Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Oxburgh and Baroness Maddock

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, would like to pay tribute to the Minister himself for the courtesy and patience which he has displayed in dealing with the myriad matters that have been raised. I join the other speakers in expressing my gratitude to him. Equally I would like to offer my best wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. She will certainly be missed. Her wisdom and her comments—sharp and to the point—will be missed as well.

The issues to which Amendment 3 is addressed remain important, but it is a tribute to the Minister’s persuasive legal tongue that in the time between Report and now he has persuaded me that the same objectives can be substantially achieved by a different route. Although I prefer the approach that was proposed in the amendment, I will be happy to withdraw it.

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, I also add my thanks to the Minister for the way in which he has dealt with us all through some tricky times, as is always the case with energy Bills in my experience. I also pass on my best wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. We will certainly miss her knowledge and her boundless enthusiasm, whatever time of night we are here. We will certainly miss that.

I am really pleased, having heard the opening comments of the Minister, and the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, that the Government are taking seriously the issue of carbon capture and storage. I am not sure that we felt that that was the case when we began this Bill, so I am very pleased that the Minister has been able to move other minds as well on this. I hope that we will hear in due course very good outcomes from the proposals he has made.

Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Oxburgh and Baroness Maddock

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Maddock]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Teverson, and also the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I want to bring it home to people that this makes “eco-nomic” sense. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, delights in having arguments, but I agree with him on some of the points that he has made. I remember when I bought my first house, in 1966. It was a little box in Southampton, desperately hard to keep warm. As some of you will remember, there were floor-to-ceiling windows in those days, and we had one of those picture windows, so trying to keep the house warm in winter was quite difficult and the bills were quite high. Then I moved to a newly built flat in Stockholm where the winter temperature was minus 27, and I say to my noble friend Lord Jenkin that to heat that house cost me less than it used to cost to heat this box with the picture window in England. That is when I got the bug about building proper homes.

I am going back to 1969, and we still have not got there. The longer we put this off, the more it costs us as a nation. We have been spending masses of money over recent years on projects to try to bring houses up to a reasonable level of energy efficiency. It is desperate that we stop doing it any longer. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, over the years many housebuilders and other builders were very conservative and did not want to go with this, and we have been suffering from it ever since. We really must not listen to the voices of holding back any longer. It makes economic sense to stop going down that road.

[Lord Oxburgh]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support this amendment. Listening to the informative discussion by noble Lords, I have seen my foxes shot one after the other so I will not detain the Committee for long, except to agree that the industry with which we are concerned here is fundamentally conservative. If we wait until there is any indication from the industry that it is ready for this, we shall wait for ever. The only thing to do is to fix a date.

If the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, with whom I so often agree, were to look at the regulations for vehicle emissions imposed by the state of California a number of years ago, he would see that the motor industry cried that this was totally impossible and would destroy the industry. Lo and behold, within a small number of years it was not only meeting the regulations but exceeding them. We have to fix a date and the industry has to work to it.