Revised Energy National Policy Statements

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, energy is a serious topic, as we have been forcefully reminded very recently. Indeed, my own house in Wiltshire was cut off from the electricity grid as a result of recent storms for two days. Since our village has no gas supply, that brought real discomfort to all, but especially of course to the very old and infirm. Luckily, the village has an emergency generator, started up by supportive volunteers who learnt who and how to help across our community during Covid.

My first point is a simple one. It is the responsibility of any Government to ensure that energy is supplied as required both to domestic customers and to enterprises of all kinds. Any Government who fail in that task will be judged harshly and might well not be a Government for very long. No amount of enthusiastic rhetoric on sustainability, climate change or habitat enrichment will serve as an effective excuse. I am not sure that the document before us is as unequivocal in recognising this reality as it could, and ought, to be. Keeping the lights on, literally and metaphorically, is the number one priority in energy policy. All other aspects are secondary to that.

Having said that, it is sensible to have documents of the kind before us today to help with planning and other decisions. Naturally, there will be a need for constant revision, since the world changes more quickly than we sometimes recognise. Twenty-five years ago—less than a third of the average lifetime—most countries, including this one, relied heavily on coal. Indeed, a recent UK Prime Minister was heavily criticised by some politicians for allegedly devastating the UK coalmining industry. Now the same people are critical of any attempt to retain any coal mining at all in the UK, even if the objective is to retain one or two heritage railway lines, as some may recall from our debates on the Environment Bill and my vain efforts to save the Thomas the Tank Engines. How the world changes! Coal was once the epitome of virtue to some; now it represents the devil to the same people.

Personally, I favour a more nuanced and balanced approach to energy policy. I would add that gas is a very important part of any transition to net zero, and that shale has played a major part in the transition in the US, and indeed in its growth. So we need to see regular textual revisions to these documents every few years, as policies change and innovations come through. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has rightly just talked about the potential role of hydrogen and town heating systems, as well as of nuclear, where I think we are on more common ground. On this question of revisions, I very much hope my noble friend the Minister can indicate how often he envisages that changes might be made.

My other main point is to emphasise how much investment there will need to be in infrastructure if the presently expected move towards electrification, including electric vehicles, comes to pass. That has two major implications. First, we need to be clear how and where the investment will be made. We need to be assured that those concerned with the grid and other electrical infrastructure have a viable plan to achieve this investment. I am not clear that we can yet feel confident on that point. Secondly, we need to know from whence the very large sums needed are to come. I note that a main method of financing green investments so far has been to impose green levies on consumers. That is one approach, but I note that it has quickly come into question now that electricity prices have risen steeply and inflation has taken off sharply. Some argue, rightly I think, for moderation, but all this certainly needs more thought.

Finally, I return to the storms and what they have taught me. Despite the advent of the 105 number, which I remember launching a few years ago when I was fortunate enough to be in the Minister’s position, consumers are in serious trouble when their power lines go down. We also need more thought about how people might prepare. Perhaps retailers could start selling first-aid style kits, with candles, matches, gloves, woolly hats, primus stoves and an old-fashioned phone that plugs in when the wi-fi and cordless phones do not work. This of course is not an issue for the statements before us, but we always need to think about how to make life easier and bearable for the consumer. Throughout history, too much of the energy debate has been provider and government-led, and that concerns me. I was therefore glad to hear that our Economic Affairs Committee will be looking at some of these knotty issues. I hope it will be able to help tackle the problems, including those that hit the poorest in the country, old and young.

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[Lord Callanan (Con)]

During the planning process itself, community mitigations will be taken into account, providing the national framework to enable local planning decisions to be taken. Community mitigations of course play an important part in the planning process.

As I said earlier in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, improving the energy efficiency of homes is the most effective way to permanently reduce energy bills by reducing the amount of energy required to heat the home, and it can tackle fuel poverty in the long term. I covered all the schemes that we have, including ECO, home upgrade grants, the local authority delivery scheme, the public sector decarbonisation scheme and the social housing decarbonisation scheme—myriad different schemes, all contributing quietly and in the background to upping the energy performance of the homes that we all live in.

The noble Lord also mentioned the need for clarity in the approach to CCUS and hydrogen. The NPS establishes the need for CCUS and hydrogen infrastructure, but we do not want prematurely to introduce detailed guidance before we know more about the impact of such projects. We will consider whether to develop a technology-specific NPS for CCUS and hydrogen infrastructure as the technology and the project landscape evolves.

The noble Lord, Lord Lennie, asked how many consent decisions have been made under the current regime. The answer is that 65 decisions on energy projects have been made under the existing suite of energy NPSs. We are, of course, expecting a significant increase in the number of applications as the transition to net zero continues. He also asked about onshore wind. It was removed from the NSIP regime in 2016 through amendments to the Planning Act 2008. This means that all planning applications for onshore wind turbines in England are made to the local planning authority, or to the Welsh Government in Wales. As national policy statements are statutory guidance, and as onshore wind is now not included in the 2008 Act, it was no longer appropriate for the national policy statements to provide specific policies in relation to onshore wind.

Finally, to reply to my noble friend Lady Foster’s point about fracking, it is important to realise that Lancashire is not Texas. The UK is a relatively densely populated island compared to most parts of the US. Although we are not in principle against the idea of fracking, it must be done with the consent of local communities and we need to be aware of its environmental impact. Also, as we discussed during Questions in the House a few weeks ago, it is not the short-term answer that many people think it is. Even if we managed to overcome all the environmental objections, and even if we managed to progress the scheme, it would be many years, if not a decade, before we got meaningful quantities of shale gas out of the ground. Even then, the quantities that we would be able to produce in this country would have no meaningful impact on the overall gas price level. We continue to keep these matters under review, but it does not represent the easy solution that we might like to think it would in this circumstance.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for answering all our points so clearly and fully. I asked a question about coal for heritage railways. He may not be aware of it, but in the debates on the Environment Act we were told that it would be fine because we could get coal from Russia. He may want to take the point away. Perhaps he could update us, because I assume that we will not now be getting coal from Russia. Also, I wanted clarification on an issue to do with planning. I think he said that some kind of planning for renewable infrastructure would take three years, but somebody—maybe it was the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, or the noble Lord, Lord Oates—said that it took one year to build an offshore wind turbine and eight years to get planning. Clearly, we have to speed planning up for necessary infrastructure; that has come through very strongly in the work that I have been doing in the Built Environment Committee. To have an answer on what we can now expect—how long planning applications of different types will take—either today or on another occasion would be very helpful.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The whole purpose of these national policy statements is to try to speed up the planning process in the first place by setting a national framework within which the local decisions can be taken. As with all these things, it is a question of getting the balance right. Of course we want to try to speed up the process, but the problem with energy policy is that it takes many years, if not decades, to put the infrastructure in place.

We are announcing, we hope, some progress on new nuclear and passing new legislation in the next few months to enable it but we will not see the fruits of that until the early 2030s. The process for the infrastructure which we see in place now was put in place 10 or 12 years ago. The reason that we have a problem with nuclear now—I am sorry to bring it back to party politics—was because when Labour came into office in 1997, that Government ruled out new nuclear. Tony Blair said in the manifesto “We see no case for new nuclear”. Now, that is a party-political point and I think many Labour Members now think that was a mistake—maybe it was right in the context of the time but it was probably a mistake. Correcting these mistakes takes many decades in order to get the infrastructure in place.