Revised Energy National Policy Statements

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister, particularly for explaining the relationship of these documents to planning decisions at both national and local level. Last night, I took home all the documents that are piled up over there, together with the energy policy White Paper and hydrogen White Paper, and tried to make sense of them. I failed utterly, although the Minister’s explanation has made it slightly clearer. Nevertheless, I shall bore the Committee with my reflections, looking at the totality of the papers before us.

I note in the present draft that the Government frequently use nuanced forms of modal verbs—namely, could or can rather than should or will. That is perhaps too loose a form of words for the immense task that we have before us in meeting our net-zero targets in particular. As the Minister said, those net-zero targets have a direct impact on not only what are traditionally regarded as nationally significant developments but the local effects that those developments will have on their areas and populations.

Therefore, the final version needs to be a little more definitive than the one before us. The key target here is clearly that for 2035. Decisions taken in planning now will not see fruition for at least three or four years and, in many cases, much longer. The 10-year run-up to 2035—meeting the 78% reduction, I think in emissions by that date— therefore depends on crucial decisions to be made in the next two or three years. That requires clearer guidance in the overriding policy statement, less freedom of manoeuvre and less nuance in the guidance given, otherwise we will have inconsistent decisions.

I take just four examples of where we need a clearer decision on the basis for any national or local decisions before they can be taken. The Minister will be familiar with the arguments in many areas—we debated nuclear yesterday and have debated other aspects—but I shall go through them quickly.

The first is obviously the replacement of natural gas heating for homes and buildings. On that, we need clear decisions on whether a hydrogen-based system can meet most of our gas needs, whether we will have enough hydrogen and how it will be produced—presumably, it will be green hydrogen. The hydrogen strategy itself, although very useful, leaves a lot of questions unanswered. We need to know whether there will be differential impacts in different parts of the country. If we are to have large-scale hydrogen for industrial and domestic purposes, heating may well extend only to the area within a few miles and everybody else will have to rely on transferring on to the national grid for direct electrification of their heating or, in the more rural and suburban areas, probably heat pumps. So there will be different impacts of that decision but if what is currently natural gas heating, which heats 80% of our homes and buildings, is to be replaced, we must be clear how it will be, and in what parts of the country it may be replaced by different forms of lower-carbon heating.

My second example is related, because one of the replacements for our gas grid proposed for our domestic heating has been district heating—effectively, local networks. If we are to have local networks on a major scale, we cannot rely on a planning process which takes propositions for development, retrofitting or individual buildings on a one-by-one basis. You have to designate substantial domestic or industrial building areas to be obliged to take the form of district heating that is given planning permission on the grounds that it is nationally significant. If we are to see district heating—I am in principle in favour of it, as long as its consumers are protected, because clearly there is no competition in those circumstances—we need to ensure that we have powers to designate the whole area, otherwise, by and large, it will not work. That includes not only new developments but the retrofitting of existing buildings and factories.

Thirdly, there is the issue of offshore wind. It has been a huge success and, in the period between now and 2035, will continue to be one of the major contributors to reducing our total carbon emissions. However, the development of offshore wind has been somewhat haphazard. By and large, a single array has a single landing point onshore and each is owned by different companies or consortia. There are planning considerations, usually addressed locally to start with, of how you bring offshore wind onshore and what the connections look like, because they will also be mostly in areas of natural beauty or other rural areas which do not like the disturbance. If every array has an individual landing point, that is a huge number of planning decisions if we are to meet the objectives in the energy White Paper.

If, however, there were to be an offshore network so that several arrays could be connected, some engineers argue that we could reduce the number of landing points by something above two-thirds. That requires a government intervention to ensure that we have an onshore and offshore network that limits the number of onshore connection points. That is a key strategic decision and, if decisions on new or enhanced offshore arrays are taken on a one-off basis, we will never reach the decision to amalgamate them into an offshore grid.

My second-to-last point relates to nuclear, which we discussed at some length yesterday. It is also important that we have early government decisions on a number of nuclear aspects, particularly the designation of nuclear reactor sites—a project that successive Governments have utterly failed at over the past 20 or 30 years. Any sizeable nuclear reactor will create significant planning effects on the surrounding area and there will be strong political pressures as well. That means that, if we are to go for a new generation of nuclear power—by and large, I am in favour of that, whether on the size of Sizewell or on a smaller size facilitated by the Rolls-Royce developments on small modular reactors, et cetera—we need to know where it will go and all the planning hurdles have to be overcome. That will again require a much clearer government decision on where those sites will be.

Of course, the most acute and difficult decision for the Government, and for all of us, is the issue of the storage of waste and waste disposal. We already have a historic legacy of waste from now-closed reactor. If we are to have a new generation of nuclear, while it will be much more efficient, there will be high-radioactivity waste to be disposed of. We need a decision on that urgently.

I hope that the final version of the statement indicates that there are key decisions that the Government have already taken, or are about to take, which will define the parameters of any subsequent decisions, even on relatively large-scale projects. I hope that those will be addressed.

My final point is that as far as I could see, certainly in the overriding document, there is a major omission on carbon reduction. As I understood it, the National Infrastructure Commission indicated that the energy efficiency project, to insulate and otherwise improve the energy efficiency of our homes, should be regarded as a nationally significant project. That is operated street by street, at best, but it is still in totality a major contribution towards meeting our net-zero targets. It should really be dealt with in the same way as these other single-site projects. I hope that the Minister, and the final version, will take that into account and that it will be somewhat shorter and more to the point than the present document, so that all protagonists can understand where we stand on that and where their own projects stand.