Localism Bill

Debate between Baroness Young of Old Scone and Lord Reay

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone]

My Lords, I underline what the noble Lord has just said, particularly in terms of the requirement to adapt to climate change. Noble Lords may remember that the Climate Change Act contained strong reporting requirements as regards authorities reporting the action they were taking and their readiness to adapt to climate change. However, those requirements were not laid on local authorities. They were laid on a huge range of other authorities, but local authorities were not required so to report because at that stage they had a performance indicator which established their readiness to adapt to climate change. However, that performance indicator has since been swept away along with all the other performance indicators for local authorities. If I am correct, we no longer have any mechanism at all to make local authorities accountable for adapting to climate change and demonstrating that they are so doing. Therefore, I very much welcome this amendment as it would at least give us hope that a requirement was being laid on local authorities to demonstrate that they were adapting to climate change.

[Lord Reay]

My Lords, as this is my first intervention at this stage of the Bill, I declare my interest as a landowner. I object strongly to these amendments. When I sought to introduce an amendment in Committee that related to the costs incurred by local authorities contesting appeals in wind farm development cases, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, chided me for introducing an inappropriate discussion of energy policy into a planning Bill. I could now say the same about the noble Lord’s friends who are moving this amendment.

As the noble Baroness more or less explained, the intention of these amendments is to impose on local authorities a responsibility for helping the Government to achieve their renewable energy targets. The principal effect in practice would be to make it even harder than it is already to resist the attempts of subsidised developers to cover the countryside with wind farms, for, of course, that is the one technology on which, in practice, the Government are, or were, pinning all their hopes for achieving those targets. I say “were” because at the recent conference of my party there were the first interesting signs that second thoughts are being entertained at last in government circles about their energy policy, owing to its expense, which seems suddenly to have become apparent to the Government. To be sure, so far the changes have been in rhetoric only but I find it hard to see that that will not be followed by action, for the point is that the Government’s deliberate pursuit of a renewable and, therefore, an increasingly expensive, energy policy is coming into ever greater conflict with the Government’s attempts to protect living standards.

In the Financial Times yesterday its energy correspondent produced an estimate that at the current rate by the time of the next election the average household will be spending more than 10 per cent of its income on its energy bills. In other words, they will be officially in fuel poverty. That will be an astonishing and, I suggest, intolerable outcome. Noble Lords will remember that when the previous Government were in power it was their stated policy to abolish fuel poverty, but, of course, that is quite impossible if you are pursuing a renewable energy policy. Under their watch the number of households in fuel poverty doubled in five years to around 5 million. With the present Government pursuing the same policies, this figure has continued to rise until it has now reached 6 million or even on some estimates 7 million. Therefore, it surprises me that in these circumstances noble Lords opposite continue blithely to propose measures that can only have the effect of further adding to fuel costs for the consumer. It did not surprise me, however, that in that same article in the Financial Times the director of consumer policy at uSwitch was quoted as saying:

“I believe there is going to be a U-turn because I believe the government is listening and they’re going to have to face reality”.

The Government, of course, could have done so a long time ago. I can hardly think of a single prominent independent newspaper columnist who has not over the past two years or more—in many cases much longer—succeeded in exposing the crippling expense of our climate change targets and the complete futility of wind farms. I should have thought that that probably covers virtually all the famous names in journalism, at least in the newspapers and magazines that I have read.

The Government therefore cannot say that no one warned them. Yesterday it was the noble Lord, Lord Young of Graffham, who had the opportunity to have his say in the Times. His article was headed:

“This is no time to waste our money on windmills”.

The noble Baroness may laugh but I cannot think of a more unsuitable time to contemplate putting a statutory obligation on local authorities to give yet more priority to the installation of subsidised renewal energy projects. I hope that the Minister will give this amendment short shrift.