Great British Energy Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of the Labour Climate and Environment Forum. I add my name to the commendations given to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Beckett. She was my boss when I was chief executive of the Environment Agency. She was a very scary lady, but hugely kind and incredibly supportive. She taught me a tremendous amount. Our House will be a better and more thoughtful place for her presence and wisdom.

I welcome the Bill—it seems that not many people do—and the opportunity that GB Energy will provide to use public money to leverage and create direction for private investment to tackle climate change and meet our net-zero objectives. Unlike practically everybody else, I am going to simply raise five points for my noble friend the Minister. All of them are about Great British Energy and the content of the Bill.

First, community energy has already been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. The propaganda text around GB Energy’s creation has been very explicit about GB Energy playing a big role in supporting community energy. Community energy schemes are really important if we are to persuade communities that the disruptions and downsides of renewables and rewiring the grid have something in it for them by way of cheaper, greener and more secure energy. Local power plans, which I hope include community schemes, are one of the five priorities for GB Energy in its founding statement. If it is a real commitment for GB Energy to deliver community energy schemes, why not put that requirement in the Bill?

Community energy schemes currently generate around only 0.5% of the UK’s electricity. Studies by the Environmental Audit Committee and others estimate that this could increase twentyfold in 10 years, powering 2.2 million homes and saving 2.5 million tonnes of CO₂ every year. It can create jobs, reduce local people’s bills and boost local infrastructure investment. Lots of other nations have seen community-led renewable energy schemes growing over the last 10 years, but we are stuck at the level it was when feed-in tariffs ended. We have not grown since.

What is most worrying about not having a statutory requirement for GB Energy to support community energy in the Bill is that Jürgen Maier, who was much praised by the Minister as the chair of GB Energy, is already on record as saying at a parliamentary hearing that he did not believe that community energy had the potential to generate gigawatts. That is totally at odds with the assurances given by the Government both in the Labour manifesto and during the passage of this Bill in the other place. If we are to have the confidence of investors and communities, and not have confusion on the role of GB Energy in this area, we need community energy in the Bill.

My second point leads on from that, to some extent. It is about the Secretary of State’s statement of strategic priorities. It is important that we see this in draft, at least in Committee. Community energy is only one issue that we want to see in it. Without sight of the statement of strategic priorities, we are being asked to buy a pig in a poke to some extent. Can the Minister tell us when we might see the Secretary of State’s statement of strategic priorities?

The third issue I want to go on about is in my capacity as a long-playing record. Many noble Lords around this House can remember what a long-playing record is, whereas vast quantities of the British public would not have a clue what I am talking about—but I am a long-playing record in this respect. Although GB Energy clearly has excellent net-zero objectives—that is what it is there for, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said—we face a twin crisis of climate change and biodiversity recovery. GB Energy needs to be given an objective on biodiversity recovery.

It will have a role in de-risking and accelerating clean energy developments. There is always a possibility, at that point, that there could be a trade-off between biodiversity and delivering net zero, but it is not either/or—it is both/and. We need to be smart, and GB Energy needs to be given objectives on both net zero and biodiversity recovery; they need to complement each other.

There is a quick way around this. We could support the Private Member’s Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, which would give the twin objectives of climate and biodiversity to all relevant public bodies. I think it is important that we have these twin objectives for GB Energy. There are lots of examples of similar—although not quite the same—entities, which are virtually independent of the state but are sponsored and wholly owned by the state, that kind of lose the plot. The Forestry Commission plants trees, but it does not do very much to plant trees for biodiversity and climate change. The water companies, which are basically creatures of the public purse, have gone seriously off the rails. I hope we can make sure that GB Energy does not get a rush of blood to the head with its new-found independence and become so fixated with net zero that it cannot do anything else.

My fourth point is on accountability, which has already been raised. We can all read the published accounts of plcs from Companies House. They do not cast much light on many occasions. It is important that this body, which has an important role and a fair slug of public money, provides more back to both Parliament and the public on how it is delivering on its role. It needs to provide a report on a regular basis about the Secretary of State’s strategic priorities and how they are being delivered. If the Secretary of State has not had the foresight to see community energy and biodiversity recovery as strategic priorities, we need reports on these—whether they are strategic priorities or not.

I do not want to see some of the inflexibility that I have heard described around the House today in requiring more and more burdensome reports from this company. It is being set up specifically to give flexibility to allow the Government to influence the direction of an emerging set of technologies as they emerge. We do not want to strangle it at birth with reporting requirements, but there needs to be a happier medium between that and simply the Companies House report.

Last but not least, you could not expect me to do a speech in this House without talking about land use. Great British Energy will inevitably be engaging with spatial issues, such as new grid infrastructure and other energy development locational issues. Any planning role or role that engages with land use and spatial issues will need to complement the existing work of both private and public bodies, including the National Energy System Operator, in producing the strategic spatial energy plan. Spatial energy issues are important, but they need to be resolved in the context of all the pressures on land—for example, other infrastructure types, housing, flood risk management, food production, biodiversity, forestry and carbon sequestration, to name but a few.

The previous Conservative Government promised me the publication of a land use framework for England as a Christmas present last Christmas. I thank the new Labour Government for their commitment to producing a land use framework for England. I know it is there in draft and I had hoped we might be out to consultation by this Christmas. That would be a nice Christmas present. Can the Minister confirm that the Government see the importance of setting the strategic spatial energy plan in its broader land use context and framework? I think it is called joined-up government. If so, when might the land use framework consultation emerge?

Finally, I wish good luck to the Minister in responding tonight. The discussion has been amazingly wide, right across the energy policy agenda and beyond, for a very tiny Bill for a very specific purpose. It is going to be a bit like summarising the entire works of Proust in 21 seconds.