Energy Bill

Debate between Lord Dixon-Smith and Lord Deben

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I suggest that there is much here for the Government to think about seriously. We need a policy that is clearly consistent in its detail as well as in its broad thrust, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, has rightly suggested that this is an area in which consistency is not readily obvious. We are looking to make clear to everyone the internal consistency that I am sure there is.

My noble friend rightly said that the key issue, as we have been arguing right the way through, is certainty for the future. Surely, if we are going to meet the obligations laid before us under the Climate Change Act, we need to make it possible for people to proceed along a sensible path. We have carbon budgets that take us all the way to 2027—that is where we are—yet we appear to have none of the underpinning activity to ensure that, side by side with that, the energy industry is able to meet the requirements of those carbon budgets. However, Parliament has passed those carbon budgets; they are part of the law of the land, as part of a structure that Parliament decided upon. We ought to make the point in this Committee that Parliament decided that as Parliament. It was not the Government who decided on the Climate Change Act but Parliament. Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Scottish nationalists, Welsh nationalists, Irish Protestants and Labour Members together said, “This is a non-party issue. We as Parliament want this to happen”. I am sure that my noble friend will know that in the House of Commons there were but five votes against that Act, including the two tellers.

I am not by any means saying that the noble Viscount has exactly the right answer to this, but I say to my noble friend that we have to recognise that unless we do something in this area, as in the previous amendment, we stand challenged in defending the claim that we are keeping to the law of the land. That is the issue for this Committee. Our job is to ensure that we obey the law of the land, and the law is very clear here. It has targets and budgets up to 2027, and I do not see how you can meet those if at the same time you are continuing and creating energy sources that are manifestly not in line with that. I hope my noble friend will be able to say at least that he will take this away and look at it again. Any other answer puts this Committee into the real difficulty of having to remind the House of Lords that we have responsibilities in terms of our legal needs to meet the decisions that Parliament as a whole has already come to.

[Lord Dixon-Smith]

My Lords, I have hesitated to intervene in this section for some time, but I feel that I should follow my noble friend Lord Deben in this matter. The truth is that the 2050 target for the electricity generating industry is zero. That is the reality of the economy that we have to head into. To assume that we can have gas plants running at this level five years short of that is perhaps acceptable if they are constructed in the next short timescale, with a view to them going out of use in 2045, but it will not be acceptable for something constructed in 2040. It is as simple and basic as that.

The purpose of having a discussion in a Committee like this on a Bill like this is to enable Members to raise these types of inconsistencies and for the Government to say, and I hope that the Minister will: “There is actually a point here. We will go away and think very seriously about this”. If gas generation is to continue past 2050, it will have to have CCS fitted to it and will have to work pretty well perfectly. My opinion—I think I said this at Second Reading—is that we should stop messing about with CCS in coal because it is not going to get us there. It may get us there with gas, or we have to have other forms of generation. That is now the law of the land and we are not going to set that aside. Frankly, one would have to say to our noble friends speaking for the department that if they flatly reject this, they are asking for amendments to be brought forward on Report that will then have to be voted on, and I would rather they did not do that. They ought to be able to arrive at a more reasoned approach.

Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Dixon-Smith and Lord Deben

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

I oppose the amendment, first, because it suggests that the Treasury will be able to do things that even it cannot do. I am always suspicious of requests for the Treasury to do something, but this seems to go beyond the normal. In the interesting discussion between the noble Lord on this side of the Committee and the noble Lord, Lord Lea, on whether one situation is more elastic than another, we missed the important point: people make very different decisions, which are not necessarily connected with their income. Many of us have had the experience of canvassing in not the richest parts of constituencies and being hit by a wall of heat. That is in circumstances where people are clearly in the quartile to which the noble Lord, Lord Lea, referred. As I said, people make very different decisions. To ask the Treasury to produce some sort of documentation in which it applies these requirements to so wide a range of individual decision-making seems to me not sensible.

Secondly, the amendment does not fit into the whole context of the Bill and what we are trying to do. I say to my noble friend Lady Noakes that of course we want to have an effect on the consumer; that is part of what we have to do. However, the idea that there is some secret thing that we are not putting forward misses the point. The point is that we do not pay the proper price of our energy because we do not pay the price for destroying our climate. I know that my noble friend does not believe that the climate is changing, but most of us do. In those circumstances, we would do great harm to a future generation if we allowed people to go on treating energy as if it did not have these costs. Therefore, those of us who believe in a marketplace have to make sure that the market pays the costs.

We ought to be a bit bolder in telling people what we are about; that we are hoping to provide alternative means which do not destroy the future for our children and our grandchildren. The idea of trying to twist the argument in order to say that it is somehow unfair on a statistical fault is one that I have always found so difficult in politics. Of course it is true that if you have a smaller income, any increase has a bigger effect. It says nothing to say that. You can put up the price of anything and it is bound to affect those on the poorest incomes by its nature. That is not a statistical statement but a fact of life which is obvious to all.

The question is: can we take alternative measures in order to help those who are most hurt by this? However, you do not do that by providing even those very erudite people who clearly speak in the pubs of Burton with the material suggested in both these amendments. I cannot believe—although it may be true of Burton, it certainly is not true of any town that I know—that this would be the subject of discussion in the saloon bar, let alone the public bar. The fact of the matter is that there would be a general moan about the increase in prices.

We have to face the problem that if we are to deliver a world in which our children are able to live comfortably, we have to change our energy arrangements. In this Bill, we are doing that to help poor people to have the kind of housing which does not need as much heat. That is part of what we are trying to do and I hope that the Minister will be extremely robust in her reply to the noble Lord, Lord Lea. This seems to me to be both out of date and not a sensible use of Treasury time. I would like to see the Treasury getting down to understanding why on earth it cannot allow sensible borrowing from the private sector to improve energy efficiency. It pretends that that is somehow or other on the books when it could quite easily be off them.

There are a lot of things that the Treasury can be doing but it should not be doing this and we certainly should not kid ourselves that we either make these changes or, in fact, leave the world a worse place. I am a Conservative; I believe in passing on to the next generation something better than I have received. That is why I am very much in favour of this Bill and I hope that we will be really tough about the proposals in this amendment.

[Lord Dixon-Smith]

Perhaps I might intervene after my two noble friends, partly because I would like to introduce a little bit of hope. I should say to the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that in fact the consumer pays for it all. We should not duck on that. Even if they do not pay for it through their use of the fuel, they do so through their taxes. The consumer has to pay the total bill, one way or another. Of course, through the tax system we share the bill out a little differently from the actual consumption figures, which are what I really want to talk about. My noble friend Lord Deben brings me to my feet, because I want to look backwards instead of forwards.

The fact of my life is that in 1960, I paid one shilling and thre’pence and three-eighths of a penny for a gallon—that is, five litres—of farm red tractor diesel. Petrol prices were commensurate but the duty rates were of course higher. In the case of petrol, prices have risen as they have with red diesel oil but the duties have risen even further.

Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Dixon-Smith and Lord Deben

Monday 24th January 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Dixon-Smith]

My Lords, I feel provoked to intervene. We are making the subject far too complex. I thought that I heard, a few minutes ago, that the golden rule of the Green Deal would be that the energy savings would equal the cost increases. If I did not hear that, I am mistaken, but I am fairly sure that I did.

If that is the case, let us consider a situation where one tenant leaves and a new tenant comes in. Provided that rule applies, there is no disadvantage or, indeed, advantage to the new tenant in saying that he does not want to be part of the deal. If the deal is cost-neutral, why is he likely to refuse to participate?

I also think we need to bear in mind that word of mouth is a very powerful force. Once the scheme begins to operate on any sort of scale, I suspect that there will be a great deal of support from those who initially participate in it. They will all be telling their friends that they have a warmer house; that their energy bills are at a new level; and that the improvements apply to both tenants and landlords. I suspect that we will get to the point after a time where tenants start to demand their landlord to make the improvements if they cannot themselves. I am therefore optimistic about the way this scheme will go, and we should not raise too many potential difficulties. The difficulties are there, I admit, but in reality, once the scheme begins to take off, it will develop its own momentum and the nightmare scenarios being portrayed will not in fact exist.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I do not think we ought to take it quite as simply as that. One of the things we learned from the Warm Homes operation—which I had the privilege of introducing—was that many people live, as far as their heating is concerned, to the level that they can afford. If their house becomes better insulated, what happens is not that they have a lower bill: they merely warm the house better than they were able to do before. In other words, this is not as simple a mathematical equation as one might think.

I am worried about the concept of a sort of holiday. If someone enters a tenancy where the agreement has been made already, they will know the terms of the tenancy: it will be part of what they are offered. It does not seem possible that anyone can have a holiday in those circumstances, because that is what they joined in the first place. I realise that we have chosen to concentrate on people at the bottom end, with perhaps little choice in the tenancy they have. I very much agree with the comments made about some landlords. However, in my experience of having had a lot of landlords in my former constituency, a good number were decent. In those circumstances all I am suggesting is that when people enter into an agreement, they know what the situation is, and there certainly should not be a holiday.

The only circumstance seems to be the first one, where people are actually able to control the heating bills. If you have better insulation, you can decide whether you are going to continue with the amount of heating you had before—in other words the price you had before—but get more benefit from it because the house is better insulated. Alternately, you may decide—and many people do—that you would prefer to get even warmer. I am sure people who have gone canvassing know that there are certain houses where you bang on the door and cannot stop yourself stepping back from the wave of heat that hits you. It is not always true that we are sensible about our heating. The fact is that these things are within the control of the tenant, and I find it difficult to understand why we are going down this line. Tenants have a good deal here, paid for by the state, and it is absolutely right; but do not let ourselves get into a position in which we find that tenants are able to turn up the heat and then ask for a holiday because it does not work out as they thought it would.