Localism Bill

Lord Reay Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I am very glad to support this amendment. It is not just my great regard for the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, in his commitment to the best heritage in our society and to preserving it that makes me want to support him but the issue itself. Litter is a menace in our society. It is disfiguring our towns and villages and the countryside. If we really care about our inheritance and preserving what is best, it is no good just having exhortations and principles, which are sometimes enunciated in legislation; it is essential to have some muscle in what is being done to combat it. A few egocentric, selfish people can ruin the environment, whether it be the built environment or the rural environment. It is time that this matter was taken in hand.

I sometimes get a little frustrated in my home community. I have the pleasure of being the president of the Friends of the Lake District—which, of course, represents the CPRE in the whole of Cumbria—but I sometimes reflect in my own neighbourhood of the community how people who take tremendous pains and care with their own gardens and their own estates seem to abandon responsibility when they move outside the garden gate. We have to promote a sense of community commitment on this, followed through with legislation consisting not only of words but the means to make it happen.

It is not an accident that nations that are healthy socially and economically have a great deal of civic pride. I sometimes think that it is a good way of measuring the state of psychology of a nation. If a nation is in good heart, there is a much better chance that all these matters will be taken seriously. On the other hand, it is a two-way argument, because if we let things slip people lose interest. They lose their sense of civic pride and their sense of belonging to a community and needing to make sure that our community is strong and prosperous. It all goes together psychologically. From this standpoint, I thoroughly commend the amendment that has been brought back at Third Reading. The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, was absolutely right to bring it back at this stage.

[Lord Reay]

I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, has just said and I strongly support the amendment.

Like my noble friend, I did not think very much of the Minister’s arguments for not accepting my noble friend’s amendment on Report. He argued that we could wait and see how it worked out in London when London boroughs get powers under the latest London Local Authorities Bill to issue the registered keepers of vehicles with civil penalties where enforcement officers witness littering from a vehicle. I thought that argument had some plausibility.

However, London is not the country. Litter thrown from vehicles is a particular scourge of the countryside. People driving through the countryside may feel themselves more likely to be unobserved and so more prone to commit the offence. They may well be right. Creating this new offence may work better in towns than it will in the country—we simply do not know—but I suggest that the logical thing to do would be to allow it to be tried out in different parts of the country. My noble friend’s amendment would enable this to happen by permitting local authorities who are particularly keen to do so to take action.

I hope the Government will accept the amendment. If they do not and do not say that they have now changed their minds and intend to introduce, at the earliest opportunity, a new national offence along the lines of my noble friend’s amendment, I hope my noble friend will press his amendment to a Division and I shall certainly support it.

[Lord Deben]

I am attracted to the amendment, which has been so ably moved by my noble friend Lord Marlesford. As a campaigning environmentalist I am sometimes concerned that the one issue that unites everyone is not fighting climate change—which, of course, is the biggest issue of all—but litter. If you really want to cause a major row, then raise the issue of litter. The Government have to be careful about appearing not to recognise how, particularly in the countryside, as the noble Lord, Lord Reay, has said, this is an issue of considerable concern.

I find it one of the more depressing things that, in the beautiful part of England where I live, at most weekends the first part of the job is to pick up the various items that have been pushed into the hedge and down the drive of the house in which I live. It is a sad fact but it is one that needs to be taken seriously, and I hope noble Lords will agree that this elegant use of the Bill—to give opportunity for particular local authorities to make a particular choice—would be a sensible step. I am sure the Minister may have some really remarkable argument to show a better way forward, which I look forward to hearing.

In Suffolk we have a very successful campaign, which I have to speak of very carefully because it is headlined by the phrase, “Don’t be a tosser”. It is designed to make people stop throwing things out of car windows. This is a real issue. The local authorities in Suffolk might well like to take the opportunity, were they able to, to help the Government by trialling such a proposal. I hope the Government will take seriously what the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, has suggested.

Revised Draft Overarching National Policy Statement for Energy (EN-1)

Lord Reay Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Reay]

My Lords, I find myself in a position in which I may rain somewhat on the parade. As I see it, the NPSs are essentially tools designed to help force through the planning system the Government’s energy policy, which, above all, reflects a quixotic desire to achieve the most exacting renewable energy targets in the world at whatever cost there may be to economic growth and irrespective of whether any other country does likewise.

It is on wind power that the Government must place virtually all their hopes of achieving their renewable energy targets. Last year renewable energy provided 6.6 per cent of our electricity and, out of that, wind power only 2.4 per cent. Nevertheless, only wind power has shown any substantial growth, having tripled the amount of electricity it has generated in the past four years, while hydro and biomass have not managed increases of even 20 per cent. However, the main trouble with onshore wind from the Government’s point of view is that it is extremely unpopular. It is noteworthy that the Committee on Climate Change, in its recently published Fourth Carbon Budget report, recognised that the unpopularity of onshore wind turbines poses a risk to their deployment. In the measured—indeed, understated—words of the committee on page 248,

“there are questions over the extent to which the full practical potential can be exploited, given local opposition in some areas”.

There are now several hundred protest groups throughout the country, tenaciously opposing the imposition of industrial-scale turbines on their rural landscapes. In an increasing number of cases, they have persuaded planning inspectors of the justice of their case.

The Government’s answer to this seems to be to follow the example of the developers and seek to bribe local authorities with financial rewards if they grant planning permission in the first place. There are provisions to enable this in the Localism Bill. In such a way do the Government seek to reconcile their claim to be handing more powers of decision to local authorities with their determination to impose on them their green agenda. However, it may be—I hope that it will be—that the planning system that we still have, enforced ultimately by the Planning Inspectorate that we still have, will succeed in protecting the countryside from this onslaught. In that case, our planning system, so wonderfully successful in the last century in protecting our landscape from uncontrolled ribbon development, may save it for a second time this century from the worst consequences of today’s scandalous vandalism.

Offshore wind is less unpopular because it is further away; indeed, some of it is out of sight. That aside, it has even more disadvantages than onshore wind. As the Committee on Climate Change report puts it:

“Offshore wind generation has much more complex engineering aspects (e.g. relating to the salt-water environment), is at an earlier stage of deployment and is much more costly than onshore wind”.

Indeed, it costs the poor consumer, who is paying for the subsidy, twice as much per unit of electricity produced as onshore wind, and it is no more efficient at producing it than onshore wind, with a load factor last year that was no higher than that for onshore wind, at 26 per cent.

I have no doubt that circumstances will eventually force the Government to retreat from their ruinously expensive policy, as other countries have already shown signs of doing. The tragedy is that so much will have been wasted—indeed, scattered to the wind—in the mean time. Each accredited wind farm will be able to claim its enormous ROC subsidy at the rate originally applied for a guaranteed 20 years, whatever happens to subsidies in the future. In such a way has the green obsession resulted in the mortgaging of our future.

I should like to say something about gas and take up a point that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, made. I could find no proper discussion in any of the NPSs about shale gas, and I find that astonishing. Even the Committee on Climate Change, in its report that was published at about the same time, had something to say on the subject, including this:

“There is the possibility that potentially abundant supplies of unconventional gas will result in considerably lower gas prices”;

and this:

“The emergence of unconventional gas supplies, particularly in the North American market, has led to the prospect of a possible new ‘dash for gas’ in some regions of the world”.

Yet the Government apparently cannot find space in several hundred pages of their energy national policy statements to acknowledge the existence of this potentially game-changing development. Gas is now cheap, the price having decoupled from the oil price, and it is going to be accessible in many countries worldwide, not least in Europe. It emits 50 per cent to 70 per cent less carbon than coal, with the result that when the previous “dash for gas” took place in the 1990s and gas to some extent took over from coal, our power station carbon emissions fell overall by some 30 per cent.

What is the point of persisting with ever-rising subsidies for wind power in order to meet renewable energy targets when abundant, cheap and relatively CO₂-clean gas is available? What is the point of having to install 130-plus gigawatts of generating power in order to be able to provide 100 per cent back-up for wind power, when 80 or 90 gigawatts would be enough to satisfy peak demand using any other fuels? Do the Government think that consumers will tolerate ever-rising electricity bills in order to be able to enjoy the mystical advantage of having their electricity powered by wind rather than more cheaply by gas? At Question Time today, my noble friend the Minister seemed to wring his hands and say that it was regrettable that electricity prices were going up. The surest way of bringing them down would be to remove renewable energy subsidies.

I turn to gas and the CCR requirement. It is clear from EN-2 that the IPC may not give consent to any combustion plant above 300 megawatts, including any gas-fired plant, that has not demonstrated carbon-capture readiness. As I understand it, it is already the case today that any new large-scale gas plant, of which there are many in the pipeline—24 gigawatts’ worth, according to the Committee on Climate Change—must demonstrate carbon-capture readiness. Is that correct? If it is, what does that add to their costs? Does it result in delays? Has it affected where gas plants can be sited? Could we have the Government’s views on that?

On CCS itself, the Government have already committed £1 billion towards the cost of just the first of the four demonstration plants that they have planned. As I read it, they have already pledged to CCS as much as all other countries combined. However, the signs of success are not universally apparent. Last autumn, Norway announced a vast increase in the cost of its Mongstad project and put back by some years the expected completion date. I wonder whether the Government still hold faith in their own timetable. What is that timetable?

I should like to say something about the grid and take up what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said. According to the CPRE, we face what is expected to be the largest rollout of new power lines in a generation. This is required primarily to transport the electricity generated by wind farms in distant places to the centres of demand in the Midlands and the south-east. Even though those power lines will operate at the same capacity as wind power's load factor—that is, under 30 per cent over the year—they must be capable of carrying full capacity for when the wind is right.

Concern has been growing, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, about the damage that all this will do to the landscape. I therefore welcome with him the consultation that National Grid has launched on its approach to undergrounding energy cables, as well as the study on the comparative costs of underground and overhead cables which the Institution of Engineering and Technology has agreed to undertake. Underground cables are the rule in cities. Why cannot we see more of them in the country? Like the noble Lord, I am concerned about the apparent weakening in the NPS of the Holford rules. I have passed a question to the Minister’s officials asking why this apparent weakening has been introduced.

I end by referring to the Met Office, that old friend. The Government place all their faith in immensely long-distant temperature forecasts provided by an organisation that has time and again given proof that it is not able to forecast accurately beyond about next week, probably because its computers are programmed to provide the answers that its masters so passionately desire; namely, evidence to show that they have been right all along and that we are on the verge of being overwhelmed by a global warming catastrophe unless we do something about it. How can it be sensible for the Government to rely on that? Are the Government establishing a most urgent enquiry, as they should, into why they should continue to pay £200 million a year for the advice of the Met Office, which has just misled the whole country with regard to the weather in December, which in October it predicted would be mild? Is this the best use of taxpayers’ money? Are there no better advisers around?