Localism Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

I do not know. If the local authority is maintaining a list of land or businesses of community value, it will no doubt be known as the list of assets of community value. Whether the words are required in legislation is something I have long since stopped wondering about. I am sure that some of us could get round a table and reduce the size of this Bill considerably just by omitting stuff that appears to add nothing. I am not sure that that is our job. I would love to go through deleting stuff, but the Government would not accept it. When I do, they do not accept it. I have no real comment on that.

The Bill refers to a building or land specified in regulations, as a definition of the buildings and land which perhaps ought to be in the list of community assets. Again, it refers to a building or land, and appears to refer to a particular building or particular land, but it seems to me that it ought to refer to a class of building or land or a category of building or land.

Amendments 136ZB and 136ZC go together and are rather more specialist. Amendment 136ZB is quite long. It states:

“For the purposes of this section “land of community value” does not include … an allotment, common, open space, nature reserve or playing field in the ownership or management of a national or local authority or a charity whose purpose includes the management or conservation of that land for the public benefit … access land, or … land governed by an approved estate management scheme under section 19 of the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 or section 69 of the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development act 1993”.

Amendment 136ZC defines the terms. As defined in the amendment, access land is land defined as such under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. It covers very large areas. For example, the whole of the Lake District is access land, either because it is urban common or because it has been described as access land. Very large areas of the uplands of this country are access land, and many places have commons that are access land. Clearly this is land of community value, which is why it has been defined as access land on which people can engage in what I believe is termed “recreation on foot”. However, it would be ludicrous if all that land were to be included in this legislation. These amendments exclude it.

The list of allotments, commons, open spaces and so on removes from the Part 4 procedure land already reasonably protected by statute, and land where the present owners should not be encouraged to believe that they can offload it on other people or perhaps on public authorities. It is also desirable to simplify the creation of the lists. Many areas, large and small, are defined in this way and might be included. However, if they were it would be likely to lead to a large number of disputes that would be difficult to resolve.

The definitions of allotment, common and open space are similar to those in Clauses 163(3) and 183(10) in the London sections, which repeat definitions from previous legislation over the years. It should be noted that the definition of “allotment” does not include the normally understood meaning of allotment, which is either a statutory allotment under the Allotments Act 1922 or a council or other allotment probably let on an annual garden tenancy. These allotments are the specialist fuel and field garden allotments under an Inclosure Act, which some of us will remember discussing during the passage of previous legislation.

The amendments do not seek to prevent the transfer or leasing of any of these excluded classes of land to appropriate charitable organisations—by agreement and after full consultation with the public and those affected—but it should not be under the pressure of this procedure. These classes of land have protection that is long established and rather specialist, and it should remain.

Amendment 133E questions the five-year time limit for land and buildings that are included—

[Lord Teverson]

That is in the next group.

[Lord Greaves]

I beg your pardon. I beg to move Amendment 133D.

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

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, perhaps I may start by giving a personal opinion. When we previously considered these draft policy statements it was done in a Grand Committee-style rather than a Second Reading-style debate. I think that that probably works better for draft statements, although we now have only one more to consider. As the Minister said, a large number of intelligent and profound points came out of that process. That was partly because the session was less formal than today’s session will be—although I am sure that we will be equally productive.

One of the things that are always useful about this type of statement is that it goes through the bare facts of the background of the situation. Immediately when you read the first sections of the overarching statement you realise that, as an economy, a climate, a nation and a continent, we are in big trouble if we do not do something very quickly and decisively. We currently have 85 gigawatts of electricity capacity available to us, but 59 new gigawatts will be required by 2025, which is not that far away in terms of industrial investment cycles. That is a huge challenge, as £250 billion—a quarter of a trillion pounds—in investment is needed. Hence this project is urgent. We need to give investment certainty to large organisations and to smaller organisations in terms of the renewables that will make that possible.

The other thing that really stood out to me—I must have read this before but I did not really realise it—is that, on average, only half of that 85 gigawatts is used. It is a degree of peaking, which we are aware of, but, in terms of capacity, we already have to add on 100 per cent to what we normally need. One of the things that that says to me as a past corporate economist, and as an economist more generally, is that there is a major market failure here. Clearly you cannot take peaking completely out of energy markets—that would be impossible—but it is staggering that it is at that level. In conjunction with Ofgem, DECC is looking at market structures. This huge market failure also should be looked at. In consumer terms, off-peak electricity is clearly too expensive. I have a background in industry. If I saw most of my assets doing nothing for half the time, I would say that it is a very ineffective way to run the infrastructure of a business, let alone of a country. That is one of the major messages that comes out to me. I hope the Minister will take that thought forward very strongly in terms of market-mechanism reviews.

I will concentrate mainly on the overarching statement. In paragraph 2.2.14 the Government express a strong preference and commitment to reach a 30 per cent reduction in emissions at European level by 2020, rather than the current 20 per cent. I know that that is very much one of the Secretary of State’s aims and targets and I hope that he has success in that very important area.

Perhaps I may go through some of the areas that bring up more questions than answers. One of them, as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, is carbon capture and storage. Although carbon capture and storage is an important strategy and a great technology in that, in many ways, it sweeps the pollutants under the carpet—or under the North Sea, or underground, or wherever you want to put them—the statement in fact says that there is uncertainty about that technology. The report actually states that, which I think is very honest, and it is a good thing that it does so. However, there are all sorts of areas around CCS that we need to make sure we do not completely sell our soul on. We need to make sure that it is going to work economically and, necessarily, technically. It can probably work technically, but will it work at a cost in terms of investment that power organisations will be able to absorb?

I have been a Member of this House for four and a half years now and for most of that time we have been talking about demonstration projects, contracts, competitions, getting these things on board, Britain being ahead, and regarding this as not exactly a silver bullet but as an important part of solving the whole problem of energy capacity. Yet, I am very concerned that we never really seem to have a lot of hard evidence on where those competitions have got to, when they are going to happen, and when implementation can take place. I know that all that is happening but it would be very useful for the Minister to clarify it.

Another small thing on CCS: it seems to me that if CCS is going to require anything, it will be pipelines to disperse the carbon dioxide that we take out of energy production. However, the pipeline part of the energy draft statement relates only to oil and gas pipelines. I assume that there will be quite a few carbon dioxide ones in future as well.

I return to one of the broader issues, which is air quality. I shall quote from paragraph 5.5.2. I largely welcome these statements, but this is an area—I am not sure that I have got the reference right; I apologise. The Government specifically exclude carbon dioxide as one of the pollutants in the atmosphere. The NPS goes through the sulphur and nitrous oxides and so on, but it says that carbon dioxide is dealt with through other regulations in other ways. If we look at the American experience with its Environmental Protection Agency, which finally agreed a couple of years ago that CO₂ was a pollutant, we can see that the Government should not be afraid of CO₂ being classified as such, and it should be taken into consideration with regard to these draft statements. There are other mechanisms by which CO₂ is dealt with, but we should accept that it is an atmospheric pollutant and deal with it on that basis. We should not avoid that issue.

There is a small chapter on socioeconomic issues. I come from the south-west, and I know that in terms of new nuclear—I will not expand on this too much because this subject will come back in a future nuclear debate—there are potentially huge disruptions for local communities when construction takes place. To have a power station you have to have a construction process and inevitably you bring in a large number of contractors and workers, but there is certainly a great fear—for example, around Hinkley Point—that all the holiday home accommodation will disappear for three years and kill the holiday industry in the longer term, and that social housing will be filled or the private sector part of social housing will disappear, putting all sorts of pressures on local authorities. Perhaps I could come back to that when we debate the nuclear areas.

On consultation, I do not pretend that I have read every word of these documents but I have read pretty well most of them. There does not seem, and I do not understand this, to be any requirement to consult anyone specifically as part of the planning process. Maybe I misunderstand these documents and that is not supposed to be part of this process, but there is no requirement that the planning authority and the Minister take evidence from local authorities or, for instance, from the devolved Assembly in Wales. I do not understand from these documents who has to be consulted. Surely we have to ensure that someone definitely is consulted; everyone will be aware that a nuclear power station or an offshore wind complex is being built. There perhaps needs to be more rigour in that area, but maybe I misunderstand what these documents are supposed to do.

To come back to EN-3, as an individual document on renewable energy, I welcome the statement that the Government intend to have a test of sustainability against biomass. I am a great supporter of biomass for energy generation, but sustainable credentials of that biomass in order to benefit from renewable obligations or other incentives are very important. I congratulate the Minister on including that, but I would be interested to understand the timescales involved.