Great British Energy Bill

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I support government Amendment 8 and will speak to my Amendments 14 and 25. I am deeply grateful to the Minister for putting community energy in the Bill with Amendment 8. It is now clear that Great British Energy may facilitate, encourage and participate in those things mentioned in Clause 3(2)(a) to (d) through projects involving or benefiting local communities.

I am really pleased, as this is a win for MPs on all sides of the other Chamber and for noble Lords on all Benches in this Chamber. There is notable strong cross-party support to see community energy in the Bill. It was a key objective for us, and I am delighted that we have had a successful negotiation and got this done. We have the third-best wind resources in the world. It is our view that there can be no Great British Energy without Great British community energy. With this amendment, our objective has been achieved.

It is worth noting that, as the Minister said, GB Energy has a unique role here. When Jürgen Maier was before the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee he talked about a system coming “out of the box”. That is exactly it—going into local communities, GB Energy will be able to deliver community energy and engage with them from start to finish.

I remind the House that community energy could deliver up to 8 gigawatts and power 2.2 million homes, saving two nuclear reactors-worth of energy. It could remove 2.5 million tonnes of CO₂ and provide over 30,000 jobs. What is not to like about that? I am delighted that we have made progress on this and I thank the Minister.

Moving on, my Amendment 25 is a probing amendment in response to a question that my counterpart, Pippa Heylings, asked in the Commons this week about the fact that, at the moment, the £10 million community energy fund is oversubscribed. Some 100 projects are unable to get funding, and the money is due to run out in May. While I greatly appreciate getting community energy into the Bill, can the Minister provide clarity on what will happen with that fund? Is he able to put more money in? Is there an interregnum until GB Energy can start funding it? Ed Miliband gave very strong words in support of community energy but did not really answer my honourable friend’s point about the money. If the Minister can provide any more certainty or say whether this is being looked at, that would be appreciated.

Amendment 14 is our warm homes plan and emergency home insulation plan. It requires the Government to transfer the responsibility for the warm homes plan to GB Energy should it be requested. We have some of that coldest, dampest and most miserable homes in Europe. UK housing stock accounts for around 7% of total carbon emissions. They are among the least energy-efficient homes in Europe, with 12 million homes in England alone currently falling below adequate energy efficiency standards. The UK Climate Change Committee has said that residential retrofits need to increase to a rate of 500,000 a year by 2025 and 1 million a year by 2030 to meet our climate targets. This is a huge and daunting task. It is one of the biggest infrastructure tasks of the 21st century.

Our citizens have suffered cold, damp, draughty and unhealthy homes for far too long. In the single largest housing-related cost burden to the NHS in 2023, some £50 million was spent fighting cold-related illness. Homes cost more to heat than they should because they do not retain the heat that the homeowners pay for. The best energy of all is the energy that we never use, in particular the energy that we do not waste on absolutely nothing. Energy efficiency remains a missing part of overall energy policy. Citizens should not have to choose between heating and eating. In this country, 6 million people live in fuel poverty, while at the same time we are wasting this energy. It is utter madness.

The last Government completely failed to tackle this problem. They cut the funding and the ambition to deliver warm homes and to insulate our homes. That was not good enough. Carbon Brief calculated that UK energy bills were £22 billion higher over the past decade than they should have been because the Conservatives cut the “green crap”. The number of homes being insulated each year at the start of 2024 was 98% below 2012 levels. Of that £22 billion, £5 billion was due to poorly insulated homes and £3 billion was because homes were being built that were not meeting energy efficient standards.

However, no Government of any persuasion has ever managed to tackle this problem. It is a tough nut to crack, even with the best will in the world. Going house-by-house and retrofitting our mixed housing stock is an extremely challenging undertaking. I welcome this Government’s commitment to the warm homes plan and the £6.6 billion in funding that has already been provided. The programme that the Government are setting out will provide low-interest loans to support families to invest in insulation, encourage low-carbon heating and enable the retrofitting of our homes. The Climate Change Committee has estimated that £3.15 billion is probably the total cost of getting this done, but I welcome what the Government are doing. My amendment is not a criticism of that but is here to support.

The burden is on the private sector, where 90% of these properties are owner-occupied and not meeting standards. We need to do stuff with the over-65s, because that is a particular problem. We need to tackle fuel poverty, as we have 2.26 million homes in fuel poverty as of 2022. We need new financing options, particularly green mortgages, so that private home owners can take the cost of making these measures and put them against their mortgage, and we need similar situations for people in the private rented sector.

This is good, though. The New Economics Foundation has said that every £1 spent of public investment could generate £4.60 in capital expenditure and £6.90 in broader economic activity; this is good for our homes and our economy. It could create thousands of green jobs and increase local UK supply chains.

I am worried about the delivery of these plans; that is why I have put this amendment forward. I recognise that the Government are exploring these issues as we speak and that my amendment is a bit radical and left field. I say to the Minister that this is difficult, and at a time when the Government are also trying to put in solar panels and heat pumps. I am not the only person to be concerned about delivery of these plans. I recognise that GB Energy is an independent organisation. My amendment is not prescriptive; it is simply about not ruling out options from the start. It is about making sure that that door is not closed to GB Energy from before it is set up; it is about making sure that there is space for those conversations to take place.

If my amendment passes and GB Energy never approaches the Government or the Minister to say that it wants to take any of this on, for whatever reason, then my amendment does no damage at all; it makes no difference whatever. It comes into play only if GB Energy approaches the Minister and says that it has the skills and the contacts within the industry, that it fits with its community energy plans, and that it wants to do this and make a difference. This amendment, if it does nothing else, allows these conversations to take place, and I think that is a good thing. I dare the Government to be different and take a different approach to this daunting and challenging task.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Watkins of Tavistock) (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise. I failed to make it clear at the beginning that, as Amendment 9 is an amendment to Amendment 8, I have to call Amendment 9.

Amendment 9 (to Amendment 8)

Moved by

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 18 in the name of my noble friend Lord Patel. I remind noble Lords of my registered interests; in particular, that I am a practising clinician. The amendment, and my noble friend’s introduction to it, clearly lay out an important point about the consequences with regard to practice on non-strike days if a minimum level of staffing is defined for clinical areas on strike days. It is possible that, on non-strike days, staffing levels will fall below the minimum defined for a strike day. Under those circumstances, would it be appropriate for the healthcare organisation in question to continue to deliver service in that clinical area where the minimum service or staffing level defined for a strike day has been breached?

What would be the consequences for a clinician—a regulated healthcare professional—offering to work and participate in the delivery of clinical care in a clinical environment whose staffing would, on a strike day, be considered to have fallen below a safe level? What would be the consequence for a regulated healthcare organisation of continuing to promote the delivery of care, on a non-strike day, in an area that it would consider unsafe on a strike day if the staffing level were below that defined? For instance, what view have the professional and system regulators taken of this potential situation?

Would there then be a greater risk for potential litigation associated with the delivery of care in a clinical area that had failed to provide, on a non-strike day, staffing levels that were considered the minimum level to be provided on a strike day? Would that have a chilling effect on the capacity or willingness of clinicians and healthcare professionals to participate in the delivery of care under those circumstances? These are important issues that need to be explored in some detail to ensure that they are not unintended consequences of proceeding with an approach that secures patient safety on strike days but, unfortunately, fails to have determined that appropriate protection of patient safety on non-strike days.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the names of my noble friends Lord Patel and Lord Kakkar, and I agree with everything they said. I return to the issue of life and limb. We need to recognise that we have people in hospitals and care homes who, if they did not receive compassionate care, would be left in unclean beds, would not be fed and would not receive what we think of as ordinary, everyday care. Therefore, the whole issue of what minimum levels should be needs to be thought about really carefully. It needs to be thought about outside the opportunities of strikes and in terms of ordinary, everyday care.

I am worried that, without the amendment proposed, it is possible that we would have safer, or better, care on strike days than on non-strike days. I am also worried that, unless we tackle the workforce shortage, which has driven staff to their current level of discontent in health and care, we will continue to have problems. This is not just about people striking for an increase in salary; it is about people’s real concern about being unable to deliver the service they wish to deliver.

[The Lord Bishop of London]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 18 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Kakkar, and add my voice to many of the points already raised. I thank the Minister for being much more specific around health. I hope that we can define it much more clearly, rather than having that very broad category, as well as the issue around life and limb.

I remind the Government that, in this Chamber, they have resisted introducing legislation for minimum staffing levels on a number of occasions. It seems incredible that they now want to put in levels of minimum service, which clearly require minimum staffing levels, but are willing to do it only on strike days.

As I indicated earlier, this amendment goes to the heart of one of the key issues with the Bill; namely, that people in the health service who strike do so partly because safe staffing levels are not in place on non-strike days. We have already heard that the healthcare system is under huge pressure, trying to provide quality care with fewer staff, and there are workforce problems. The most recent statistic I have shows that there are 124,000 vacancies across the NHS—that is 13,000 more than this time last year. The Royal College of Nursing published a survey in May 2022 showing that only 25% of shifts have the planned number of registered nurses and 83% of respondents said that there were not enough nursing staff to meet all patient needs safely and effectively on their most recent shift.

Staff on non-strike days are thinly stretched and cannot provide the level of care that they would want to, which puts huge pressure on their health and well-being. The distress that they experience is causing an increase in illness to them. Reporting on the past year, the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch noted that the additional pressure that staff were under was causing sickness. As a new student nurse put it, “I no longer want the career as it is. The reality feels as though I must sacrifice my own health and well-being for less than satisfactory pay.”

The notion that the Government could legislate to require minimum service levels in healthcare settings, which are already committed to safe strikes, while there is a lack of investment and workforce planning—which is the reason for the action—is unfathomable. I would welcome the Government legislating to ensure appropriate staffing levels on non-strike days that are greater than the strike day cover. That would be welcomed by nurses, because it would mean more resources and more workforce planning than the health service has seen for years. It would also resolve one of the reasons why nurses are taking strike action. I have spoken about trust, as have a number of noble Lords. Accepting this amendment would go some way towards to rebuilding the trust that has been eroded, and will be eroded further by this Bill.

Amendment 13 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, seeks to make a similar point but through a different route. Along with my right reverend friend the Bishop of Manchester, who is unable to be here, I express my support for that amendment as well.