Energy Bill

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I am quite happy to take away the noble Lord’s concerns and, I hope, respond to him in writing.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

Perhaps I may raise a tangential point that came to mind when my noble friend Lord Whitty was speaking about interconnectivity. There is a possibility of a large offshore wind farm being built in the Irish Sea. Would there be difference in the contracts related to where the energy was used; for example, whether it went to the Republic or Northern Ireland, then to be shipped to Great Britain, or operated in the other direction? I do not expect an answer just now—I have only just thought of the question—but I hope that when the Minister writes to Members of the Committee she might take a look at that issue.

[Baroness Verma]

Rather than give a brief response to that, I would prefer to give a more detailed one. On international eligibility, I refer noble Lords to the Government’s response of 27 June to the call for evidence on renewables trading. Final decisions will be made at the end of the year and will be set out in a public document.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, I will be brief because a lot of what needed to be said in this debate has been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, and my noble friend Lord O’Neill. However, at some stage we need to focus on fuel poverty issues. I declare an interest as a non-executive director of the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult. I am very conscious that the change in the structure of the market proposed in this legislation is complex. I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, who said that the model is complex and relatively expensive. With my commitment to renewal energy, I know that we are talking in many respects of infant industries and that there will be additional costs. I have no doubt that in the long run we will see energy prices come down, not least through the introduction of nuclear energy, but, frankly, in the long run we are all dead. We need to try to find something now to mitigate the impact on the fuel poor of the possible side effects of this legislation.

As regards change in the energy markets, as a policy-maker I have always felt that no change is a change for the better if it means that someone else is worse off—the old concept of Pareto optimality that some of us who are in our prime will remember. Under this legislation there is a real risk that the most vulnerable will be worse off. The Government’s own figures estimate that 4 million people in England are fuel poor. Many of those are particularly vulnerable and are also affected by, for example, the bedroom tax and stringency in local authority budgets. They are the people who can least afford to have these increased costs placed upon them.

The Bill is about market manipulation. I do not have a problem with that. If you are to change the nature of an industry, you need to manipulate the market. What I am pleading for—I will return to this at a later stage—is that, in manipulating the market, we seek to mitigate some of its worst effects on the most vulnerable. I seek to put another weapon in the armoury of the Secretary of State so that he or she will be in a position in the future to draw upon instruments that will mitigate the impact on the fuel poor.

There has always been a consensus in this Parliament, certainly in the years that I have been here and certainly since 2000, on the need to act to protect the fuel poor. In a building such as this which is well heated and where we are well fed and looked after, we may not realise the impact that the inability to turn on a heater has if your house is cold and damp. In Coatdyke, where I and my title come from, people are issued with hypothermia meters for their houses to make sure that they do not suffer from hypothermia. I acknowledge that this provision does not directly relate to that part of the country, but whether you come from the north of Scotland, the Yorkshire dales, Derbyshire or wherever, it is a damning indictment of our society that poor people have to choose between putting on their heating or feeding themselves. That is a choice none of us should have to make in a civilised society. In 2000, we set targets that should be reached by 2015. The most recent work by the NEA suggests that we are going backwards. That is not a good position in which to be.

I urge the Minister to bear in mind the significance of fuel poverty and to give us some indication of whether the Government are looking at mitigating factors. I take the point about the Green Deal. As I pointed out at Second Reading, you need money to get into it. If you do not have money, you cannot buy into the Green Deal and get assistance, for example, to protect or heat your home, or to ensure that it is properly insulated.

This is a probing amendment. I will not seek to engage the Committee much longer. However, if we come to the end of the Bill and we have not done something about the poorest in our society, we will have let them down.

[Lord Deben]

The climate change committee raised some very important issues about fuel poverty. We have a commitment to do that. My noble friend Lady Maddock pointed to it. Has the Minister had a chance to register our concerns? They are specific and bear on the way in which the Green Deal is operating. It is important for us to take that into account. I hope that she will be able to help me here.

I am always concerned about the expression, “fuel poverty”. When I was chairman of a statutory water company—I am still chairman of a water company that has interests in the industrial area—I was very concerned about the poverty that meant that people found it difficult to pay their water bills. There is an issue around these fundamental necessities of life. I do not like to put it all to one side. I have stopped myself having anything to do with one part of a business that connects electricity of any kind—it is agnostic about the sort of electricity—but I try to keep in touch with the same issue that we knew in the water industry as it relates to the supply of fuel. There is an issue about some forms of help that we thought would be more extensive: for example, solid-wall insulation, which is a real problem in some of the poorest parts of the country. I very much hope that my noble friend will be able to say when she will look again at the effects of government policy in the particular areas to which the climate change committee drew attention.