Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Barker of Battle and Martin Horwood
Gregory Barker
I would be very happy to come to Stoke-on-Trent. It is important that as well as having an ambitious target we understand its impact, particularly on manufacturing industry and efficiency in a global marketplace.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
One of the most important European initiatives for our future energy supply and the efficient implementation of renewable energy is the European super-grid. The previous Labour Government equivocated over the super-grid; what is the view of this Government?
Gregory Barker
We can see the absolute merits of a super-grid, but we do not yet have a fully evolved policy. I am sure the hon. Gentleman will play a key role in helping that policy emerge.
Energy Efficiency
Debate between Lord Barker of Battle and Martin Horwood(14 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Gregory Barker
That is an excellent subject for an Adjournment debate, but perhaps we have just had it. I entirely accept the hon. Lady’s point, but ultimately the private sector is the best engine of ingenuity and growth, and it is not the role of Government to pick winners such as that company and give them special treatment. However, I agree that there is a role for Government in creating an enabling, encouraging and supportive framework for enterprise. I can assure her that increased cross-cutting work has been taking place across Government, involving colleagues from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Treasury and the Department for Education, to ensure that the right frameworks and the appropriate support are in place.
I shall now draw the House back to my speech. What needs to change? As a first step, I am announcing today my intention not only to extend CERT, but to refocus it radically. It obliges energy companies to carry out energy-efficiency measures in people’s homes and it has historically involved a range of other things too. CERT will be extended until the end of 2012, but the original scheme has not been without criticism, much of it justified. So CERT will be refocused on those most cost-effective measures that can make a real difference to the energy efficiency of our constituents’ homes, the most obvious being insulation.
Over the new extension period we will require the big energy companies to deliver far more insulation than originally planned, and the new target on lagging lofts alone will be the equivalent to covering Wembley football pitch more than 35,000 times. The new extension of CERT will work in tandem with the roll-out of our pioneering green deal. In order to bring greater focus to the project, I will insist that more than two thirds of this new carbon target must be delivered through approved, professionally installed loft, cavity wall and solid wall insulation. We will act to stamp out the mistakes of the past. We will introduce a complete ban on the subsidy of compact fluorescent lighting, thereby ending the farce of people having cupboards full of light bulbs which save no energy at all. We will go further. We are actively talking to industry about similar restrictions on other low-value gadgets and appliances. There will be no short cuts or get-outs for the big six under this Government.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
I welcome the Minister to his responsibilities. On low-energy light bulbs, he is right to criticise aspects of the CERT scheme, but one promising new development was the inclusion of the replacement of halogen lights, which are extremely energy-inefficient, with new, more efficient forms of technology. I declare an interest, because two companies in my constituency promote alternatives to halogen lighting.
Gregory Barker
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that some very exciting developments are taking place in lighting, not the least of which will be light-emitting diode—LED—technology in the longer term. However, we must be brutal and realistic in the use of CERT; we must opt for the most effective, most value-for-money carbon abatement schemes. That means opting for loft insulation, because any exercise that one chooses to undertake shows that key insulation delivered to our constituents’ homes offers the best value for money and the best use in terms of carbon abatement. We have to be far more focused on that. I checked how many light bulbs had been distributed as a result of the previous CERT scheme and I found that the answer was a phenomenal number. This begs the old question of how many light bulbs it takes to change a Labour Government—the answer turned out to be 262 million.
Martin Horwood
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. One answer is clearly the green deal, which will incentivise private companies to invest in such training themselves. Apprenticeships might be part of the solution, too. However, when I asked Gloucester college, a forward-looking and innovative FE college based partly in my constituency and partly in Gloucester, what was the single biggest step that could be taken, the answer was not to fund extra courses. It suggested allowing FE colleges that provide such training to accredit their own courses, rather than having to defer constantly to universities. I commend that recommendation to Ministers and their colleagues in other Departments. The college believed that that would enable it to respond much faster to market situations and to design courses much more flexibly, and that it was the single most important change that could be made. I hope that provides an answer to the hon. Gentleman.
On new buildings at least, the other possible pitfall is the rather prescriptive and increasingly complex code for sustainable homes. I welcomed the code when the previous Government introduced it, and generally, as an instrument of policy, it is a welcome development. However, it has been painfully slow at raising energy efficiency levels in new buildings, and it risks becoming so over-prescriptive that it defeats our objectives.
I know the Secretary of State well, and he is no friend of over-prescription; he prefers the creation of the right market environment, which would avoid the need for such complexity and enable the process to move faster. Instead of having standards of such complex design, perhaps we should reinforce one or two simple measures—for instance, a measure of kilowatt-hours per square metre for every building, old or new. To follow up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main), that would be easy to communicate to the public and easy for estate agents, politicians and everybody else to understand. It might become a powerful measure of energy efficiency, with no need to prescribe such complex details as we find in the current code.
This morning there was a round-table discussion hosted by The House Magazine, and one point repeatedly came up. Examples were mentioned of earlier civilisations—even the Romans—that were very good at preserving openness and light in buildings and making them energy-efficient through the communal use of heat; the renewable heat issue has already been mentioned. More traditional wooden buildings within the Arctic circle still seem to require less energy to heat than many buildings in this country. I know from my own experience of villages in India where buildings made basically out of mud were beautifully cool in summer and beautifully warm in winter. They were very energy-efficient, but used materials that would probably not be allowed under current building regulations. Incidentally, I am not suggesting that we should all start living in yurts or anything like that; that would be a bit too Liberal.
Martin Horwood
Indeed.
We should be wary that over-complication and over-prescription could risk the defeat of our own objectives, and lead to our prescriptions to the industry for low-carbon homes being too inflexible and therefore too expensive. More flexibility might enable the private sector to deliver some of the objectives more simply and efficiently.
I shall now talk about smart metering. I was a shadow environment spokesman under the previous Government, and assorted people lobbied me heavily—as they did my opposite numbers, I suspect—about their particular designs of smart meter. I am aware that the field is very competitive. I make no judgment between the different systems, but I am increasingly aware that smart metering covers a multitude of sins. There are tough decisions ahead for the ministerial team about exactly which designs we might favour.
At the most basic level, we are talking about something that just generates information that can be read out on a display, and might be reflected on a bill. That would be useful, but rather limited. More sophisticated systems influence the timing of devices such as washing machines and dishwashers so that they operate at different times and improve the efficiency of the whole household.
The most interactive technology feeds real-time information back to the energy companies themselves and could improve the efficiency of the whole network. I would draw a line at the kind of systematic smart metering that enabled people to switch suppliers minute by minute, which I know has been suggested by some hon. Members. The machine itself searches for the best deal and tariff at any particular minute. That would lead to indescribable confusion over billing and might destabilise businesses from week to week. However, we need to look at the various different technologies and be ambitious about what smart metering can deliver.
On energy markets and pricing, the Minister rightly said that we suffered from a plethora of different energy efficiency programmes under the last Government. Many were well intentioned and individually well designed, but there was a lot of stopping and starting and different, confusing and overlapping requirements. Last Christmas I visited the Cheltenham Royal Mail sorting office and found postal workers falling over heaps of low-energy light bulbs as one energy company in particular had mailed out huge numbers of the things at the last possible moment. I am not surprised that the Minister said that 262 million had been supplied.
In a way, I suppose that the bulbs were a good thing, but they spectacularly missed the point. While price still rewards energy consumption, it will always be difficult to mobilise the energy companies really to get behind energy efficiency. For the longer term, I commend to the Minister one other Lib Dem policy that did not quite make it into the coalition agreement. It was to take energy bills and set a historic baseline amount for each household, taking into account the number of children and so on, which would be reflected in the historic consumption. Thereafter, the cost to consumers would rise if energy consumption rose, but the energy company would not be allowed to profit from that rise.
Instead, the surplus would be taken, for example, into a fund administered by the company for energy efficiency or environmental programmes. At a stroke, that would break the link between profit and increased energy use; it would actually cost the energy company money if energy use rose. The company would have a direct financial business case for increasing energy efficiency. That would be hugely simpler than all the complicated schemes in which the companies were set targets and sought various ways—some of them rather untestable and unverifiable—of trying to meet Government objectives. If the Minister adopts that policy, I really will think that he is turning into a Liberal Democrat.
If the coalition is to deliver on these ambitious targets, and on its ambition to be the greenest Government yet, we will need, in the Minister’s words, to change the game and be really ambitious, bold and radical. I fully expect that we will be.