Great British Energy Bill

Debate between Baroness Young of Old Scone and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 116, which is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who cannot be with us today, and to which I added my name. I was greatly encouraged by the Minister’s words at Second Reading that he looked forward to discussing biodiversity further in Committee. I do not think I have ever heard a Minister say that before, and now is his moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has previous with this sort of amendment, having tabled similar amendments to a variety of previous Bills, so colleagues may now be familiar with her modus operandi in this respect. The amendment aims to address the challenges of how the objectives, strategic priorities and other functions of GBE fit with the legally binding targets in the Climate Change Act 2008 and the Environment Act 2021, which the Government have a statutory requirement to achieve.

At Second Reading there was recognition that when making decisions about the rollout of renewable energy, clean power and the associated infrastructure, it is important that we bring together all the different responsibilities, issues and trade-offs in one scheme—one structure or place—so that Great British Energy and the Government are fully equipped with all the information to weigh up these decisions and to take account of all these different factors in an integrated way, rather than in the siloed approach to decision-making that we distressingly see all too often in government. This is particularly important where there are legally binding targets that the Government have to achieve and where it would be distinctly unhelpful if Great British Energy were working in the opposite direction.

We have a real opportunity here to set the long-term strategic direction by putting in place the right frameworks to provide a stable structure for Great British Energy to make decisions and to be as transparent as possible in its decision-making, both now and into the future. The aim is to try to make sure that the projects invested in are the most effective at delivering on GBE’s objects but operate in such a way that they do not militate against the Government’s achievement of the binding climate change and biodiversity targets. We want to be cunning; we need to learn to walk, talk and chew gum at the same time. We want to achieve the strategic climate objectives that Great British Energy is there to deliver but we also want to achieve other objectives—it is both/and, rather than either/or.

The amendment does not imply that in every single case Great British Energy needs to contribute to the statutory binding targets, but it does aim to ensure that they are considered from the outset when Great British Energy makes decisions—and indeed when the Government make decisions—about strategic priorities; that it factors them into the decision-making process and, where reasonable, contributes in a positive way to the statutory target achievement; and certainly that it does not make it more difficult for the statutory targets to be achieved.

I have said that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has previous on this. Noble Lords who took part in the Crown Estate Bill recently will have heard the her argue for a clause very similar to this. She successfully persuaded the Government of the need to join up the functions of the Crown Estate with the climate and nature targets. During that Bill’s passage, the Minister agreed both in Committee and on Report that:

“It is right that the public and private sectors make every contribution they can to help achieve our climate change targets”.—[Official Report, 14/10/24; col. 75.]


I hope we can persuade the Minister that this is an even more important case than the Crown Estate having an eye to the climate change and biodiversity targets, and that GB Energy will have an appreciable impact on both of those targets. We need to hardwire it in from the outset, particularly since, as was outlined in the previous debate, we have not yet seen GB Energy’s strategic priorities and plans.

I hope the Minister will accept that what was good for the Crown Estate goose applies equally to the GB Energy gander. I want to make a festive allusion, if noble Lords will pardon my lame attempt: I hope the Minister will agree that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that GB Energy should have a similar requirement laid on it as was accepted and passed for the Crown Estate. I hope we can persuade the Minister of that.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, very briefly, I offer Green group support for Amendment 56 and, in particular, Amendment 116, which has broad support, as we see from the signatures. I declare my interest as a member of the advisory committee, as I think it is now called, Peers for the Planet. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, has already said many of the things I was going to say. I just add that I can go back even further than she did, to the Pension Schemes Act 2021. That was an historic moment, with climate being written into a finance Bill for the first time ever.

I have been in your Lordships’ House for five years, and we have had win after win, as the noble Baroness just outlined. It really is time for us to stop having to bring this to the House to be inserted, taking up so many hours of your Lordships’ time to get us to the point at which clearly the Government should have started.

I will add an additional point to what the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said. In the recent election, Labour explicitly said that it was aiming to take a joint nature and climate approach to its way of operating the Government. This surely has to be written into the Bill.

To set the context, a nature recovery duty was discussed in the other place. My honourable friends Siân Berry and Adrian Ramsay were prominent in that, along with people from other parties. We are one of the most nature-depleted corners of this battered planet, but our statutory duty is at the moment only to stop the decline, not even to make things better. We surely cannot be creating such an important new institution as this without building nature into its statutory obligations. The Government regularly remind us that the economy and GDP growth is their number one priority, but the economy is a complete subset of the environment. The parlous state of our environment is an important factor in the parlous state of our economy.