Energy Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Dixon-Smith
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I support the amendment. The Minister will undoubtedly have been advised by officials and the Cabinet Office that it is not normal to put purpose clauses into Bills. However, that has always been nonsense. It is particularly important that we set out clearly in Parliament the purpose of these measures.
I commend the Government on developing the plans for the Green Deal, but undoubtedly not all the details have yet been thought through. Some will be thought through before the scheme is launched, some will appear in codes, some will appear in regulations and some will have to be dealt with in subsequent practice once we see whether the market is mobilised as effectively as the Government wish. However, the purpose will not change. With any changes down the line that the Government find it necessary to make, it is particularly important that we go back to the purpose of the Bill. That purpose is, in effect, twofold: to save energy and therefore carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, and to reduce the incidence of fuel poverty. Both those need to be addressed and set out in something like a purpose clause with a requirement to report back.
As for fuel poverty, I speak as one of the two Ministers who drew up the original guidelines. My noble friend Lady Liddell was the other Minister who signed the original Act to set up targets for fuel poverty, and it is not an easy subject, but it is important that the Government and Parliament set out the objectives. The contribution towards the elimination of fuel poverty is clearly one such objective. That will not solve the problem, as other measures also need to be taken, but it is a contribution and any subsequent change down the line needs to be seen against it, particularly in relation to the Green Deal.
On the face of it, it is not clear how the basic principles of the Green Deal apply to the fuel poor, particularly those who are in tenanted accommodation, whether with social landlords or private landlords, because the best way of delivering that dimension of the Green Deal may be in a deal with the landlord, albeit that the tenant normally pays the bill. Some complicated arrangements will have to be made. That is not yet in the Bill and I do not expect it to be, but reference back to the objectives and obligations to report annually would help us to keep the objectives of this provision clear. I hope that the Government will adopt something like these clauses in the final version of the Bill, either today or in subsequent proceedings in another place.
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, I hesitate to intervene, and if the Minister had risen quickly enough to keep the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, in his seat, I probably would not have intervened at all.
Although repetition is a good thing, we must bear in mind that the stated purposes have already been written into legislation and are already so ingrained in all our thinking habits that, frankly, to put them at the beginning of this Bill adds nothing. One problem with the amendment is that it requires “commensurate contributions” from two very diverse and very different things that will depend on a great deal of voluntary action by large numbers of people or groups, societies, local authorities, housing associations and so on. To me, the word “commensurate” makes this, worthy though it is, in effect meaningless because there are too many outside factors that mean that commensurate action will probably be only accidental because it depends on so many people, either tenants, landlords or the other categories of people whom I have already mentioned, volunteering to take part. It also depends on a lot of other factors, the primary one being the absolute certainty that the energy savings they will achieve, and the value of them, will be greater than the costs that they have to bear. Such arguments were expressed in Committee because of the uncertainty about what might happen with interest rates in the future.
The second point is that, even if we put this into place, the far more potent effect in reducing emissions from domestic households will be the work that will have to be done on the supply side of the energy industry to decarbonise the electricity supply. It is far more important to pay attention to that sort of aspect, where the effect can be far greater on a residential level, than this aspect, which will have a beneficial effect—there is no denying that—but not a huge effect because the amount of energy and the cost saved will be nowhere near the cost of making the domestic sector CO2-emissions free. In my view, the effect of the 2050 target implies that by 2050 the whole domestic sector has to be carbon-emission free. We need to focus much more on that effect and take this as it is now. It will be a benefit, of course, but it will be only a small benefit. I do not think that we should complicate the matter, and still less should we try to take actions that depend on the actions of others—that are commensurate—because we simply cannot control the situation with that degree of accuracy.