Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Young of Old Scone and Lord Howell of Guildford

Wednesday 21st October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I had not thought that what we were dealing with was liquid legislation. I thought we were dealing with piecemeal transitional arrangements dreamt up on the hoof as we go through the process. But I am quite prepared for the right reverend Prelate to give us this liquid legislation definition in perpetuity. It is a rather splendid phrase.

This has been a really unsatisfactory Bill and we must not allow ourselves to see this as an argument about onshore subsidy protectionism. It is not about that at all. I think that everybody in the House recognises that the period of subsidy for onshore wind may well come to an end at some point in the nearish future. It is much more about what it is that we want to try to do to send signals about our climate change intentions and to adhere to our own regulatory principles. I have been a regulator three times on behalf of the Government and on each occasion I have absolutely worked my socks off to make sure that we are as fair as possible to British industry. Fairness means giving clarity of policy and adequate times for industry to adjust, meaning that companies are not caught with their foot on the wrong side of a piece of change and penalised as a result of their previously sensible decisions in line with what previously had been government policy. Even with the very welcome changes to the grace periods that the Minister has laid before us, we are still not there.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, talked about the statement made yesterday by the Energy Minister in another place. I was a bit distressed to hear the Minister here say that we have made lots of concessions and we now have enough renewable energy from onshore wind in the pipeline. I do not think that that is the point. The point is, have we dealt fairly with British industry and given anybody who could reasonably consider themselves not to have been fairly dealt with the benefit of the doubt in this circumstance, where, all of a sudden, policy has shifted? The Minister said that there had been extensive consultation with the companies and stakeholders, yet many noble Lords will have been lobbied and briefed by players in the energy business, who, even this morning, have been listing a series of situations where, through no fault of their own, they continue to be penalised by the graceperiod arrangements.

I simply ask the Minister to consider some of the circumstances that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, aptly summarised in such an eloquent fashion to ensure that the statement made by the Energy Minister yesterday about fairness is adhered to and that we do not continue to see liquid legislation that is simply piecemeal, illogical and very damaging, both to our climate change image in the world and the image in terms of British industry about whether reliable frameworks in which companies can realistically work will continue to come from this Government.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I was not going to intervene at this stage, but the right reverend Prelate’s intervention and his association with my noble friend Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation prompted me to pursue the point that he raised. A lot of our discussion has been on the penalties —in other words, the removal of subsidies from people who thought that they had a chance of the subsidy when they started their projects. That is aside from whether the project is environmentally okay or whether they get local government approval for planning reasons and so on; it is simply the question of whether they were caught by various delays and, therefore, would not get the subsidies that they thought they would get when they set out.

We are not in any way trying to stop the development of the very successful parts of the onshore windfarm industry. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, reminded us, electricity from wind power is getting cheaper. If it is getting cheaper, it will in due course need less subsidy. Remarks from outside this country—particularly an ill-informed remark by the UN adviser, Professor McGlade, that somehow Britain was putting a stop to its movements towards low-carbonisation by putting a stopper on all wind power and so on—are way out of kilter and far from representing where we stand.

It is no less interesting to work out to what extent these grace periods will help the situation—I thoroughly approve of all the amendments that my noble friend has brought forward with such assiduity. Presumably, as a result of these grace periods, we will see slightly more subsidy paid out, which has to come from the consumer—the industrial consumer in particular—than we would have done before he introduced the amendments. The money that was not going to come from somewhere has to come from somewhere. Somebody will have to pay for it. This is on a day when we are staggering under the colossal redundancies that have been announced throughout the steel industry—including the steel industry in Scotland—which, we are told, are overwhelmingly the result of very high energy costs. Apparently, for electricity, we are paying twice the German level. In turn, of course, energy costs for the steel industry of Europe are leading people to predict that the entire industry will be wiped out. At a time like this, we need to watch with needle sharpness what is happening to the costs that are falling on the industries where all these jobs are being destroyed. How much more of that cost is still going to persist in meeting all the grace period conditions which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, with his massive legal knowledge and detailed grasp of the situation, has described as being necessary and fair? How much more will this kind of fairness cost in the end in burdens on the electricity users of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom in ways which will precipitate even further these appalling redundancies? We need to keep that side of the argument very clearly in our minds.

Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Young of Old Scone and Lord Howell of Guildford

Monday 14th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on whether keeping this clause in the Bill is sensible. I share his views entirely about the vagaries of the local planning system. It is true to say—it would be good if the Minister could confirm it at some stage—that not only are there not many neighbourhood plans in existence, but some local authorities have not yet published local plans, far less had them accepted. This provision might be okay in places where they have thought about it, but so many have not and show no signs of doing so.

The National Planning Policy Framework only encourages local planning authorities to consider identifying suitable areas for renewable energy sources and as a result the links in the chain that could fail are rather long. A local authority might not have got to the stage where it had a local plan and therefore there cannot be neighbourhood plans, because they have got to be in a consistent process with the local plan, and there is only a vague nudge in the direction of considering whether suitable areas have been identified for renewable energy. It does not feel like a well-honed local set of circumstances for fostering that vital and, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, pointed out, cost-effective way of meeting some very stringent climate change targets and budgets. I have concerns about the removal of the Secretary of State’s consent in this respect.

It is rather strange that we are moving in one direction for fracking consents and in another for onshore wind consents. I simply make that remark without having any belief that there should be one without the other. I must confess that I need to meet my noble friend Lady Worthington to talk about some impacts of fracking other than simply energy generation, carbon reduction and cost.

There is one other issue in respect of the localisation of decision-making in terms of onshore wind, which is how we get some strategic perspective. It is going to be abominably difficult to meet our carbon targets, and we will need every tool in the toolkit to do so. In this clause, there is no mechanism for that happening on a scale larger than a neighbourhood or local plan, yet many of these decisions involving technologies other than onshore wind need to be part of the mix on a local and national basis for these decisions to be looked at on a more strategic basis at a higher level than the local planning authority.

I hope that the Minister will come back to us with answers to some of the questions we are raising about the advisability of removing the Secretary of State’s permission.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, am waiting for my noble friend Lord Ridley to give his limpid views on the future of onshore wind and, indeed, on the role of onshore and offshore wind power in the tasks of reducing emissions worldwide and producing a balanced energy policy for the British people. No doubt he will enter into later debates on the next clause which will cover very much the same ground.

I admire the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for his frank admission of the dilemma he faces. On the one hand, localism is the flavour of the month, the year and the time, and there is a great desire to move from central administration in every area of policy, certainly including energy, into a greater role for local people, local planning and local authorities, yet he is also worried about inconsistency and fears that in some way the onshore wind cause is being abandoned. I do not see that. If you look at the proposals and the argument in the impact assessments behind the Bill, it is perfectly clear that, first, onshore wind has had a fantastic run over recent years. Some would say it was possibly too big a run given the very considerable economic advantages it brought to many wealthy individuals, gigantic corporations and energy companies and to those who are benefiting in all sorts of other ways from the proceeds and the subsidies, which are, of course, paid for by the consumer. In many cases, we know it is the poor consumer, and it is certainly the competitive consumer in industry. It is clear that subsidies have created this great growth. There must be a limit, as has been set quite clearly by government, and it is going to be exceeded unless the brakes are put on. There is a limit in two senses: first, the sheer weight of subsidy required to maintain the industry until it can get its costs down. I will come to that in a moment because there are real problems in getting costs down.

Secondly, there is managing a balanced grid system which can absorb the intermittency of wind. Every country that has gone into this business in a big way—Denmark is a good example—has found enormous difficulties. That is one reason why Denmark wants to have an interconnector with Britain for electricity. Intermittently there will be no charge at all for the electricity it supplies to us because it is a danger to it and an advantage to us. Spain has found enormous difficulties in going too fast and beyond the limits of engineering and electronic management in organising its grid when the wind blows too hard or too regularly.

Thirdly, there is the intermittency problem, which we all face. One day we will get over it because the storage will come at lower costs and intermittency problems will be much reduced. In the mean time, though, intermittency requires back-up, and back-up requires gas. There are other devices but gas-generated electricity is the area where most people in Europe, certainly in this country, think the gap can be filled. Far from being inconsistent, then, it seems to me utterly consistent that at this point the contribution of onshore wind should be restrained in the ways that are proposed.

As for the emissions angle, we know that we are driven by the European requirements for renewable energy, the formidable target of 15% of our energy from renewable sources by, I think, 2020, and Europe’s target of 40% by 2030. It is quite clear from the present pattern that we are not going to meet that target, and that even if we were to double the onshore wind power we still would not get near it, even if we took into account merely the emissions that emerge from the production of energy. In fact, the emissions that emerge from our capital consumption of energy per head, and from all the vast imports that we suck into this country from countries with much lower standards with very high emission content, have not fallen very much at all; indeed, many would argue that they have increased greatly since 1990.

So the real problem is that the present policy is not actually working. Those of us who are concerned about climate change look at what is happening throughout Europe, notice the contrary tendencies in delivering emission reduction—much more coal burning and a failure of the heavy concentration of wind around the islands, like the one that we are living on—and ask whether we should not begin to think about an entirely new and different policy. I see no inconsistency at all. No doubt we will debate this a little further on in the afternoon in more depth and detail.

I worked very closely with my friends in the Liberal Democrats in the last Government and enjoyed doing so, but I find their stance on this almost impossible to understand. They seem to be favouring a system that does not do much for emissions, distributes money in massive ways from the poor to the rich and apparently produces all kinds of tax advantages that are going to be exploited. This is one irony of the situation: even with this restraint, it looks to me as though we are going to have continuous investment in onshore wind, even without the subsidies, because of the big tax advantages that are built into the system. Should we not be looking at those before we take a position on the question of local powers and so on?

It is a puzzle to me that we do not look in a more balanced way at what is being done. It seems utterly consistent. I do not think that I want to be a supporter of anything that promotes further a system that is unfair to the poorest people and consumers, and which delivers considerable tax advantages to clever people and yet does not do very much at all for emission reduction. It seems to me to be a sad mixture, and it is about time that it was changed.