Energy Bill
Debate between Viscount Hanworth and Lord Cameron of Dillington
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, I support the theme of these two amendments, particularly the latter one. It is widely recognised that energy demand reduction is one of the cheapest ways to achieve decarbonisation of our economy. I have seen figures—I am not sure whether they came from DECC—which state that energy saving could reduce demand by 26% by 2030. I imagine that that 26% is not from where we are now but from where we would be if we did not have any form of energy demand reduction schemes in place.
It worries me, as the noble Lord, Lord Roper, was saying, that DECC originally said that it would be implementing energy demand reduction via the capacity market. Perhaps I am quite glad that the noble Lord did not find any reference to it in his reading last night because maybe we have got that wrong. To be honest, it makes absolutely no sense. Why wait for the capacity auction next year and implementation in four years’ time before introducing demand reduction schemes? Why wait for a capacity crunch before introducing them? We need these schemes to start now or as soon as possible. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, we are not talking about energy security or even capacity margins; we are talking about emission reductions across the economy.
I think that I am happy to accept that the Government might want to run pilots here, although the noble Lord, Lord Roper, was absolutely right that we need to put details in those pilots; for example, when the results will be, what will happen afterwards and so on. We have seriously to get on with this.
Lots of opportunities are available. Smart meters are the first that come to mind. A supply company can run machines within a business or a household that are very expensive on electricity—tumble dryers and even dishwashers can wait until the smart meter tells it to turn itself on. Obviously, it should be allowed to be overridden by the householder but the householder must know exactly what cost there will be if he or she overrides the meter. There will be certain times—obviously, when people come home from work and turn on the kettle, or when they get up from watching a film or “Coronation Street”—when the electricity companies know intimately when the peak demand will be. The prices should be allocated accordingly.
I should also say that in future, smart meters could—nay, should—be sensitive to the amount of supply available. If a large proportion of our supply such as photovoltaics or wind turbines is dependent on the weather, a smart meter should know what the weather is to be tonight at 6 pm when the peak demand is coming and therefore what the capacity margin will be. For instance, in Germany last week—and probably this week as well—at certain times, 33% of the national electricity supply came from photovoltaics. Clearly, at those times there was no shortage of power in the country and no need to restrict demand at all by cost.
The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, also said that demand reduction could be encouraged by better energy rating in housing. I could not agree more. Again in Germany, 360,000 homes have been brought down to near zero emissions by lending money to householders at 1%. Perhaps a pilot could be encouraged on those lines; as we all know, the Green Deal has not been very effective as yet.
However, the most important move, because it throws down the gauntlet to the entrepreneurial flair of industrialists, business people and householders themselves, is to pilot and introduce as soon as possible energy efficiency premium payments. Those schemes have worked very well in the USA and, I believe, could work in the UK if bundled together with grants for capital investment. That could, incidentally, include hundreds of household or office-based batteries linked to the smart meter—so electricity is going in and out of those batteries. Obviously, some help would be needed with the capital expenditure in those circumstances.
The main point is that the Government have to drive that agenda, not just sit back and let it happen via the rather clunky capacity mechanism, which was never really designed for electricity demand reduction in the first place.
Viscount Hanworth
My Lords, I, too, express my appreciation of the intentions of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, but I should like to pick holes in the amendment in much the same way as has my colleague, my noble friend Lord Davies. Whereas he considered proposed paragraph (f), I shall concentrate on proposed paragraph (g). It may well be that the amendment is more sophisticated than it seems, because it is possible that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, is trying to strike a judicious balance between saying something felicitous and saying something that will get past the Minister.
Let me try to deconstruct what is being said in paragraph (g). It is an injunction,
“to progressively increase the energy efficiency of the United Kingdom as measured in terms of quantity of energy used per unit of GDP”.
That is most unlikely to impose a binding constraint. The fact is that the ratio has been decreasing monotonically since 1950, at least, so that in 2010, we used about half the quantity of energy per unit of real GDP as we did in 1950.
I want to make a bigger point than that. I think that we should approach most of what we read in the Bill in a spirit of cynicism and scepticism. I am sorry if that sounds strong, but if we analyse a great many clauses in detail and think of the circumstances in which they would be applied, we realise that they impose non-binding constraints and impose no particular behaviour by the Government that might staunch emissions, improve efficiency, or whatever. I do not fully understand the motives of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and they may, as I said, be more sophisticated than they seem but, if I may be forgiven for saying so, his amendment would perpetrate exactly such an ineffective provision. I hope that he will forgive me.
Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Debate between Viscount Hanworth and Lord Cameron of Dillington
Viscount Hanworth
My Lords, I would like to reaffirm some of the points we have just listened to. The provisions of Clause 5, which seek to limit the power of local planning authorities to require information in association with planning applications, seem to be not only unnecessary but pernicious. I am at a loss to understand their provenance. As has been suggested, the key word that reveals the drift of the thinking is “reasonable”. The Bill enjoins planning authorities to limit their demands for information to those that are reasonable. The implication is an aspersion that, hitherto, there has been a significant number of unreasonable demands for information. Where is the evidence that would support such an aspersion? I am sure there is no such evidence.
Rather than relating to the practice of planning, the clause seems to relate to a prejudice against the planning process. As such, it seems to accord with the general tenor of this Bill, which has little or no grounding in facts or in evidence. Perhaps the worst aspect of this clause, as has been suggested, is that it gives no indication of how judgments would be made of what is reasonable and what is not reasonable. The consequence of this is that it invites planning applicants to withhold information on the spurious grounds that it is unreasonable to request it. A licence to behave in this way would surely wreck the planning system. One can fairly ask the Minister whether that is indeed the intention of the Bill.
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, I am totally supportive of this clause, but I am vague about how it will work as it is without any form of back-up information. It may be my ignorance of the planning system because I come to it from, as it were, the other side of the desk as an applicant rather than a local authority or planning officer. I am particularly concerned about small developments in rural areas, and here I ought to declare an interest for the purposes of this Committee as a farmer and landowner.
In many rural areas, which are of course underfunded as the result of an unfair and imbalanced central government funding system, planning departments have inadequate resources, staff and expertise. I believe that some local planning authorities are reluctant to engage in pre-application advice; indeed, they cannot afford to do so. I am concerned about the first encounter with the local planning authority for small applicants when they submit an application. It is likely that they will find themselves having to pay, say, 30% to 50% of the costs of a project—we must bear it in mind that these are small projects worth £50,000 or even less—in order to conform with the demands made by the local planning authority in terms of reports and consents. The project, of course, is also greatly delayed because they have to get all the answers needed to complete these reports. It seems to me that the belt-and-braces, tick-box approach applied by local planning authorities is not necessarily in order to cover themselves in case of a comeback on the result of an application, but all too often because they lack the expertise within the department to know what is relevant. That is why they take a belt-and-braces approach. The fact that, due to the costs, a small project is killed before it even gets off the ground is often the cause of a secret sigh of relief in an overworked and underfunded local planning authority. In these circumstances, you have to ask yourself where our much-needed development will come from.
In my experience when talking to councillors—I have never actually been a councillor—I have found that few of the reports that are asked for are read by the members of the planning committee. One might say that that is fair because they are reported by the planning officers who know all about them, but even that is not necessarily always strictly accurate. I have known reports to be asked for by planning officers which are already in the file; in other words, the officers have not read the file. I have some questions. How is an underfunded rural local planning authority without knowledge and expertise to apply this clause? How will an overworked planning officer apply it to the multitude of different sorts of application that he has to deal with in a rural area? Is this clause all there is? Should there not be more guidance, which is what I would really like to see?
As I say, it may be perfectly clear to those who have worked for a local planning authority and are used to being on the other side of the desk, but it seems that we need a bit more detailed guidance. However, I repeat that I am totally supportive of this clause.