Energy Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lord Lilley and Graham Stuart

Monday 18th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lilley]

Indeed, not universally on the Opposition Benches. It puzzles me that the political class is committed to such perverse policies. Then I found a possible hint of an explanation, when someone mentioned to me, Madam Deputy Speaker, a book that I am sure that, like me, you have not read but have heard about called “Forty Shades of Grey”. It is apparently a mildly pornographic—

[Graham Stuart]

Fifty, not forty, I think.

[Mr Lilley]

It is apparently “Fifty Shades of Grey”. [Interruption.] Have I any higher bids? I have not read it; I have not even read the title of it. However, the surprising popularity of that book demonstrated that sadomasochism, or the infliction of pain and the submission to pain, are far more widespread tastes than we had previously thought. It seems to me that in the political sphere there is a similar belief that it would be popular to inflict pain or submit to pain by green policies. We might say that what we are suffering from in this country is “Fifty shades of green”.

The trouble is that Members who are committed to this doctrine measure the success of their policies not by what they will achieve, but by what they will cost, and not by how effectively they will reach a given destination, but by how onerous are the burdens they can place on Britain, British households and British business.

That pain is very significant. The Committee on Climate Change worked out the costs of climate change policies in 2014-15, and it came out at about £250 per household. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) may disagree with the Committee on Climate Change, which he helped set up; if so, please intervene—but of course he cannot sustain his position. That figure is set to double by 2020, to double again probably by 2030, and to double again by 2050. That is the direct effect on household budgets both through their energy bills and the cost of more expensive products because energy prices feed through to product costs.

There is also the cost on jobs. We have lost the aluminium industry already, and earlier today we were seeing the serious the impact of job losses in the steel industry. Of course, the basic reason why there are job losses in the steel industry is that there is a worldwide glut of supply, but the reason that falls excessively on this country is that our industrial energy costs are higher than those anywhere else in Europe. That is why we are suffering disproportionately at the moment. I am reliably informed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) that we are importing bricks. I recently had lunch with a businessman who said that 7% of his output comes from the UK but that 28% of his energy costs were in this country.

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[Mr Lilley]

I agree. It was very late in the day when we introduced that system, so at least we incurred the minimum cost of subsidy to achieve the given objective rather than just plucking out a number, which would inevitably have been high, given that civil servants always are rather generous with public money and set targets high, just so that they can say, “Oh look, we have achieved our quantitative solution, even if we have done so at unnecessary expense.”

[Graham Stuart]

My right hon. Friend is making an entertaining speech. Offshore wind has a price of around £140 per MWh, but the industry expects to bring that down to around £100 by 2020, and by the time we have any nuclear power stations, it is pretty likely that it will be below the cost of nuclear and falling, whereas the cost of nuclear will be fixed for the entire time.

[Mr Lilley]

My hon. Friend is normally very rational, but on this occasion he is being irrational. He is suggesting we should invest in very expensive and currently inefficient products in the hope that the next generation of such products will be cheaper. However, other people would also be able to invest in those cheaper products and compete with us. If they are going to be cheaper in five years’ time, we should wait five years and do it then.