Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill, which builds on the work of the Labour Government, who did many good things, but it needs some important amendments. I am an emeritus professor of climate modelling from University College and vice-president of Globe, which means meeting other legislators around the world. I worked in the CEGB once as a trade union branch secretary; I do not often claim that, but I thought that it might be relevant today. Subsequently, I was chairman of an environmental consultancy company. I am a capitalist, a trade unionist and an environmentalist, but I am not an economist, and I shall make some remarks about economics.

The global climate and the environment are changing faster than ever before in many thousands of years. Much of this is due to human effects. We are seeing this dramatically in the reduction in the amount of ice and of forests, and we are seeing huge variability of temperature and precipitation around the world. The world’s climate is a very complex process. I remind noble Lords of a very far-sighted speech made in the House of Lords in 1853 on the importance of studying the Gulf Stream and its effects, which led to the setting up of the Met Office. Some Members of this House are definitely 150 years ahead of the times, while others are about 150 years behind the times, as they cannot understand some of the physics of the 1850s. But that is the variability of this House. The important point is that variability in climate is leading in some parts of the world to really dramatic and dreadful changes in the environment, and the consequences on people.

Europe’s climate is in a curious part of the world, which is mild for much of the time but with a small change can become like Labrador, as we have been seeing. In the summer, of course, we sometimes have huge heat-waves from Russia. An interesting point about climate change is that we are likely to have more of this variability in future. Our policies for planning and housing must therefore be comprehensive and imaginative enough to deal with this full range of likely impacts, both cold—which many people have been talking about—and heat.

The global emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing much of this change are increasing despite the wish and aim to reduce them. China’s greenhouse gas emissions are increasing by a factor of two by 2050, although China is becoming considerably more efficient. If it were not, those emissions might increase by a factor of three, as noble colleagues have mentioned. The International Energy Agency recently commented that emissions around the world are expected to have a three or four-degree temperature rise, which was implicitly endorsed at Cancun.

Nevertheless, unless the countries of the world have a policy of reducing emissions, we could get into even worse situations. The UK’s contribution is therefore important. The UK’s plan to reduce its total emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 was ambitious, and I agree a little with the noble Lord, Lord Lawson: if other countries are not making anything like that reduction, we might need to look at that in this period. However, we currently have a goal and we should stick to it.

The Bill is welcome because it provides measures not only for energy, which I will come back to, but for conservation through housing. I did not mention that I was once a city councillor in Cambridge in the early 1970s. I went to a conference in Germany, where I saw houses. Whether they were the erste, zweite or dritte classes of Sozialwohnungen, they all had much better insulation and windows than anything in Britain. Why do we have such poor housing in Britain? The economists and the Treasury did not allow local authorities to build the kind of houses that they were building in Germany. I hope that the Treasury has changed its entire heart through the Bill and will finally allow British people to have decently insulated houses. It is because of this Treasury-driven lack of insulation that we have the illness and problems we have now. That was not a very clever piece of foresight for the National Health Service.

Under the Bill, we will have a system in which you can examine houses with advice and assessors. They can look at the insulation and the heating system. It is important that the heating and insulation must also be related to the ventilation. We have had some discussions about this. I ask the Minister whether the funding will also enable houses to have more modern and appropriate window ventilation. The ventilation must of course be suitable for very hot conditions.

A particularly difficult point is that a large quantity of our public housing is on flood plains. Flood plains are of course cheap areas in which to build houses. Some are on coasts, where they have driving rain. Flooding is a great difficulty. In Bracknell, where the Met Office used to be, council houses were flooded every two to three years. Of course, this has a devastating effect if you have insulation in the walls. I was talking to my son-in-law this morning, who knows these things, and I gather that there are special ways of insulating houses with tiny balls rather than insulation material. That way, if there is flooding, it does not devastate the insulation system. These are the kinds of things that the Government must consider. They will need very good assessors to do that.

The Green Deal will not work unless we have extremely good and high-level training. We need centres of information all around the country. We discussed this again in a pre-meeting that the Minister kindly arranged. This must happen through local colleges of technology and community colleges so that people can be trained and get information from there. This will be the centre in which this essentially domestic revolution develops.

I have mentioned social housing, which is one very good way of introducing energy efficiency through district heating. I spoke to the Greater London Authority yesterday. It has a system of what it calls low-carbon district heating, in which there are considerable economies. You can also use other technologies. For example, heat pumps could be used for such purposes. One of the reasons why power companies have found it difficult to work with the planning and local authorities on these matters is that, if they install a combined power and heating or cooling system in housing, this will not be guaranteed over periods of 20 or 30 years. Some element of the Bill should meet that objective.

The Bill goes on to deal with the question of nuclear waste. Further to the boasting—if that is not an unparliamentary word to use in this House—of the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, we may have had a policy since the 1980s but, as a result of it and as others have said, we do not have a leading nuclear industry, a leading wind industry or some other things. During this period we did not make the investments that we needed to. The Government are now taking forward nuclear, and the conversion of the Secretary of State in this direction is a welcome development in current British politics. One of the important points is that decommissioning is part of this policy.

I was in China in early November. China is now thinking about sourcing its nuclear—if you can imagine it—from sea water. The Japanese now have a system of producing uranium from sea water at $200 a kilo, compared to $80 a kilo from mining, which may be revolutionary. However, even if you do that, you will still have waste. Therefore, in China there are also very advanced systems of thinking about hybrid methods of fusion and fission to deal with the waste. In 20 years the technology will certainly change in China, which is an important part of looking forward. We should not freeze in legislation a particular technology.

Finally, in Part 4 of the Bill there is a point that was not made in the Minister’s introduction. This is a Bill to empower and, we hope, use more effectively the knowledge and know-how of the Coal Authority. As far as I am aware, the Coal Authority has considerable land holdings, some of which I have seen near Stoke. Some of these are on hilly terrain, which could be well used for wind energy. I am pleased that the Bill includes the idea that the authority will become more innovative in using its resources. In the Netherlands, one of the most progressive and important parts of the economy is the company Dutch State Mines, which has done exactly the same sort of thing. It used to own the old mining areas and has turned into a world-leading company. Maybe that will be one of the interesting developments from the Bill.