Feed-in Tariffs (Amendment) (No. 3) Order 2015

Debate between Lord Deben and Viscount Ridley

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I was not here at the start of the debate, but I hope the House will indulge me if I add a few short remarks. The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, said that the policy of feed-in tariffs has been highly successful. What do we mean by that? It has been highly successful in taking money off people and giving it to other people. As my noble friend Lord Cavendish said, something in the order of £1 billion a year is now going through this programme. It is going, on the whole, from the poor to the rich because electricity bills are a bigger part of poor people’s bills than they are of rich people’s bills, and most of the people who can afford to put up the upfront costs of drawing down feed-in tariffs are on the whole rich people.

That is not the measure of success surely by which we should judge this policy. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, just said that it should be judged by its impact on the climate. So how much has it reduced carbon dioxide emissions? How much bang for that enormous billion pound buck are we getting? The answer is: a trivial effect. We know that solar power, which is the bulk of the feed-in tariffs, produced 1% of our electricity last year. Therefore, the emissions reduction cannot be more than 1%. It is probably a lot less because of back-up and other issues. We know roughly where it is and we can therefore make a rough calculation as to the costs per tonne of carbon we are buying these omissions at.

The figure for those who were lucky enough to get Ed Miliband’s first tranche of feed-in tariffs is close to £1,000 a tonne. Not even the noble Lord, Lord Stern, thinks the social cost of carbon is anything like that. He says that it is about $29 per tonne. More recent estimates, because of cuts in the feed-in tariff, show that that number has now come down to something like £200 a tonne, but it is still 10 times higher than the social cost of carbon. We do not have a successful policy. We are doing it on the backs of relatively poor people. It surprises me that the two parties opposite should in this case be taking the side of the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than Robin Hood.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, as chairman of the climate change committee, I declare an interest. I also declare a clear view that my job is to be entirely independent on these issues. Therefore, it is with care that I am going to try to navigate the discussion that we have had so far.

The climate change committee has clearly stated that we have a requirement, if we are to meet our statutory ends, to meet first of all the fourth carbon budget and then the fifth carbon budget which has been presented to the Government. The Government have committed themselves to the fourth carbon budget, and they must legislate on the fifth before the end of June. That is in the Act. No doubt, Ministers will be thinking very carefully about how they will do that because there is no elbow room in the fifth carbon budget. It is as generous as it is possible to be while still meeting the targets that were laid down—reducing our emissions by 80% by 2050—not by the climate change committee but by the Act itself.

In dealing with the Government’s proposals here today, it is not for the climate change committee to argue that the Government should not do this, should do that, or should do the other. It is for the committee to remind the Minister that the Government are committed to delivering reductions in emissions. The mechanism used must indeed be for the Government—that is the democratic balance we have established in the Climate Change Act.

Climate Change

Debate between Lord Deben and Viscount Ridley

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords—