Student Maintenance Grants
Debate between Graham Stuart and Kevin Brennan(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan
The hon. Gentleman told us in his speech how hard he has worked. Given that he is from Cardiff and that he has such an accent, I can absolutely acknowledge that he is a very hard-working individual. He will know that a general election was fought following that decision being taken and before they were introduced.
We all know that the Chancellor prefers governing from the shadows, and this shameless betrayal of previous promises and the shabby manner in which this has been handled in Parliament bear all the hallmarks of the current Chancellor of the Exchequer. Being young in Britain should be a time of opportunity—a time when opportunity knocks. Instead, we have the Chancellor introducing an opportunity tax. His proposals are an assault on aspiration, on opportunity and on those who want to get on in life. That is why we oppose them and also why the Welsh Government, under Labour First Minister, Carwyn Jones, is keeping maintenance grants. By the way, those who say that these proposals affect only England should think again—I say this to Welsh Conservative MPs as well: of the 30,000 students studying at Cardiff University, nearly 9,000 are from England.
Graham Stuart
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that the shadow Minister would not wish to mislead the House, but he has just said that tuition fees were introduced not after the 1997 election, but after the following general election. That is not true. They were introduced in 1998. Having said that they would not introduce them, the Government started the process 12 weeks later.
Green Investment Bank
Debate between Graham Stuart and Kevin Brennan(9 years ago)
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Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that point. In so far as it was necessary to have a publicly controlled and funded green investment bank in the first place, what has changed so that such a bank can now be transferred to the private sector without ending up simply acting like and emulating all the other banks, even if it has a greater degree of green expertise than most? How do we know that it will continue to play this unique role? That is the nub of what we want to hear from the Minister.
A good deal of the GIB’s success has come in the form of delivering what its CEO has called “financing firsts”. To use Mr Kingsbury’s own words:
“We have taken on complex projects that would otherwise not have gone ahead and we have been innovative, helping new technologies into the financial mainstream.”
The Westermost Rough offshore wind farm I referred to earlier is a particularly good example of that. The GIB took a stake in the project in 2014. The project was unique, in that it was the first large-scale application of the new Siemens 6 MW turbines, which are significantly more efficient and better suited to the marine environment than previous turbines deployed to date. Of course, they had not been used in 2014, so there will have been natural caution about a move to a new technology.
The project will help to drive down the cost of offshore wind, which has already fallen by 11% in the past four years, and also has supply chain benefits—including, not least for me as the MP for Beverley and Holderness, the fact that Siemens will manufacture the turbines in Hull and East Riding. Over the coming years, we hope to see the supply chain develop around that initial investment. Indeed, there is hope that other manufacturers might see the supply chain and combination of specialties in Hull as something worth coming to and investing in.
The project simply would not have taken off if only private investors had been involved. When I spoke to Mr Kingsbury earlier in the week, he talked about the fact that DONG Energy, which was pushing the project, wanted to find a partner—it did not want to take on the responsibility and risk alone. It found a Japanese investor, but the partner company was looking for comfort. The comfort it sought came in the form of the Green Investment Bank’s expertise and particular positioning, which provided the reassurance needed for it to invest. The GIB got involved, negotiated—as Mr Kingsbury would say—high returns for high risk and used its expertise to help and give comfort to both the Japanese investor and DONG. The project then went ahead, with the positive ramifications being not only the lowering of the cost of wind energy but the delivery of investment in my local area and beyond.
Likewise, the GIB has joined Aviva Investors in financing NHS energy centres. A good example of that is the £18 million investment the bank made in the £36 million energy centre project for Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. That project is emblematic of the market failure affecting the financing of non-domestic energy-efficiency projects. It required the installation of a combined heat and power unit, a biomass boiler, efficient dual-fuel boilers and heat recovery for medical incineration. The project will lead to a saving of £20 million on the hospital’s energy bill over the 25-year project period and an annual reduction of 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
I know the Secretary of State is confident that the eventual purchaser or purchasers will want to buy the GIB precisely because of its expertise in that kind of work. That is the nub of the Government’s argument. In a helpful briefing earlier this week, Mr Kingsbury told me that he is adamant that the GIB is a marketable proposition precisely because the decision was taken not to use the bank simply to offer cheap Government borrowing to the renewables sector, but to develop specialist teams with deep-sector knowledge that are capable of managing sophisticated and challenging financial deals and negotiating high rates of return, as it did with Westermost Rough. Mr Kingsbury was clear that he believes that makes the bank a great business and an attractive proposition to potential purchasers.
Concerns persist, however, about the fact that in private ownership the GIB may yet come to resemble more conventional competitors, such as Bank of America or Macquarie. I do not want to criticise those institutions in any way, but they are driven by the shareholder value that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) rightly mentioned, and they come to different decisions, take different approaches and have different team assemblies from those of the Green Investment Bank, which has a very specific brief.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman is making a thoughtful presentation on this issue, and he has come to one of the key points. Ministers have responded to questions about the future of the green focus. In his statement, the Secretary of State said that the Government
“also want and expect a privately owned GIB to continue this clear focus on green sectors”.—[Official Report, 15 October 2015; vol. 600, c. 21WS.]
In a written answer to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), the Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise said:
“The Government wants a privately owned GIB to continue this focus on green sectors”.
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to hear something stronger than that before we can be convinced that that will actually happen when the bank goes into private hands?
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman, who has served in Government, will know that even within Government it is not enough to wish that institutions will behave in a certain way. We know that the incentives must be understood. For example, it is necessary to understand how schools will behave—the hon. Gentleman and I have experience of that. It is not enough for people to sign up in name to deliver a certain thing and for politicians to say that they will do it, because they will be moved by the complex sets of incentives in which they find themselves. If we do not understand how those incentives collectively impinge on those institutions, we will not truly understand how the institutions will behave. That is as true for education as it is for a bank.
It is not enough simply to say what we want and what should be aimed for; we have to understand how the framework of incentives for a private owner of the bank will lead them to behave in the way that Ministers and the rest of us want. I am impressed by the chief executive of the Green Investment Bank; I think he is passionate and honest in his belief about where the bank will go. Nevertheless, I want to understand how it will go there.
Kevin Brennan
Yes, I agree. I am tempted to quote Kermit the Frog, who said, “It’s not easy bein’ green.” It is not easy, actually—why make it more difficult? That is the problem with the proposal. Everything that my hon. Friend said is absolutely right. There is nothing currently in the proposal that will make any of those things any easier. That is why all of us, in all parts of the House, are asking the Minister to go away and think again about the current proposal with his colleagues.
I do not intend to rehearse, once again, everything that people have said about the success so far of the Green Investment Bank. I remember it as a very embryonic idea when I was in Government, all those many years ago now. It was certainly mentioned by Alistair Darling in one of his Budgets and it was kicking around the Cabinet Office and BIS when I was a Minister in both those Departments during the previous Government. I was very pleased when the coalition Government brought forward proposals, the Bill was passed and the bank was set up and am also pleased about what a good start it has had—how well it has got under way. There have been criticisms about the straitjacket that the Treasury may have put on the Green Investment Bank. Nevertheless, it has genuinely been able to participate in the financing of projects that otherwise would not have taken place and which make a real contribution, as the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said at the outset, to meeting our commitments under the Climate Change Act. Essentially, it is a good story.
Graham Stuart
It is touching to see the hon. Gentleman paying such tribute to this creation of a Conservative-led, now Conservative, Government, especially because at the end of Labour’s period in power, when he was a Minister, only Luxembourg and Malta had a lower share of renewables as part of their energy mix. I am delighted to say that whatever questions need to be asked about the Green Investment Bank, the record of this Government is a paragon compared with the abject failure of so many years of Labour, sadly.
Kevin Brennan
I have known the hon. Gentleman for a long time. All I will say is that he has let himself down slightly by injecting a slight note of partisanship into our proceedings; I knew it would inevitably come. Given the sort of person I am, of course, I would never respond to anything of that kind.
Kevin Brennan
We were indeed, Mr Crausby. All I will say is this. The notion that, had the Conservatives carried on in power after 1997 we would have had a much greener Government than the Labour one, who passed the Climate Change Act 2008, is one that I find slightly difficult to believe. Anyway, without labouring the point too far, I was saying that in my view—
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is extremely generous. A little partisanship does not go amiss. It is important to have the perspective that the current Prime Minister, then Leader of the Opposition, was the first major party leader to call for a climate change Act. That same day, the Liberal Democrats followed, and it was only because it felt that it was going to be left behind that Labour joined in. It was thanks to the current Prime Minister that we got the Act, and it is within that framework going forward that we can have confidence that we can meet these challenges. That is why it is so important that Ministers get their policies right.
Kevin Brennan
I most certainly will. I am sure that my hon. Friend will lend me his copy so that I can do that as soon as possible. I look forward to receiving it shortly in the post or perhaps by a more green method: he can hand it to me personally.
It is a myth that privatisation is necessary and is the only way the Green Investment Bank could go out and borrow in the marketplace. That could be done, as I understand it, under the current legislation in any case, but because of that financial orthodoxy and the desire, which I understand, for the Government to be able to say what they want to say about their deficit targets, they are extremely reluctant to allow the Green Investment Bank to do it.
As the hon. Member for East Lothian said, in a sense this is a notional concept; it is the sort of debt on the books that really is not of great concern to the City or to the markets. It is part of the obsession of the boffins at the Office for National Statistics that where the Government, in any minor way, have an influence over what an institution such as the Green Investment Bank does, by setting out to limit the types of investment that it makes in any way shape or form, it has to be counted as being in the public sector for the purposes of Government debt.
[Mr Andrew Percy in the Chair]
It is an incredibly esoteric and technical reason for requiring the Green Investment Bank to be privatised even though there is clear evidence of real problems with that process, as we have seen from today’s debate.
The decision to privatise the Green Investment Bank was announced in June. Was it a premature decision? I believe a lot of people thought it was. Many commentators expressed concern at the time. The Government were able at the time at least to give the assurance made by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in his written statement on 25 June, in which he said that he was going to privatise the bank:
“This should bring a number of important benefits, giving GIB greater freedom to operate across a wider range of green sectors in accordance with its green purposes, which are enshrined in legislation.”—[Official Report, 25 June 2015; Vol. 597, c. 27WS.]
A key part of the Secretary of State’s announcement, emphasised in that written statement, was the fact that the green purposes of the Green Investment Bank were protected by the legislation in which its duty to pursue them was enshrined. Obviously, something has gone horribly wrong in the meantime.
The advice from the Office for National Statistics that I referred to earlier has led the Government to say that they intend to repeal the very legislative protection that they prayed in aid when deciding to privatise the bank on 25 June. By October, they had to say, “Do you know what? That is not so important after all. It doesn’t really matter if we repeal all that to make sure that the Green Investment Bank doesn’t appear on the books.” That requires a great deal of thought, scrutiny and debate. I thank the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness for pointing that out—and, indeed, for ensuring that we are having this debate.
I do not think it is unfair to say that so far, the Government have no answer to the question of how we can ensure that the Green Investment Bank maintains its green purposes. The letter from the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills of 15 October, in which he announced his intention to repeal the relevant measures in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, offers no assurance that those green purposes will definitely be maintained. The Secretary of State does say:
“We want to ensure GIB’s green principles continue to underpin its business in future and this will form an important part of our discussions with potential investors.”
That is all very well, and I am sure that potential investors will come along and happily assent to the green purposes of the Green Investment Bank prior to privatisation. That is not the question, however; the question is what happens after privatisation. At that point, when the bank is either fully or partly in the private sector—we do not know the full details of the Government’s proposals for privatisation—how are we to ensure that it maintains its green purposes and does not, as other hon. Members have suggested, simply become yet another bank, albeit a very small bank that can easily be, and is likely to be, gobbled up by somebody else?
Although the Secretary of State says in the letter that the Government want to ensure that the green principles will be maintained, he cannot ensure that they will be. The Government can only entreat; they cannot ensure. We need to hear more about how Ministers will pursue this proposal, and how they will ensure that the green purposes remain if the current proposal is implemented. There has been no answer yet from the Secretary of State or Ministers.
I referred earlier to a written question from the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion to the Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise. In response, the Minister repeated that the Government want a privately owned Green Investment Bank to continue the focus on green sectors, but she did not explain in any way, shape or form how the Government can ensure that it does. We need to know more about that, and I would be interested to hear more from the Minister when he responds to the debate. That absolutely central question has to be answered if we are to have any confidence in what is happening. Otherwise, the situation would seem to be a bit of an unholy mess, and we need to know how the Government will unravel it.
I will ask a few other questions, because there will be a reasonable amount of time for the Minister to respond when I have finished my remarks. Will he admit that he cannot guarantee that privatisation will not dilute the green purposes of the Green Investment Bank? Is the Government’s policy simply: “Fingers crossed”? Have the Government discussed or considered the possibility of some form of penalty for the privatised company should it depart from the green purposes currently enshrined in legislation when the legislative guarantees are removed? Can he confirm that the legislative lock on the green purpose is being repealed purely in order to get the Green Investment Bank off the books? Is that the only reason for removing that lock? Can he tell us a bit more about the stake that the Government expect to retain in the Green Investment Bank following privatisation? Some clarity on that would be greatly welcomed by the House and the country.
What about the £1.8 billion that the Government have set aside to fund the Green Investment Bank and its projects, which is yet to be committed? Do the Government intend that £1.8 billion to be committed to green projects as originally intended, or do they intend that money to be taken back into the Treasury during privatisation? If the latter, what will the Treasury do with that money? Will it simply be set aside against the deficit, or will it be used instead for other green projects and priorities? We need some clarity on that, because some of the claims made about the Green Investment Bank will ring pretty hollow if that £1.8 billion is not devoted to the purposes for which it was intended.
Can the Minister give us a ballpark figure for how much the Government expect to raise through the privatisation of the Green Investment Bank? I do not expect him to be precise, because it is impossible to be precise about that, but can he give us some idea of the parameters that we are talking about? How do the Government intend to avoid the sorts of criticisms that they encountered about the lack of value achieved for taxpayers in the privatisation of Royal Mail? I will not put it any more strongly than that, because we have raised the tone of the debate again since the partisan interventions of the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness; I do not want to lower the tone again or tempt the hon. Gentleman out of his slumber. [Interruption.] He is not asleep; I apologise.
Kevin Brennan
I do not want to tempt the hon. Gentleman out of his contentment. What advice were Ministers given when the guarantee was first enshrined in legislation? Was there any suggestion at that time that putting the green purpose in legislation might jeopardise any future privatisation? Is it possible that when the bank is privatised and its purposes are widened, its funds might be used to invest in things such as fracking?