Energy Bill

Lord Stoddart of Swindon Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Lords Chamber

I may be dim, and I may not have been in the Labour Party for long enough to understand how it appreciates these things—it is 60 years this month since I joined—but the amendment is, surely, incompatible with our main policies. I suspect the electorate will see through it. I cannot see why I, as a Labour person, should support the amendment: it hits jobs and is likely to increase fuel poverty. Politically, I am aware that yesterday’s big poll showed that 60% of the public oppose green taxes so I am not sure that is a great flag to wave before the next election. The poor should not pay the price of green dreams.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, I shall not be supporting the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh. I am also a Labour person but an independent Labour person, so I shall not be supporting the Labour Party this afternoon. However, I want to say one or two things about the amendment and the debate.

The noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, in a detailed critique, settled many of the arguments that have been made. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, was absolutely right to say that the Bill is not about energy but decarbonisation. The two things are quite different. I have been asking a lot of questions about energy and decarbonisation, and the latest reply I received from the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, was that the Government are responsible for 14% of the average bill paid by consumers for energy. The companies, for which I hold no brief, are getting between 5% and 6%. They are being demonised for increasing the bills and yet the Government are responsible for three times as much of the bills as the companies are.

When I was in the Labour Party before I was expelled for supporting Labour people instead of Tories—defecting Tories, incidentally—I opposed from the Front Bench the privatisation of the gas and electricity industries and I believe that was the right thing to do. It may very well be that the Labour Party, because it now apparently believes in socialism, will consider whether it wants to renationalise those industries if it gets into power at the next general election. However, that is by the by.

My other point is that like most other sensible people I believe that climate changes but like other noble Lords I believe that it is not necessarily carbon emissions that are causing the climate to change at present—if there is any significant climate change at all. However, the Government, Opposition and virtually everyone else say that climate change is due to carbon dioxide emitted by humans and their activities. That may or may not be true but unfortunately the Government do not deal with the problem. If climate change is due to human activity, why on earth are we not doing something about the predicted increase in the population from the present 7 billion to 9 billion? That really is going to exacerbate the problem. An extra 2 billion people will be emitting more carbon dioxide and their activities will add to the problem. Why do the Government not have a population policy? That would meet the problem without the Bill and without the amendment.

Then, of course, there is the possibility that carbon is not the real problem, that perhaps it is not global warming we ought to fear but global freezing. I am old enough to remember a lot of climate changes in my life and there seems to be some sort of circle. They come around now and again. However, suppose the people in the 1970s who said we are going to have a new ice age are right. Then we would be wrong in trying to reduce. If the warmists and the people who believe in carbon dioxide causing global warming are right, we would need extra carbon dioxide to deal with the ice age rather than less. This is becoming quite an issue. I read in the Daily Express today an article—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

I am sorry I have gone downmarket a bit. I am quite sure noble Lords will want to take more notice of the Financial Times, which was quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, rather than me, but I saw this in the Daily Express. It is not the view of the Daily Express; it is the view of Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University, who said that,

“erratic and extreme weather patterns could be the norm in 20 years. He said the risk of harsh winters and wet miserable summers has gone up to 25 to 30 per cent compared with 10 per cent a few years ago. Weakening sunspot activity is to blame for a ‘major change’ in the UK’s weather he told BBC TV. He said: ‘The sun is ‘quietening’ really rapidly. We think it is actually quietening more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years’”.

We are entitled to take Professor Lockwood’s view into account as well as the views of other people. If he is right then we should be taking a completely different course on climate change. I hope that the Government will take note of what he said. Finally, I hope that they will indeed take some action to ensure that the people of this country—the energy consumers—are not put to further expense by additional green measures. Perhaps there could be a reduction in the cost of those as well.

[Lord Dixon-Smith (Con)]

My Lords, I hesitate to intervene at a late stage in this debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, for tabling the amendment that we are discussing because it has enabled this extremely wide-ranging debate over a whole lot of matters that are not specifically aimed at the wording of the amendment. I am bound to express the view, which the House might agree with, that having had this debate at the start of Report I hope we will not have to repeat it.

The debate reminds me so much of the distinction between climate and weather. This morning, I tried to set out to come here. Every road I attempted to pass down was blocked by a fallen tree for about the first three hours of the day, and it was impossible. Of course I am here—that is noble Lords’ misfortune but that cannot be helped. The fact of the matter is that that is weather, and weather is only a part of the climate. This debate makes me think more and more of weather. However, the conclusions we come to and set in our debate will create the Bill and will set the climate. That is the significance of what we are discussing.