Energy Prices and Profits

Debate between Lord Lilley and David Mowat

Wednesday 4th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lilley]

That is the average of both generating profits and distributions profits. It is in table 6 of the report, which I am sure the right hon. Lady has read assiduously. She can check it if she wishes.

The right hon. Lady refused to answer a question about what a correct level of profit would be, but I cannot believe that she thinks profits are more than twice as high as they need to be. Even if we were to halve the profit level from 7.6% to 3.8%, the effect on prices would be very small compared with the huge increase we have seen. As we all know, the increase is largely the result of the increase in fuel prices, which is outside the control of Governments.

The suggestion that all energy companies have seen massive rises in profits is also dispelled by table 4, on page 27 of the report. Indeed, the Committee referred to the figure given in the Labour party’s motion of an increase in profits of £3 billion, which I think comes from Consumer Focus. The report states:

“Table 4, however, doesn’t appear to support this.”

Table 4 shows what has happened to companies’ profit margins from 2007 to 2011. For EDF, the average profit margin was 15.7% and went down to 8.5%. For SSE, it went from 4.2% to just 0.8%. For British Gas Centrica, it has gone down from 7.3% to 5.6%. For Scottish Power, it has come down from 11% to 4.4%. For E.ON, it has come down from 6.8% to minus 2.2%. For npower, it has come down from 12.2% to minus 5.5%. Therefore, the idea that there is huge scope for us to bring down excess profits, and thereby prices, through regulation or improved competition is sadly not correct, and it is dishonest to pretend that it is.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I think we are using the term “profit” quite loosely, particularly the Opposition. What matters in judging the profitability or effectiveness of these companies is return on capital employed. That is how they measure themselves for the investments they make and the returns they get. I do not believe there is any evidence that the return on capital employed has increased in the last five or six years. If it had, those on the Opposition Front Bench would put that to the House.

[Mr Lilley]

My hon. Friend, as always, is absolutely correct. People would do well to note what he has said.

The most important issue to our constituents is the cost of living, and within the cost of living it is energy prices. Energy prices have largely been driven up by factors outside our control. The one factor within our control is the cost of renewables. We are hypocritical if we shed salt tears for our constituents while we, through the only area where we have discretion, are driving those costs up higher and are set to do so much further still in future.

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Debate between Lord Lilley and David Mowat

Thursday 18th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Lilley]

Well, that is fine. Let it go ahead.

[David Mowat]

I just wanted to put my tuppence-worth into the example from Tanzania. If that were the way forward at scale, China would not be building 50 unabated coal stations every year. That is what is happening, but it does not mean that solar power cannot power laptops in Tanzania. The proof is in the pudding. I want to go back to the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley). Where does he see nuclear?

[Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)]

Order. Interventions are too long.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lilley]

I take all those points, and I probably did give the wrong date for the Chinese. However, I remember also seeing their figure for further ahead, which was not much higher. There would be a large increase in the amount of renewables, but not in the percentage of renewables, and still the vast bulk of their energy will come from conventional sources.

We can make ourselves feel better by bigging up in our mind the amount of renewables and by getting warm feelings about the sight of solar panels bringing light to small villages in isolated parts of Africa. However, if we seriously imagine that these great jamborees will result in an agreement by the countries in the developing world to constrain significantly their ability to grow by constraining their ability to use fossil fuels, we are living in a dream world, and everything that has happened in this debate suggests that the majority of Members present for it are part of that dream.

[David Mowat]

I will make a quick intervention to point out that we are saying that fossil fuel usage is a developing world phenomenon—it is not. The EU is increasing its use of coal. Last year, the increase of coal use in the EU was significant. For example, it is one of the reasons why Germany has much higher carbon usage than we do, both per head and per unit of GDP.

[Mr Lilley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, Germany is moving away from renewables, if one counts nuclear as a renewable. It is moving away from nuclear. It is planning to close down all its nuclear plants, and by and large that will mean replacing them with fossil fuel plants instead. [Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) want to intervene?

Jobs and Growth in a Low-carbon Economy

Debate between Lord Lilley and David Mowat

Monday 5th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lilley]

We have absolutely no desire to have what is essentially a sub-prime bank in our area. The idea that we can boost—[Interruption.] It will be a sub-prime bank, because the Government have said that it will not accept prime investment opportunities, which will be left to the market. The bank will be able to lend only to those opportunities that are not attractive to industry—despite huge subsidies, quotas, publicity and fashion. In short, it will be able to lend only to the sub-prime opportunities, so let us hope that it is a long time coming. We do not want it in Hitchin.

The idea that we can boost productivity by replacing competitive sources of energy with uncompetitive sources of energy is so ludicrous that it is strange it has passed without comment today. We have a need for electricity generation. If we invest a certain amount of money in wind, which is four times as expensive as gas turbines, we will get for a given investment only one quarter of the electricity that we would if we relied on gas turbines. With onshore generation we will get half the electricity that we would from gas, so the idea that we can boost growth through low-productivity, high-cost industries is nonsense, and we should cease deluding ourselves that we can. It has been suggested that we might be able to generate jobs in the supply industries for those forms of energy, but it is nonsense to suppose that subsidising the use of renewable technologies automatically results in an increase in the domestic production of equipment for them. It manifestly has not; there is no reason to suppose that it should; the Government are not allowed to give subsidies to those equipment suppliers under EU rules; and in any case the record of Governments trying to pick winners is lamentable and miserable, so it is probably just as well that they cannot.

[David Mowat]

The thrust of my right hon. Friend’s comments—that we cannot generate jobs with lower-productivity activities—is right, but if we accept that the Climate Change Act 2008 is right also and we have to decarbonise, we reach a position whereby we ought to decarbonise ruthlessly with the cheapest option in front of us, which takes us to nuclear power rather than to some of the others.

[Mr Lilley]

As one of the five people who opposed the 2008 Act, I do not necessarily accept my hon. Friend’s premise, but I will for the purposes of debate, and if we are going to meet those targets we should do so as efficiently as possible. Nuclear is one of the best ways, but the cheapest of all is gas turbines, and gas might become cheaper in this country if we exploit the potential for shale gas, which has halved the cost of gas in the United States.

Solar Power (Feed-in Tariff)

Debate between Lord Lilley and David Mowat

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lilley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the argument that such investment creates jobs is—as the Secretary of State will know, being a distinguished economist—completely bogus. We have a fixed amount of money. We can either spend it on gas, oil or nuclear, or we can spend it on solar. If we spend £8 billion on either, we will create roughly the same number of jobs. Spending £8 billion on solar means that many fewer jobs in gas, nuclear, coal and oil. We have not created any net jobs across the economy by means of this subsidy. One never does.

[David Mowat]

My right hon. Friend is making an extremely powerful speech. In addition to his point about the allocation of £8 billion, is he aware of the recent peer-reviewed research from Imperial college—it was the subject of a Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology note—that said that nuclear power has one third the CO₂ emissions per kWh of solar over its life cycle? That is an extraordinary statistic, which goes right to the heart of the policy.

[Mr Lilley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. George Monbiot pointed out in his original article that it costs about £3 to save a tonne of CO₂ by investing in geothermal energy, and £8 by building a nuclear power station, whereas the scheme that we are talking about costs more like £800 to save a tonne of CO₂.

Not only do we not create any net jobs; we also create only a tenth of the amount of electricity by investing £8 billion in solar than we would by investing in nuclear or something else.

Immigration

Debate between Lord Lilley and David Mowat

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lilley]

In a moment, as I want to finish answering the point that was raised.

I am not suggesting that certain categories of skilled workers could not be used during a temporary shortage while domestic employees were being trained, or that there could not be a skills transfer when the skills that were required could not, by their very nature, be acquired domestically or through training. We have traditionally allowed companies to import workers for the purposes of skills transfers when the skills concerned are company-specific.

Let us say that IBM is setting up a factory here. It has an IBM way of doing things. Initially, it will need to bring in the IBM accountant to show British accountants how to run the accounts and the financial system. Those running the production line may have to bring in IBM production engineers to train British engineers in their ways of doing things. It is not possible to buy such company-specific skills on the market; they must be imported temporarily. However, because the people who have transferred the skills invariably return, the transfer does not result in net migration. That is very different from allowing cheap skills into this country.

In a blog that is influential in the IT industry—here I declare an interest—the author of the Holway report constantly hammers home the fact that we are moving slowly towards circumstances in which fewer and fewer entry-level jobs are available in the industry. Last year 9,000 skilled IT workers were brought into the country by a handful of companies under the intra-company transfer scheme. That is not transferring skills from a company to domestic residents; it is importing cheap labour. However, we allow it, although as a result the IT sector has one of the highest rates of unemployment in industry. The Government must think seriously about the issue, and must not form policy on the basis of slogans such as “Skilled work is good” and “Open border to skilled workers”. That is not good in the long run if it means that fewer of those who are already here acquire skills, experience and expertise.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

Using the analogy of the IT industry, my right hon. Friend has pointed out that unemployment exists, and that there is a demand from a small number of companies for a large number of people to come into the country. The corollary is that, in a process called outsourcing, we move jobs to other parts of the world. That is just part of being a free trade country. If we wish to position ourselves as leaders in terms of free trade, as the Prime Minister said 10 days ago, the corollary is a degree of freedom of movement. There has been a massive skills failure in the country over the past decade and a half. Most of the 180,000 entrants are for STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. If we are unable to train people ourselves, it behoves us to allow them into the country in a way that benefits us.

[Mr Lilley]

My hon. Friend’s intervention prompts a number of questions. For instance, why do we not train people?

For a while I was chairman of a small German company as a result of a merger, and the first thing that we did was bring in British employees to train its employees. It is considered automatic: every company, even a small company with only 200 employees, trains people. Sadly, that culture does not exist in this country. All that we think of doing is importing people from abroad, or possibly stealing them from our competitors down the road. At least if we steal them from our competitors down the road, we have to bid up the salaries for the particular skill involved. We encourage more people to acquire that skill, and as a result increase the number of people with such skills in our economy. However, the idea that we should assume passively that this country alone in the world cannot train people to acquire skills that semi-developed countries seem to be able to train their people to acquire strikes me as a defeatism that is sad and deplorable.

I hope we will recognise that there are some skills that we should allow into the country: entrepreneurial skills, for example, I rather doubt whether entrepreneurship can be taught. Some people are natural entrepreneurs while others are not. That is fair enough: if someone has proven success as an entrepreneur abroad, we should let him in, with some of the capital that he has acquired. Only a small number of people will be involved, however. That is not mass immigration. It will generate a lot of jobs and it is a sensible thing to do, so let us do it. However, we must distinguish between those sorts of skills and the sorts of skills we can enable the existing population of all ethnic origins to acquire, so that the well-being of those already here improves.