Energy Bill
Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Deben
Lord Deben
My Lords, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will look at these amendments as probing amendments, because there are some important issues which we need to cover. I declare a past interest in the sense that I was involved in trying to get a particular interconnection. My experience from that is that there are many difficulties which are not systemic difficulties, as the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, might refer to them, but simply difficulties about the way in which we do things in this country which makes it very complex.
There are two different issues here which are covered in the first of the amendments, which was introduced earlier by my noble friend Lady Parminter. One is connection and the other is connection,
“in order to support the continued development of a European internal electricity market”.
Those are two different things, although I hope that they would run in parallel. Manifestly, in the long-distant future, it would be quite sensible to have a lot of windmills when there was wind and a lot of solar when there was sun. Being able to pass that along would be very good. Modern methods of transmission are very much less wasteful than previously and there is some indication that we will be able to move things very well in the future.
Obviously, therefore, there is a long-term interest in linking up the systems more effectively. I do not know what the latest figure is, but it has been estimated that if we made certain, not-very-difficult changes to the northern European connections, we could save about 11% of our emissions, simply because they are now wasted due to the connecting arrangement. That may have been updated now, but there are clearly savings to be made there. They are the sort of savings that we should make before we do other things. It always seems to me that wastage—I am glad that right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester came into this debate—is the least acceptable manner of putting emissions into the atmosphere. It just does not seem to be a right thing to do.
Even if it were not for that reason, we need to open up the opportunities for people to invest. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, is right that such investments are quite expensive, but if you open up the opportunities for people to invest, the market will sort out which investments are sensible and which are not. There will be an opportunity then for perhaps rather more cost-effective investment, which would involve interconnection.
The purpose of the amendments, so far as I can see, is to ask my noble friend the Minister, “Are we sure that we’ve looked at this sufficiently well in the general panoply?”. The climate change committee, of which I have the honour to be the chairman, has always talked about a portfolio of energy supplies as being the basis for energy sovereignty, for making sure that we do not become subject to very high prices of gas and for making sure that we fight against dangerous climate change—these three things come together. The portfolio approach is the one that I am always looking at. I am very keen that we should not write this Bill to exclude this. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, would probably go along with the concept that we should make sure that there is not an opportunity here. I am not sure that the Bill does that. If my noble friend could say to the Committee that she will make sure there is not a lacuna here, it would be a very helpful outcome of this debate.
Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan
I want to make this point to the noble Lord. We have a department that at the moment cannot provide us with important, immediately required, documents. We are asking them to produce a strategy in 12 months, a lot of which at the moment seems to be wishful thinking. Are this lot capable of doing it?
Lord Deben
I knew that I should not have raised the noble Lord’s name, because it gave him the opportunity to say what he so often does, which is anything that is not complimentary to the Government. I remind him of the early part of Wuthering Heights where there is a peculiarly nasty individual. He ransacked the Bible for the promises that he pulled to himself and the curses that he threw at other people. Sometimes, I am reminded of that in the speeches given by the noble Lord.
Energy Bill
Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Deben
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I could not agree more with the noble Lord. The point that I am trying to make is that, while First Utility has had very dramatic growth—I have spoken to some of its senior executives, who paint a very interesting picture—I am not quite sure what the life expectancy of the organisation would be if the main shareholders were given an offer that they could not refuse by one of the big six. I do not think that there is really anything in the competition legislation of the United Kingdom or within the powers of the Secretary of State to do anything about that. That is why I am a wee bit sceptical about us jumping up and down and waving our arms on this issue because somehow there is something intrinsically attractive in a new form of competition. I am not sure whether it will be any different from what we had post-1989 and defy the laws of economic or financial gravity that have been applying in the intervening period.
While I wish my colleagues well in promoting the amendment, I am not very optimistic. In five years’ time, we might well be debating the same issue and trying to secure a greater degree of competition because of the inexorability of the forces that have been at work. I am not overdramatising it or going into neo-Marxist stuff. I am merely making the point that the six main players, who are big and who are not always as nice as they appear, certainly like competition as it is and do not seem to want anything else, and I am not sure whether many of the ambitions of this Bill will actually change the status quo that much.
There are other options, which are not on the table, and I will not waste the Committee’s time discussing them this afternoon. However, we have to be perhaps a wee bit more realistic than we are. In the light of past experience, even if British companies did not want to take over some of these smaller successful players, I am sure that there would be international players, who would have a bit of financial elbow room. They might even come in to see how a competitive market works, as the Americans did in the 1990s—they thought they were going to have liberalised markets in the United States, as the Germans thought they might have liberalised markets. In fact, what they have is a market with a number of players, but each of them is a regional monopoly. Therefore, when we talk about competition, we have to be quite clear that Britain is the exception as a competitive and liberalised market, not the rule, as far as energy utilities world wide are concerned.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I am driven to get to my feet by the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill—he may be embarrassed by this. They lead me to believe that this is a very interesting and important amendment simply because it reminds the Government, at a crucial point, of their responsibility to the marketplace, where we are of necessity intervening in order to give it a sense of time. After all, what we are really saying is that these decisions are made not just for today and tomorrow; they have to be made, given the problems, over a very much longer period. That is why we are intervening in the market-driven mechanism. However, we have to think about some of the fundamentals of the market as well.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, when he points to the oligopoly in which Britain is. He is right to say that other countries are in a worse position, but that does not mean that we should not try to improve our own position. One of the odd things about oligopolies and, indeed, large businesses in general is their lack of enterprise. The bigger a company becomes, the less likely it is to produce intelligent and quick-footed answers. What worries me is that we also take for granted that bigness is better. I have seen no evidence whatever that that is true; indeed, I see a good deal of evidence that it is the opposite. Bigness is convenient, and that is a wholly different concept. I think that the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, pointed to that when he showed how, over the years, people have taken on companies which would otherwise, in competition, be embarrassing, inconvenient and difficult, and have forced them to think differently—all the things that one needs to ensure happens in a market.
Energy Bill
Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Deben
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I am very happy to follow my noble friend. The fight against fuel poverty in the past 10 to 15 years has been bedevilled by loose definitions and arbitrary targets. The amendment goes some way to mitigate concerns that have arisen about that. It sticks in my craw to say this but the Government must be praised for obtaining support for the measure from Derek Licorice, the chair of the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group, and Jenny Saunders of the NEA. The fact that people are giving understandably cautious support, but none the less a blessing, for the measure is an indication that Ministers have sought to build bridges on this issue. Known targets and definitions have been taken away and a rather more complex Hills approach has been adopted. That approach has its drawbacks but does take account of the complexity of the situation. Therefore, it is desirable to move forward not using the bludgeon of statutory change but rather a regulatory approach, as that will enable subsequent Ministers of whatever political complexion to adjust and calibrate the policies.
It is also fair to say that for us in Opposition to try putting forward amendments at this stage would be somewhat premature—although, from what one can gather of the parliamentary timetable ahead of us, we will have time, probably over the Recess, to look at some of these issues. Obviously, the statutory instrument and regulatory approach will be the subject of consultation and discussion. One would hope that that need not take an unduly long period. None the less, it will give us some opportunity to look at the fine print of this.
Some of us would be happier about this if we were to see the colour of the Government’s money, or indeed money at all from the Government. Their approach to fuel poverty has been to withdraw state funding from this and make it a tax on the consumer rather than on the country as a whole. That is a flawed policy. It would not be difficult for the Green Deal to become more successful than it is at present, but if it does not become substantially better we will have to look again at the Government providing funds for some of the major programmes that will be required to address areas of fuel poverty. We are not talking about individual households but street after street after street. If approached on that basis, we could deal with an awful lot of the most deep-seated areas which Hills recognises are the core of the problem.
As I said, I do not wish to be grudging in my support for this approach. There will obviously be difficulties and flaws but this is not the time to identify them. The opportunity for that will come on Report and beyond, when we have had time to digest some of the indigestible graphs to which the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, referred. If we can do that, we can perhaps make something of this. At the end of the day, somebody has to pay for it. At the moment, that will fall in the main on the shoulders of the consumer of gas and electricity. That is not a satisfactory approach to social injustice on this scale. Even with the Hills modification, the scale is intolerable for a society such as ours to leave to some kind of slipshod market mechanism, the like of which we have seen in the Green Deal. The Green Deal might work. It is the only show in town but it will have to start working very quickly or some of us will not be confident that the great ideas and reasoned approach in this White Paper, these documents and expressed in this amendment will be enough, without proper financial support, to tackle the major social problem we have here.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I again declare my interest as chairman of the climate change committee, which has a specific responsibility to consider and concern itself with fuel poverty. It would be suitable for me to say a few words about this. I am very pleased that the Government have brought forward this amendment, not least because one of the difficulties of advising on fuel poverty has been the very peculiar mechanisms that we have used to measure it. To be able to measure it more effectively, to have a proper and accepted basis, will help us very much in giving advice. As noble Lords know, if you are a scientifically based committee, it is quite hard to move from making decisions on science, which is of course what we do, to making decisions on measurements that would not stand up to any kind of consideration from outside. This is a very good first step. All of us acknowledge the fact that there is widespread support for the principle but there is a lot to be worked through. I think most of us would agree with what the noble Lord who just spoke said.
It is worth realising, too, that it has much wider implications. As usual, we have been very much helped by the intervention of my noble friend Lord Jenkin. I am always amazed that he gets his head so easily around the most complex of issues and then lightly dismisses that by saying that he is not quite there yet. If when I get to the same stage of life, I am “there”—if I may put it so—as well as he is, I shall be very proud indeed. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I should perhaps start by declaring an interest. I am chairman of SmartGrid GB. In some respects we will have an information overload as a consequence of the rollout of smart meters. On the other hand, it would be desirable for the rights of the consumer to be taken properly into account. It is quite likely that there will be a lot of information, and it would be a reassurance to the consumer if they had access to what was out there. Some of the enthusiasts for the new technologies, which have yet to be fully realised, find their eyes glowing at the prospect of smart metering. We have to be a wee bit cautious. There could be civil liberties concerns, although not about the time when you put on a kettle or whether you run the washing machine in the middle of the night. These issues are trivial.
It is a bit like another problem that we have at the moment. If we use our passes on the Underground, we could be tracked over the course of a day or a week. While that might be of use to some authorities, and might be used for beneficial purposes, it could be a problem. It will be the same when we get these new meters in households. I see the noble Lord, Lord Deben, looking at me, but I am sure that, in his experience of constituency surgeries, he had, as I had from time to time, individuals who were convinced that in a television set there was a camera as well as the receiver, and that somebody, somewhere, was finding out what was going on in their living room.
Lord Deben
The noble Lord is absolutely right, but we should not allow people to think of this just as a joke. Some newspapers will certainly try to suggest that this sensible proposal is a means of doing untold damage. Therefore, we must get it right from the beginning or we will destroy the whole system.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I remember being a lorry driver’s mate in the 1960s when I was a student. As a consequence of a Labour Government’s legislation, the haulage companies were trying to introduce the “spy in the cab”. That is now regarded as a very important health and safety measure. At the time it was not very well presented. If we can get an understanding and an appreciation by government of the dangers of the overload of information that could emerge, the public could be educated on the beneficial uses of it and made aware of the dangers—of which the civil liberties lobby could take account—the anxiety that parts of the press might have about the rollout of smart meters would in large measure be mitigated.
Therefore, while I appreciate the probing character of this amendment, it would benefit the process if the Government gave us positive indications today that if this is defective, or if it is otherwise necessary, amendments could be presented at a later stage in the appropriate format. We would do well to keep this in mind even if we do not get completely uptight about it.
Energy Bill
Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Deben
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
If only an “s” were the only thing that I had to worry about. When you have a name such as O'Neill, it can be spelt about five different ways. In some instances, it is an ‘l’ of a difference at the end—but we will pass over that.
The point that I wanted to get at here is that we know that there are problems with the successor agency. There is a proliferation of agencies with which the nuclear agency will have to be associated and will be linked to. It is very useful that we have this opportunity for the Minister, probably somewhat tortuously, to make the matter quite clear. In this day of judicial review and the like, what we say in these Committees, when we are being sensible and relevant, is of some significance outwith this place. Therefore, it will be guidance for people. I still have some sympathy for constituency MPs confronted with the prospect of a nuclear dump in their back yard. In my constituency, it was almost in the field where we believe the Battle of Bannockburn was fought, but it was not quite. They did not need to use nuclear weapons in 1314, although we might have to use something akin to them in 2014—but that is for another day and another debate. I welcome the amendments and wish them well until they are withdrawn.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I do not think that one can add much to what my noble friend Lord Jenkin said, except to underline one thing, which is the question of the sites and their management. I declare an interest as the chairman of Valpak. We are responsible for a good deal of recycling.
First, there is a real issue about sites and the checking of sites. Wherever the check can come on the product, one is in a much stronger position. My noble friend’s point is that, in many cases, the site is actually not a nuclear site at all but the product is provided for a nuclear installation. In those circumstances, it is very important that any consideration of the checking of sites should be limited to those which one has to check and not include those which one does not. That is more important than one might think, given how difficult such checking is.
Secondly, I support the point made by the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill, as I was also previously a Member of Parliament—for a constituency with two nuclear power stations. It is interesting how quickly people become happy to have those nuclear power stations once they understand the situation but how easy it is to stir something up when you have them. The only way to overcome those things, as I know the Minister will understand, is to have absolute clarity and to state matters in a form and in language that people can understand.
When we sought planning permission for Sizewell B, I held nearly 50 parish meetings. The trick was that the only people who could come to those meetings were people who lived in the parish, so the peripatetic protesters could not arrive and we could have a proper conversation. The protesters had to go to their own parish meetings. At most of them, they were well known and not altogether liked. Therefore, the discussions, considered and reasonable as they were, ended up with all those parishes supporting the opening of the new nuclear power station. My noble friend should be reminded that what made it work was the simplicity and clarity with which we discussed the issue. I hope that in answering what I think has been an interesting debate, particularly the discussion between the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and my noble friend Lord Jenkin, she will give us an assurance that we will continue to be as clear as possible. This is a very dangerous area in which to be unclear and it helps a great deal if there is clarity from the beginning.
Lord Deben
I agree with my noble friend about that example. The reason I drew from familial experience was that I was brought up by a father who had pastoral responsibility for one of the mining villages in south Wales. For him, that event was most devastating. Although as a family we were not affected by it, my father was affected by his memories of what he had to do in those kinds of circumstances. I remember vividly his comment that you can never trust to police an industry those for whom the main interest is the industry as a whole. That is not because they are bad men and women, but simply because they would have to wear two different hats, and you should not ask people to wear two different hats. That is why we keep on talking about declarations of interest and so on. We know that however good and sensible you are, it is sometimes quite difficult to remember which hat you are wearing.
Again, I agree with my noble friend—Aberfan remains in one’s heart in a very special way and will be there until the day one dies, even though one was removed from it. That is simply because of the effect it had on people one knew and upon the memories of my father. I feel strongly that we should not allow the lesson that we should have learnt from the coal industry to be forgotten in this industry.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I have some sympathy with the remarks that have been made, which sets me at variance with my noble friend. When I was chairing the Trade and Industry Select Committee in the late 1990s, we went to Dounreay, which has been the subject of many investigations and problems. Had other colleagues been here, I am sure they would have be able to embellish this far more than I can. At Dounreay, there had quite clearly been a failure to scrutinise the safety arrangements on the part of what was then the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. It is fair to say that that part of the inspectorate had pretty well gone native. Dounreay is in a very isolated part of the UK. You cannot go very much further north without getting wet. It is natural that everybody was living and working together, playing golf on the same golf courses, probably drinking in the same pubs and what have you. They came together.
An independent report had to be carried out. It was carried out and, as the Select Committee, we wanted to see it. We were told by the DTI Minister at the time, who I think was John Battle, that it would not be appropriate for a Select Committee to see it. The DTI was the sponsoring ministry. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate was in those days, as it is now, sponsored by the equivalent of the DWP. It took the Secretary of State for Scotland, who had environmental responsibility for the area, to step in and say, “Publish and be damned”, so we got access to the report. In fact, it was not anything like as damning as people had anticipated, but it was essential that it was produced.
There is a danger in establishing this umbilical link between the sponsoring department and the functions. We have seen it in agriculture and food safety in the past. And we have taken strenuous steps to correct it, but there are still problems. In my experience, the nature of the nuclear industry is such that it is a secretive industry. It grew out of the production of weapons-grade material for nuclear weapons. While it is now under commercial control in a number of respects, it nevertheless still has a culture of understandable secrecy, partly because of what would be regarded as security but also because it is so damn dangerous. The truth is that because of the way in which in the industry is handled, the dangers are minimal.
The culture of the industry is determined not only by security but by safety. At times, there is a sense in which the industry is covering its own back as well as trying to protect people. That is natural. Even today nuclear installations are for the most part in relatively isolated, secluded areas. It is common knowledge that Sellafield was chosen during the war because it was most unlikely that German bombers would ever be able to find the place because it is shrouded in mist and it is likely to be raining all the time, hence the Lake District. In those days, it was just a weapons store.
The industry has a security culture and a culture that is understandably and correctly preoccupied with safety, but it is also at times unduly linked to matters of secrecy where safety can be jeopardised. In my limited experience, I confronted a situation where there had been regrettable failures at Dounreay, which have now been corrected. The report on that was nothing like as condemnatory as people thought it would be but there was reluctance to have it published. It took an independent agency, the Scottish Office, and the late Donald Dewar as Secretary of State—who made it quite clear that he saw no reason why we should not have access to it—for us to get the report. I remember that we got a faxed copy of it as we got off the plane in Caithness. The clerk had summarised it by the time we got to Dounreay and we were able to make use of it when we were questioning officials.
There is a danger in creating too close a link between the ministry and this function. It is important that we discuss it and have it aired but I would like to think that we do not go any further with it because there are too many examples of departments looking after their own too carefully. The ONR took a long time to come about. It should really have been in the previous Energy Bill but in those days the DWP and DECC were arm wrestling over it. It was a turf war. The compromise was that they would let it go as long as they had a control over it. The DWP conceded a bit and held a bit and we just have to accept that that is the way in which the matter was agreed. For the reasons I have given, it would be desirable for us to leave it to the DWP rather than having a sponsoring department that might take an overprotective view of what could be at stake here, which could be very serious.
Energy Bill
Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Deben
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
My Lords, in his meandering tour d’horizon, the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said that the only approach he had had in support of this amendment was from the renewables lobby. I have certain misgivings about renewables, as I stated at Second Reading, but there is a degree of oversimplicity in the approach that a number of people have taken towards this amendment. The blanket opposition to almost all kinds of targets that we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Howell, is symptomatic of this condition.
This amendment does not suggest that the target will require nuclear power stations to be built tomorrow. Some of us would like them to be built today—yesterday, in fact—but that is not a possibility. But there are a number of small and medium-sized projects, about which there is probably greater investor uncertainty because of their size and disparate character, which would take encouragement and reassurance from amendments of this kind. Rather than the somewhat cautious approach of the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, I think that the dates suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, are more realistic.
We are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, for his insight into how coalitions work. Certainly, as far as decarbonisation is concerned, it seems that the bus has set off on the way to Damascus. What some of us want is for it to arrive there. One of the sure signs that it would be at least within the environs of that city would be if we were to get acceptance of this amendment and an early possible date. There are dangers in targets at times but on this occasion this is a nudge—not a massive shove—in the right direction. It would be a very significant amendment if it were carried on Report—I know that none of these amendments is going to be pushed to a vote at this stage.
In summary, we are not considering all forms of generation and all projects as being triggered by an amendment of this kind. We are saying that a number of small-scale investments would be given a significant push if there were to be appropriate targets within a reasonable timescale. These amendments meet both those objectives. We could remove a degree of uncertainty. I do not think that we are going to get security of supply from these targets today, or a massive degree of decarbonisation, but we will get some. If we get a bit more security of supply, perhaps we will get a degree of affordability.
A lot of pious nonsense is spoken about affordability and security of supply. For the fuel poor, there is no security of supply because they cannot afford to pay for it. They self-disconnect and do not use it—they have to make very difficult choices. We need far more radical measures than this modest amendment to try to secure objectives of that character. However, for the purposes of the moment, this is an appropriate and sensible amendment to start the passage of the Bill in this House. If we were to get a broad spread of consensus at this stage, we could hopefully look to going into the Chamber and securing the kind of majority that a modest amendment of this character merits and deserves.
Lord Deben
My Lords, it gives me some concern to disagree with both my former Secretary of State—for whom I was a loyal and, I hope, reasonably efficient PPS—and my former Permanent Secretary, both of whom have spoken against this amendment. I always find these discussions difficult, because people move to extremes, and I hope that your Lordships will not mind me suggesting that there have been some examples of that today. The reason why the climate change committee advised that there should be such an interim target is that, by law, we are charged with ensuring that we meet the statutory target of reducing our emissions by 80% from 1990 by 2050. That is a statutory provision.
At the moment, we face a situation in which business has certainty up to 2020 and has it again in 2050. I declare an interest as a chairman of the climate change committee and, although I do not have business interests in the areas that we are talking about, I have had them in the past. The reality is that business needs to feel that there is a continuing mood, so that if it invests now it will be secure at least from government vacillation. No business can be assured of everything else—all kinds of things can happen in these circumstances—but the one thing that makes this very difficult is the natural fact of government intervention. My noble friend talked about the interventionist nature of the Bill. The real problem with the subject that we are dealing with is that it is necessary to have some intervention. The argument is in large part about how much.
As to whether industry needs this, we had the powerful suggestion from my noble friend Lord Jenkin that industry did not want it except for the renewables. I have a list here of 50 major companies, including Scottish and Southern, EDF, Alstom, Doosan, Mitsubishi, Siemens—I could go on—all of which have specifically asked for this because they are concerned not only about their own investment but about the supply chain. We are pressing this not because of climate change but in order to get the benefit of what the UK is doing because of climate change. If you do not do this, all the money that we are going to spend—£7.5 billion—between now and 2020 in order to begin the decarbonisation of our electricity supply is imperilled, in the sense that the businesses that should grow and produce will not come here if they feel that there is no certainty beyond that. My noble friend Lord Jenkin said that it was all very difficult and we ought to put it off. My problem with that is that climate change does not wait until we find it convenient to meet the problems. Every year we put it off, the cost is greater and the problem is bigger. We have to take that into account when making these decisions.
We also have to recognise a serious new factor, which is the reverse of what used to be true. It used to be thought that Britain was in the vanguard. We had this wonderful Bill and we were doing all this, and other people were not. Anyone who looks at the GLOBE International report, produced with the London School of Economics—and I declare an interest as the president of GLOBE—will see that over the last year some 30 countries are now embarking on serious investment in this area. So we are now competing with other countries that are also seeking this investment.
The problem for the British Government is that, however much they talk about these issues, around these tables today are others who keep on saying, “Well, it is not going to be like that”. Every newspaper throughout the rest of the world repeats the comments of the climate change dismissers, who are always suggesting that just around the corner all this nonsense will stop and we will go back to business as usual.
The trouble with that is that people will go to countries to invest where that is not the case and where Governments have given long-term assurances. We need therefore to take this fact seriously for the British economy and for the green jobs that we have sought to create. This is why I think that the Government have been mistaken in doing this and why I have some sympathy with this proposal, although of course I have no inside knowledge of the kind produced by the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, as to what may have led to this decision.
Then we have the question of the cost to the consumer. When the newspapers see a rapidly rising cost of energy, they do two things. First, they want an easy answer as to why that is happening, particularly one that they think they might be able to affect. Secondly, they will not think ahead as to whether this is going to go on and what we do as far as the future is concerned.
I suggest to your Lordships that the biggest problem of the cost is actually the basic cost. It is true that gas prices have risen—that is much the biggest amount. The additional cost to the average family in Britain at the moment from our green measures is £60 a year. It will rise to £100 a year in 2020. If we do what is suggested and set a carbon-intensity target, the bills for the average consumer—as far as we can do this work; we have to rely on the best evidence that we have—will between 2020 and 2030 have risen by £20 more than they would have done. After that, of course, because electricity will have been decarbonised, private energy costs will fall significantly.
We ought to keep this in some sort of proportion, rather than blaming all the rises on the fact that we have what is actually a limited cost. That cost is, in my view, a cost of insurance. I am sorry to repeat it—I have said it before because I think it is important—but there is not a Member of your Lordships’ House who does not insure his home against fire. Yet there is a 99.8% chance of that house not burning down. That insurance costs £140 a year. That is more than twice what we are charging as a nation for people to protect themselves in the future.
The insurance cost that we are talking about is sensible and it insures us against three things: it insures us against dangerous climate change; it helps to ensure our energy sovereignty; and it insures us against rising gas prices. Some people believe that gas prices will not rise. The international energy body certainly thinks that they will rise. I certainly would not like to bet my future, or my children’s future, on the idea that gas prices are going to fall. That does not seem sensible to me. Replacing our present dependency with a portfolio of mechanisms by which we produce our energy is an essential insurance against that, because energy is so crucial, as my noble friend Lord Jenkin has said.
I end with a reminder to your Lordships. The noble Lord who is a former Secretary of State for Energy said that he had had a great plan for nuclear power, and what a great thing it would have been if it had gone through. He did not get it because people were not prepared at the time to face realities, needs and long-term decisions. He is now asking us, on the basis of that experience, to repeat the mistake. He is asking us again to say that this is not the right moment and that we must not rush into things and make these decisions because, for one reason or another, we should wait.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, that we have not impaled ourselves. We have taken on a necessary and absolutely essential burden. It is the burden of this generation ensuring a future for the next. The sense of urgency is there because, if we do not do it but put it off, we will always put it off. That is the lesson of our failure to invest in nuclear power when we should have and it is why the noble Lord’s speech should have been the other way round. He should have said that we should learn from that disaster and do now what we need to do. The pace does not seem rushed to the public; it seems very reasonable.
Energy Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Deben(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Deben
It is most important that we should consider these three amendments as one because they are seeking to do the same thing. I do not have any pride of ownership for my own amendment, I just want to raise some of the issues which the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has brought forward.
It is right to say that this is a cross-party concern. There is no division between us on this and it is supported by all sorts of places, some of them not wildly likely. I would like to take up the comment of the noble Baroness about the word “resist”. There is another part which happens before that, as all of us who have been Ministers know, and that is when civil servants say, “Better not, Minister”, a phrase I remember very well. This seems to be one of those areas.
My only disagreement with the noble Baroness is this: perfectly rightly, the Government saw the particular way of reporting that we have had before with local authorities having a number of drawbacks and fitting into a pattern which the incoming Government were unhappy about. But because one gets rid of something one is unhappy about does not mean that it is better not to put something in its place, where that seems sensible. Here it is sensible. The first reason for this is because of the Localism Bill. If you get rid, absolutely rightly, of regional government and the rest of it, you are going to ask local authorities to co-operate with each other. They need a framework within which they can co-operate. This is one area where they will have to co-operate. In the borough of Ipswich, for example, much of the urban area of Ipswich is in the Suffolk Coastal district council area. To do the thing properly, local authorities will have to co-operate over the boundaries. Therefore I support this kind of structure which will enable people to start off with the same basis, so they know how they are going to do it.
I shall have the pleasure of chairing the Suffolk-wide green conference which we have every year to promote exactly these things. In an entirely Conservative-controlled local authority, county and district, everyone believes that this is a necessary part of doing what they want to do. Suffolk wants to become the greenest county because it wants to force other people to compete with it, and that seems a good thing. The Minister may have been advised that it is not necessary because this is all voluntary and we will all be doing it happily together. We are not asking for compulsion, we are asking for a framework within which people can use their several and different talents to do this job properly.
All the amendments, certainly mine, show the need to take seriously the fact that we will not meet national carbon budgets unless we meet local carbon budgets. I have spent most of the past 10, 12 or 13 years trying to help big businesses change so that they become much more corporately responsible and concerned about these issues. I have become more and more passionate about the practicalities of doing this rather than the high-flown rhetoric. The more one does it, the more one wants to say, “Can I tell you how you can cut your energy by 13 per cent simply by using some kind of regulator of the voltage? Can I help you to do these things in a simple, basic way?”.
When I looked at the Bill it seemed that the one failing I wanted to correct is that we need to engage local authorities so that they feel that they have a real part in the achievement of the Green Deal. That is why this is so important. It is to get the local authorities to think that the Government have said that if they are going to achieve these things, if they are going to do these things, local authorities are an essential part of it. A lot of the practical nuts and bolts, which is what the Federation of Small Businesses is saying, have got to be put together at the local level by the local authority working with its own community. That is why my amendment refers to working,
“in partnership with local residents, businesses and”—
I hate the word “stakeholders” but it seems to be compulsory—
“stakeholders including schools and hospitals in drawing up and carrying out the strategy”.
The joint strategy referred to specifically in subsection (2) of the proposed new clause draws attention to that co-operative element which the Localism Bill will have and points out that CO2 is not a respecter of county or district boundaries. It is very important to make this part of the way in which we proceed.
Lastly, I have suggested that we should ask the Secretary of State to introduce the local carbon budget scheme to begin at the start of the second national carbon budget period.
I would like to pick up something that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said. We do not have a long period of time to decide when it might be convenient for this or that to happen. The timetable before us is dictated by the climate change which we have caused. I will not get back to housing, but if we had known about this at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we would have done things rather better. But we did not. Now we are having to pay the price for what was vastly beneficial for the United Kingdom. We have a bigger responsibility than any other country because we got a bigger profit out of it earlier on. What is happening now is something that we caused—not quite alone, but certainly we were the leaders in what has caused the climate change that we have, because it takes that much time to work through. Therefore we have a huge moral responsibility to put this right.
There is an urgency here. In everything we do we should be asking the Government to sign up to that emergency by putting dates on it. We have had too many pieces of legislation. I remember a White Paper on energy in which the only date was 2050; every other date had been taken out. I think that even the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, will accept that, if you take out every date which the Government are unlikely to live to see, it does not make for a sense of urgency. I am very keen on having things that everybody in this Room will see. Therefore I ask the Minister to take this extremely seriously.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I am very happy to follow the noble Lord; I broadly support his amendment, along with the other two. There is a degree of repetition, but that in itself is not a problem. As we were listening to his remarks, I was almost tempted to do an AV Bill-type speech here—but I am not going to. As I think I have said before, those of us who laboured in the Augean stables of Scottish legislation in the past have over the years learnt how to make a rather thin line go quite a distance.
I am interested in something that the noble Lord, to an extent, alluded to in his remarks about the start of the Industrial Revolution. When you have been in the House of Commons for a time, boundary changes become a regular feature of your life as a politician, and quite often you move with the changes. Over the years, as a Member of Parliament, I had dealings with about five different local authorities. I do not want to go through them in great detail, but I had five coal mines in my constituency which fed coal into a power station in a different local authority, and that power station generated 2,400 megawatts of electricity. That is an awful lot of smoke going up the chimney and a fantastic contributor to pollution within Scotland. The coal mines have closed, but the power station is still generating.
Across the River Forth was the petrochemicals complex of Grangemouth, which was in Falkirk local authority; and adjacent to that was Bo’ness and one or two other places where there were petrochemicals and hydrocarbon facilities. Then you had Clackmannanshire, where there was, I think, the biggest bottle-making plant in Britain—again, spewing out industrial waste of all kinds. We also had timber-processing plants near Stirling, and the like. Therefore, in an area of 40 to 50 square miles, you had an incredible amount of pollution. The local authority is trying to keep tabs on this. It does not have a clear and specific obligation to try to reduce the pollution, although it has a kind of moral obligation to do so. However, I think that authorities would be anxious about co-operating on a collective basis to reduce carbon emissions and enhance the energy efficiency of these communities, because very often the pollution moves from one area into another simply with the wind gently pushing it along.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Deben(14 years ago)
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Lord Deben
I hesitate to disagree with the noble Lord in what he has said, but as I understood it he was lauding the fact that there would be a separate date for the referendum on the Assembly’s powers. He suggested that there should be another date for this referendum and there would of course be the date for the Welsh Assembly elections as well. Those are three dates.
As regards the comment about the unwillingness of people to go out to vote, if you have three opportunities to vote, you are likely to have low turnouts in all of them, which does not seem to be a very good idea. One has to face the fact that although we may be fascinated by this subject, it is not a subject which is the constant conversation at the Dog and Duck. I am afraid that it is not. I wish that it were. The noble Lord opposite suggested that we are in that sense anoraks. We are different because we find this all very interesting.
It hardly befits people who are in favour of AV. People will be asked a series of numbers to put down, As the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, there will be complicated discussions about where you are on, say, numbers 5 and 6. For one then to say that it is too complicated for people to be able to decide yes or no on a simple ballot paper is really not a sensible argument. If we are talking about complication, it is quite complicated to decide about a regional list and a constituency member. But we seem to think that people can manage that on one occasion. We are merely asking that they may also manage a simple choice as to whether they want AV or not. If we cannot believe that people can do that, there is no case for AV whatever because it is so complicated that no one could possibly manage it at all. We have to be a little less condescending to the electorate. The big difficulty is not complication. It is the willingness to take part and to make people feel that it is worth doing. They are more likely to feel that it is worth doing if there are a good number of things to do on the same occasion and they are not spread out over time.
Some people make the argument that the referendum should be on the date of another election because they think that there are advantages. I do not think that there are any advantages either to my side or the other. I would be totally unable to decide, so I think that I am being entirely independent. But I have to say that if the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, really thinks that £15 million is unimportant at a time when I am trying to justify very small amounts of money that have to be removed from people because of the situation we are in, I would not like to have to try to explain that in my former constituency of Suffolk Coastal or in any Welsh constituency. They would spend that £15 million somewhere else. I beg noble Lords not to accept what seems to be a superficial argument.
As to respect, what could be more respectful than saying to people when they vote for the excellent Scottish Parliament that they also have an opportunity to make a decision about the electoral system of the United Kingdom. That is very respectful. For the Scottish Parliament to believe that it is not respectful to ask two questions on the same day seems to be a definition of respect that has been surpassed in unsuitableness only by a former Member of the House of Commons creating a party after that name, which was also a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
In his comprehensive treatment of electoral systems, my noble friend Lord Foulkes missed out one system. As a consequence of the experience of multiple elections in Scotland, there have been two changes to the electoral system. In 2015, as my noble friend said, the elections for the Scottish Parliament will not take place on the same day as the elections for the UK Parliament. Equally, in May 2011, there should have been local government elections under the single transferable voting system on the same day as we would be having a Scottish Parliament election.
Much as I respect my old friend’s political acumen and his attractiveness to the electorate, the fact that he is a Member of the Scottish Parliament is down to only one thing—namely the low vote that the Labour Party received in the first past the post seats for the Scottish Parliament. One of the reasons why the Labour Party did not do as well in the 2007 elections was that people were being asked to participate in two elections using two different systems. Across the country there were incredible numbers of spoiled papers. In my former constituency, the majority of the successful nationalist candidate was less than the number of spoiled papers, which in our estimation tended to come from the areas which had been the traditional stalwarts of Labour support. That is the kind of confusion that seems to have escaped the attention of the previous speaker.
The confusion that arose may take a slightly different form in this election, but it has already been admitted by the desire to have two elections in different years, and two elections in the same year but at different times. Simply trying to get a bigger turnout seems to be the only argument. It could be that saving money is one of the arguments, but I suspect that that is a pretty feeble one because £15 million is a lot of money in one area, but it does not amount to a great deal across the country. Certainly, if we are to do this election properly, we will have to have more people in the polling stations than we had at the last election. We will require sufficient numbers to get the job done. If £15 million is a figure that would break the bank, I would be very worried about the staffing of the polling stations on election day.
I do not want to prolong my speech too long, but I want to make another point. There will be confusion. I have fought several referenda, and I think that I have won one and lost two. I lost the European one in 1975. I lost the Scottish one in 1979, but then went on to win my seat. My point is that the result of a referendum is often largely dependent on the popularity of the proposers. At present, Tory supporters, although they are wilting a wee bit, by and large are quite happy with what this right-wing Government are doing. But I cannot imagine that the proponents of AV—the pure and unalloyed, or the slightly alloyed, proponents in the Liberal Democrats—will be accorded the respect of the electorate, given the way in which they have failed to stem the right-wing tendencies of this Government.
It would be in the Liberal Democrats’ interests to have a referendum as far away from next May as they can—probably to have it a year and a half before the general election, if they are to have one at all. By that time they might be a wee bit less unpopular than they are at present. The university towns and cities of this country are the kind of areas where young people would be expected to turn out to vote for constitutional or electoral change, but the Liberal Democrats do not have a hope in hell of getting any support from them at present.
This is a confused, ill-constructed, badly thought-out proposition of which the date is only one part. It would be desirable for us to look afresh at the date. My noble friend Lord Rooker wants to give electoral reform legitimacy. If we are going to give the result legitimacy, we should hold the referendum at a time when it is not tainted by or confused with any form of political activity.
A referendum is an awkward political weapon which has to be used carefully. Let us face it, over the years there have been referenda across Europe which have resulted in outcomes that none of us would have liked. I do not think this is the same, but it lends itself to confusion in ways that this country could well do without at this time. That is because there are forces at work that are anti-democratic and who wish to use every opportunity to denigrate the democratic system. Having a referendum on the day suggested, when elections are being held in other parts of the country, and in the format decided upon, is foolhardy. No one will be a winner and democracy will be the loser.