuclear energy is being paid double the going rate with government price guarantees, despite the fact that it will take decades for new nuclear power stations to be built, and despite the fact that nuclear has lost all credibility with a large proportion of the nation. Fracking, a whole new source of carbon emissions, seems to be granted new tax breaks in every Budget Statement made by the Government.

There is not a single source of energy that is not heavily subsidised—apart from renewables. Why are renewables held to a higher standard as the only energy source that needs to become financially self-sufficient, in a way that would cripple fossil fuels and nuclear power? If the Government want subsidy-free energy, at least create a level playing field and remove the nuclear and fossil fuel subsidies. Perhaps the Minister will explain to the House why renewables are singled out while the Government continue to create favourable tax incentives, easy planning rules and a strong policy commitment for the polluting energy sources. The distortionary effect of all this is enormous—a government-backed guarantee that we will be tied into fossil fuels for decades longer than the planet can handle.

Coming back to the statutory instrument and its justification, the Government are suggesting that this is just a stepping stone between the old system of support and a new system, a “smart export guarantee”, which will be based around new technology and market innovation. Again, it sounds sensible, but none of that new system exists and there is not yet a market for domestically produced green energy. The Government are doing absolutely nothing to ensure that this changes.

The stark reality is that the Government are throwing the domestic renewable industry off a cliff, with the vague promise that an ambitious new system might appear in time to save it. Plus we have no idea of the rate at which this energy will be valued. Can the Minister let us know whether there is any conclusion on that? Why have the Government decided that for an indeterminate amount of time new domestic renewable installations will have no option but to export the energy they produce to the national grid absolutely free? How that can be considered acceptable to anyone is beyond me. It is state theft and cannot be justified.

If the Government had a policy that resulted in the oil and gas industry producing for free, people would complain that we had turned into a communist country. For some reason, the exact same thing is happening with solar and wind power and it is just fine.

It is true that the renewables industry has made incredible progress in bringing down its costs and that we are approaching a point where it will be able to outcompete fossil fuels on its own. However, it is plain wrong to single renewables out as being the only energy source that should not get any subsidies or tax breaks. We need to do the opposite of this; we should be spending billions of pounds on a green new deal to create a million climate jobs and transform our economy.

Will the Minister explain to this House why the Government are not doing all they can to take climate change seriously? I ask her please not to do a Claire Perry and say how we are world leaders, that we are doing on best on emissions and that sort of thing, when we do not even count all our emissions—for example, we do not count aviation and shipping. For all these reasons, I beg to move.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for raising this issue and bringing it to the Floor of the House. I commend her passion about the subject; it is completely justified. We should remember that feed-in tariffs have been amazingly successful. As we see from the Explanatory Memorandum and the commentary from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, some 800,000 feed-in tariffs have been applied over the period in which they have been in force. One of the great things about them is that they democratise the fight against climate change. Whether they are microschemes or smaller schemes, they allow households, communities, small groups and small businesses to participate in providing renewable energy to the energy system and decarbonising our economy.

I am proud to say that FiTs came in in 2010 and were implemented by the coalition Government as part of the work of the previous Labour Government. The announcement that they would end came in 2015—a dreadful year for climate change—when the Conservative majority Government took over and we had announcements about this, the end of carbon capture and storage experiments, the end of zero-carbon homes and many other examples of decarbonisation and “all that green crap” disappearing from our legislation and our climate change targets.

As was shown during the coalition period, Liberal Democrats agree as much as anybody else that renewables and the public money put into them need to provide value for money. I have no problem with tariffs being brought down to reflect cost levels, as long as that is done in a smooth way that industry can predict, whereby the rate of return remains sensible for investors, whether they are firms or households.

What we have here is the stopping of the system altogether. Once again, it is an example of the green vandalism we have seen so much of in renewables, affecting jobs and green industry. There has been a failure to provide continuity of employment and skills, and no growth of private-sector green businesses. This secondary legislation is an example of that. We have taken away one of the ways in which communities, households and small businesses can participate, resulting in another body blow to the small-scale renewables industry.

The noble Baroness referred to the export tariff. I find it unfathomable. Claire Perry, the Minister for climate change, said that there will be export payments, but there was a major gap between that and the original announcement of this government policy. That meant the industry had a major shock, and only later was that repaired by some very vague references. The consultation period has not ended. We come to the end of FiTs on 31 March, and we are bound to have a gap during which the industry will not know what is happening. I do not know what went through BEIS’s mind as a department. From 1 April—very appropriately—consumers were going to give free energy to major energy companies. This was one of the greatest ironies and a huge political mistake. Yes, the department has decided to change that, but very late and leaving a gap. We still do not know what the change is.

International Solar Alliance: Framework Agreement

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Wednesday 24th October 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I feel that I should do something that Ken Livingstone told me never to do, which is to start with an apology. I feel the Minister might not have expected to deal with this particular issue; I gather it is quite unusual to table a debate on a treaty like this. I thank the Government Whips for allowing this to happen; I know we are always short of parliamentary time, so I am very grateful to have this opportunity.

I felt compelled to bring this debate when I saw the Government’s accompanying notes to the International Solar Alliance Treaty. At first I was excited; it looked like a very positive step forward. However, that excitement gave way to disappointment and now I almost feel despair. It was bad enough getting the UN report this month about having only 12 years to make a difference to our future as humanity, and I feel the Government are not acting in the best interests of this country or indeed globally.

My excitement came from the ambitions of the International Solar Alliance. It is an international agreement, formed at the United Nations by treaty between 121 states. Importantly, the alliance is being led by India, which makes it the first large-scale climate initiative to be led by a developing country. Together the signatories seek to raise $1 trillion US dollars for investment in solar power, and by 2030 the treaty aims to provide affordable green energy to a billion people who do not currently have any electricity. These are lofty goals and a considerable source of excitement. They demonstrate an understanding that green investment gives the opportunity to significantly increase the living standards of the world’s poorest while protecting the ecological resources on which all our livelihoods depend. So far, all good.

However, my excitement gave way to disappointment when I read the Government’s Explanatory Memorandum to the treaty, written by the Secretary of State for International Development. Those notes celebrate the UK’s involvement in the alliance but then nakedly expose the true lack of ambition behind our involvement. It is stressed that our membership,

“places no legal or policy requirements on the UK”,

and that,

“initial UK ISA collaboration will be through existing UK government funded programmes”.

The focus is placed on developing our bilateral relationship with India, with this being a nice green gesture to move that along. It seems to me that the largest contribution that our Government will be making is creating new commercial opportunities and investment opportunities for UK business. My conclusion from the Explanatory Memorandum is that we are signing up to yet another impressive-sounding green initiative but then doing absolutely nothing of substance. I find this deeply disappointing and a continuation of this Government’s “promise big; deliver disaster” approach to green issues.

My disappointment then gave rise to despair when the International Panel on Climate Change published its report this month. These are the world’s leading climate scientists, who have been asked to give an authoritative review of the world’s climate future. It makes grim reading and, frankly, blows the ambitions of the International Solar Alliance out of the water. The IPCC report sets out the devastating scientific consequences of what will happen if global temperatures rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which at current rates is likely to occur between 2030 and 2050, well within the lifetime of our children and grandchildren. The report makes clear that limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees will expose 10 million fewer people to the impacts of rising sea levels, particularly in small island nations such as the British Overseas Territories. They are why we are involved in the alliance in the first place; we would not normally merit being included, but we are because of those territories.

Fish stocks, which Brexit has suddenly got so many people passionate about, will be devastated if temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees. Other risks of climate change, such as drought, crop failures and disease, will all be lessened by keeping temperature changes below that amount. Even someone like me, who has spent most of my life warning about the dangers of climate change, was deeply depressed to see all this written in one place and to be reminded of the rate at which we are hurtling towards climate breakdown. The IPCC report tells us that even the best-case scenario is bad. A 1.5 degree change will still wipe out 70% to 90% of the world’s coral reefs and lead to the displacement of millions of climate refugees. Importantly, though, the panel tells us that that limit is achievable with the right mix of political will, financial resourcing and international co-operation.

This is where the International Solar Alliance, and our Government’s attitude towards it, are really exposed. The ambitious $1 trillion investment by 2030 is pennies when compared to the $2.4 trillion that the IPCC says must be invested in clean energy each and every year to avoid catastrophic climate change. More than 2% of world GDP must be invested in avoiding climate change if we are to keep within safe limits. The report also highlights the importance of tackling global poverty and reducing inequality. Put simply, we cannot save the planet unless we significantly improve the livelihoods of the world’s poorest. When I talk about saving the planet, I do not mean the planet itself because the planet will survive whatever we do to it. What I mean is preserving the ecosphere that we as a human race need to survive.

It is noteworthy that the very reason why we are able to sign up to the International Solar Treaty, whose membership is limited to tropical nations, is because of our territories that lie in the tropics. It is those overseas territories, most of which are small islands and coastal nations, that are most exposed to the risks of climate change.

Before I conclude, I want to stress how much our domestic energy policies are undermining any possibility of showing climate leadership on the world stage. This Government have decimated subsidies and support for domestic solar panels and made new onshore wind power virtually impossible. The 10:10 Climate Campaign says:

“Incredibly, the government is now planning to stop guaranteeing that people will be paid for the surplus energy their solar panels produce. Instead, in effect, the power will be donated for the energy companies to sell on. People installing solar after March next year will be left empty handed. Meanwhile millions of pounds go to fossil fuels. That isn’t just unfair. It’s quite literally daylight robbery—and it’s terrible news for the solar industry”.


We seem to have completely abandoned financing for energy efficiency and insulation schemes. The Green Deal was a failure and nothing ever replaced it, and of course our Government are obsessed with fracking to open up a whole new source of fossil fuels right at the time when we should be locking carbon up in the ground. I do not see how anyone can take us seriously when they see such anti-green policies in the UK.

Those are the reasons why I have called this debate today. I challenge the Government to increase their ambition on the global stage. We really ought to be making green investment the central plank of our international aid and development efforts. I want to give Ministers the opportunity to clarify their dismissive approach in the Explanatory Memorandum and set out a pathway for rapidly increasing our investment in the alliance.

Lastly, I ask the Minister to set out the Government’s analysis and response to the IPCC report, as we are reminded that climate change is the most pressing—and depressing—issue of our time. We all want to avoid climate catastrophe. I beg to move.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest, which will become apparent later, as a trustee of the Green Purposes Company, which holds the green share in the Green Investment Bank.

I welcome this debate. I do not think the noble Baroness should apologise at all because I do not think I would have been fully aware of this treaty if it had not been for this debate. I am going to take a rather different approach but I agree with the vast majority of what she has just said. We probably need Claire Perry from the Commons rather than the Minister here to answer some of these questions, although I am sure he will answer them very adequately.

I thought that this alliance and the agreement itself were good news globally at a time when we have bad news in terms of climate change, with the international consensus rather falling apart in this area. I also welcome the fact that India is the leader in this. I have to say that the history of India in climate change talks internationally has not been great. In fact the country was a blocker of some of the earlier global agreements on climate change—for good reason, in many ways, in that as a developing nation it sees the problem is one that has arisen from industrialised, developed countries and one that we are now throwing back to economies such as India to help us to solve, having been profligate in terms of our emissions in the past. Indeed, as the memorandum states, there are still issues in India with regard to the development of solar through protection in tariffs and in terms of wanting, understandably, to have its own internal solar industry rather than rely, as much as the rest of the world does, on China’s production.

Infrastructure Planning (Radioactive Waste Geological Disposal Facilities) Order 2015

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Wednesday 25th February 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am not Cumbrian and I have absolutely no connection with Cumbria—I live in Southwark—but I support the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, in his request that this order be withdrawn. It is clear that he was speaking from a democratic point of view, which is an incredibly valid thing to be concerned about. The fact that it is Labour legislation does not mean that it has to be used; there is a lot of quite bad legislation still on the books that really ought to be repealed.

There are a few environmental concerns expressed in a report called Rock Solid?, which was produced for Greenpeace specifically for this sort of action. There are concerns that have to be answered and the relative risks and dangers, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, have perhaps not been assessed as stringently as they might have been. For example, copper and steel canisters and overpack containing spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste could corrode more quickly than expected; we do not know. The effects of intense heat generated by radioactive decay and the chemical and physical disturbance due to corrosion, gas generation and biomineralisation could impair the ability of backfill material to trap some radionuclides.

The build-up of gas pressure in the repository, as a result of the corrosion of metals and/or the degradation of organic material, could damage the barriers and force fast routes out through crystalline rock fractures or clay rock pores. There are also poorly understood chemical effects, such as the formation of colloids, which could speed up some of the more radiotoxic elements such as plutonium. Unidentified fractures and faults, or a poor understanding of how water and gas might flow through the ground, could lead to the release of toxic materials into groundwater. These are concerns that cannot be ignored, and the order needs a little more research about whether this is an activity that can be supported with a view to complete public safety. I would argue that it is not, but I look forward to the Minister reassuring us.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I am also not from Cumbria, although I shall have the pleasure of visiting Sellafield in two weeks’ time. I know that it consumes a vast proportion of the Minister’s budget in DECC, and I look forward to that visit.

My question is more one of logic. The Explanatory Memorandum states clearly, as does the legislation itself:

“This Order will bring certain development relating to geological disposal facilities for radioactive waste, and the deep borehole investigations necessary to determine the suitability of potential sites, within the nationally significant infrastructure project (NSIP)”.

I suppose that my question is this: whether one likes it or not—whether one is pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear—there is a certain logic to the idea that a radioactive waste disposal site would come within the decision-making of a major project. This was set up by the previous Government, as my noble friend Lady Miller has pointed out, and taken on by this one. It sort of fits within that. The exploratory deep borehole investigations seem to be a measure on a completely different scale, so I do not understand the logic of having both of those in. The exploration side seems logically to fit far more within the standard local authority planning system. I would be interested to hear a comment from my noble friend about why both these scales of project have been put into this order, rather than just one or the other.

While I am on my feet and we are on nuclear waste, at the beginning of this Parliament we looked at the national policy statement for nuclear power generation, and it has always slightly amused me that a footnote states:

“Geological disposal of higher activity waste from new nuclear power stations is currently programmed to be available from around 2130”,

some 115 years from now. I wondered whether the Government intended to keep their foot on the accelerator on that policy.