Energy Rebates: Highlands and Islands

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Ian Blackford

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Paisley. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) on acquiring this time for a debate on a subject that matters to his constituents, my constituents and the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) and the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford).

As the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey said, this issue goes right across the highlands and islands, where we have longer, darker and colder winters. We have more houses that are older and therefore more difficult to insulate and heat, and we have virtually no access to the gas grid. Those things all contribute to the perfect storm that he rightly outlined, which is the exceptionally high incidence of fuel poverty. I know that because one of the less laudable claims to fame that the northern isles have, along with the Western Isles—Na h-Eileanan an Iar—is higher rates of fuel poverty than anywhere else in the country.

[Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)]

Much is often said about the colder temperatures and dark winters that we have in the highlands. However, we also need to give consideration to the fact that it is about not just temperature, but about the driving wind and rain that make it feel colder. There are times when the rain is horizontal, certainly in places such as the Isle of Skye and others. Let us remember that these communities are often very isolated. We are talking about single homes. Little protection is provided, so the impact of bad, cold, windy or wet weather on these communities is enormous, which just increases the need to have the heating on to give some protection from the climate.

[Mr Carmichael]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We have to be a little careful about how we describe that to people in other parts of the world: doubtless, in a week or two, we will all be back here telling everybody they should come and have their holidays in the highlands and islands. However, we are by no means unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the rain that comes straight at you. Certainly, it is always the surest sign of somebody who has just recently moved to Orkney or Shetland, or who is visiting, that on a rainy day they go out with an umbrella, which is a spectacularly useless piece of equipment in the communities that we are blessed to call home.

The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey brings us the interesting and constructive proposal of a standing charge rebate. When it comes to the question of energy costs, I have long taken the view that every little helps. Frankly, it does not really matter whether it is a silver bullet: when families are facing the choice not of heating or eating but of starving or freezing, which might be a better characterisation of the situation in the highlands and islands, if there is some benefit to be had, we should take it. That was the view I took on the alternative fuel payment brought forward by the Government last year: it helped a bit, and a bit of help is better than nothing.

The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey would probably agree that standing charges are a small part of the equation when it comes to the question of energy costs and the actual cost involved in heating people’s homes. The unit price is where the real action is to be found, and it is there that I would like to focus some attention, not least because I understand that Ofgem is carrying out a consultation on a social tariff. That is an interesting idea, and one that I think would command a fair degree of support across the whole House. I therefore hope Ofgem gets on with it—and quickly. Within that social tariff, there surely has to be some mechanism for geographical variation, because social is not just on the basis of income. It has to bring in other factors as well, such as the fact that we live in places that have longer, darker and colder winters.

Energy Trilemma

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Ian Blackford

Thursday 23rd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Blackford]

Actually, I agree with those comments from the professor and from the hon. Gentleman. When I have been in Aberdeen and been out looking at some of the offshore technology there, it has struck me that there is that transferability—if I may call it that—of skills from the oil and gas sector. Of course, we need to make that happen.

But what I would say is that, if Skilling is right—and I believe he is—the scale of the opportunity goes way beyond the jobs that we currently have in oil and gas. We need to make sure that we have the research and development and the innovation right across the supply chain, and that we are utilising not just our higher education sector, but the further education sector to deliver people with the appropriate skills to do this. That is an enormous opportunity. Out of that, there is an enormous opportunity to make sure that we have an industrial strategy that is fit for purpose as well. I would be delighted if we had these kinds of debates more often in this House—if we were actually having detailed discussions about how we do all this. What do we have to do to make the planning system work in a way that is respectful to local communities, but recognises the need and desire to move ahead?

[Mr Carmichael]

On the subject of planning and the delays that are associated with it, I have no doubt that the right hon. Gentleman is aware that, in Canada, the time from consent to installation for a tidal device is around three years, whereas in this country, it is seven or eight. It comes down to something as simple as the fact that we do all the different impact assessments and the rest of it sequentially, when with a bit of imagination and creativity, they could all be done side by side.

[Ian Blackford]

I agree. The right hon. Member has made an important point. Often, the question is: how do we make sure we are protecting the rights of stakeholders and the rights of communities, while being able to do things at pace? What we have been talking about highlights the potential loss of technological leadership, because if we cannot do these things, we will not get that investment. In that context, let me go to the side a little, because I want to talk about one of the subsets of the green industry that has enormous potential for us.

We heard a comment earlier about nuclear and the opportunity to provide baseload. I have mentioned this in the House on a number of occasions, and I do not apologise for doing so again: there is enormous opportunity in tidal, and that has been demonstrated with the success we have seen with a number of projects. I encourage everyone in the House to examine a peer-reviewed Royal Society report published just ahead of COP26. It highlighted the opportunity of developing 11.5 GW of energy from tidal. If we look at the projects already developed in the United Kingdom, we tend to find that as much as 80% of that supply chain has been generated domestically. A number of the companies doing that are supplying equipment to such countries as France and Canada, as has been mentioned. There is a real danger that unless we recognise the scale of the opportunity, we will lose that leadership.

I am delighted that in the last contracts for difference round, the UK Government put in place a ringfenced pot of £20 million for tidal. That got us off to a degree of a start in fulfilling that ambition laid out in the Royal Society report. It was not as much as I would have liked. For us to fulfil that potential, we need to provide as much as £50 million annually, but I regret that over the past few days we have seen that that ringfenced pot will be cut to £10 million. I say to the House that we run the risk of losing this industry, and I appeal to the Government to revisit this issue. We can provide that baseload from tidal, as an alternative to nuclear energy. If we are ambitious about getting to that kind of scale in tidal, ultimately we will be providing that baseload on a more affordable basis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Carmichael]

Absolutely. We make progress on these things incrementally, so if we can get to that situation that would be music to my heart and to the hearts of my constituents.

In Orkney, we already generate more energy from renewables than we can use in our own community. However, as the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) observed earlier, because of the way in which the market is regulated and structured, we actually pay more for it. That is something that generates not just energy, but an enormous amount of resentment in the community as well.

[Ian Blackford]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the progress he is making. There is a real issue about the disbursement of these funds because they are becoming particularly meaningful; it is a hot topic at the moment in Skye. We need to reflect on the powers that often lie with developers to make the determination as to how that pot is disbursed. We will have to be very careful across Government, here in Westminster and in the devolved Administrations, about setting the principles that have to be followed. If not, we will end up in a situation in which communities will, quite frankly, not get the benefit to extent that they should. We need to have effective governance in all of this to make sure that people are protected properly.

[Mr Carmichael]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. With a commitment to the principle from the top, everything underneath tends to fall into place.

There is another aspect of community benefits in which we may have missed a trick in Scotland recently. Although we missed out on a sovereign wealth fund, apart from in Orkney and Shetland, in the 1970s, there would have been an opportunity to generate more of a sovereign wealth fund from offshore renewables in the ScotWind round. We missed the boat this time, but I hope we can make up for it in future.

In many ways, Orkney and Shetland demonstrates the energy transition issues and the trilemma in microcosm: we have long, dark, cold winters, we have poor-quality housing stock and we are off the mains gas grid, so we do not have the same opportunities for access to cheaper heating as other parts of the country. The affordability element therefore very much matters to us. We generate more electricity from renewables than we can use for ourselves, but because of how the market was regulated until recently, when we finally got consent for a cable to the Scottish mainland, we have not been able to maximise the benefits. It is galling that although we are leading the way in decarbonised energy production, we end up paying more because we are part of a market that is regulated for the UK as a whole and that relies too heavily on the wholesale price of gas, as we are now seeing.

Let me just vent parenthetically for a second or two about the energy company SSE and its occasional choice simply to stop paying people who are entitled to feed-in tariff payments. I always seem to have at least one such case on the go among my constituency casework. Just last week, I was able to secure eventual, long-overdue repayment from SSE of £72,000 to one farmer in my constituency. That was money that SSE owed him and there was absolutely no reason for it not to pay, but for arbitrary and unaccountable reasons it seems occasionally just to decide to stop paying people. To my mind, that is an abuse of the privilege that it has been given by successive Governments.

Orkney is home to the European Marine Energy Centre, which is just about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. It has been at the forefront of the development of tidal stream energy generation; no doubt it could now play a similar role in the development of floating offshore wind.

Like other hon. Members, I was delighted to see the ringfenced pot in the round 4 allocation, but I share the concerns of the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber. That is not just me speaking; the UK Marine Energy Council, RenewableUK and Scottish Renewables have all reacted badly, so I hope that the Department is already thinking about how to maximise the opportunities by getting some of the money back.

With the synergy between oil and gas, we have been at the forefront of the country’s energy needs for 40 years now, and the development of offshore renewables is the obvious next step. When I speak to apprentices, as I did during National Apprenticeship Week last month, they tell me that although they are starting apprenticeships in the oil and gas industry, they fully expect to have transitioned to something different by the end of their working lives.

For the past 40 years, my constituency has been home to the two largest oil terminals in western Europe: Flotta in Orkney and Sullom Voe in Shetland, which provide a visual demonstration of the just transition. EnQuest, the terminal operator at Sullom Voe, is now working on projects involving hydrogen, carbon capture, use and storage, and offshore electrification of production. It is a visual illustration of transition, but again it shows just how ill served we are by binary choices. All the time, we seem to be told, “You can have renewables or you can have hydrocarbons, but you can’t have both.” That is dangerous nonsense. We have allowed production of oil and gas on the UK continental shelf to decline in recent years, and it has been to our detriment. It was never put in these terms at the time, but I cannot think why anyone ever thought it would be a good idea to rely on Vladimir Putin for the purchase of our gas and Mohammed bin Salman for the production of our oil when we have a rich resource on our own doorstep. As we heard from the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid), the production of oil and gas in the North sea or to the west of Shetland is much less carbon-intensive than importing it from other parts of the world.

The point, surely, is this: it is not an either/or. There is no route to decarbonisation and achieving net zero other than one that goes through oil and gas production. I do not want to see the future generations of my constituents working in oil and gas. I do want to see them work in renewables, but I think that that will be much more likely if we take a long, hard, clear-eyed look at what happens in the future with oil and gas production on our own continental shelf.

There are many other things that we should be doing, such as managing supply and demand and increasing the amount of storage and smart grid—something that offers great opportunities for those who can turn on their washing machines at the other end of the country using their smartphones, although I suspect that it would be a bit more challenging for the members of the community who would benefit most from opportunities of that kind.

The right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire has done us a great service in initiating this timely debate. I hope that its strategic aspects have been heard and understood on the Treasury Bench, and will be acted on.

Proceedings during the Pandemic

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Ian Blackford

Tuesday 2nd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to be called in this debate and to follow the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley). I implore her to move her amendments this afternoon. They are important amendments. They are about the rights of all Members to participate in the process of Parliament, both in debating, speaking and holding the Government to account and, of course, in voting. The shadow Leader of the House is correct. We must remember that we are living in the middle of a pandemic. It is the responsibility we have as a Parliament, and our responsibility to all the nations we represent, to make sure all our constituents are not disenfranchised.

I rise today in the absence of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), who, because of the pandemic, cannot be here. I have to say that it is a considerable privilege to do so. The Leader of the House and I have known each other for a long time. I hold him in high esteem as a political opponent, but I have to say to him that on this matter I believe him to be wholly wrong. The decision by the UK Government to return Parliament has put parliamentarians in an impossible situation. A small number of us on the SNP Benches are here today—reluctantly—in order to ensure that the Government are held to account.

I have to ask the question: why were we forced to come here? Why were we forced to come here today? Reference has been made to the journey I have made. I do not wish this to be about me, but I had to drive to Inverness and then get a sleeper train, because there are no flights from the highlands to London. As has been referenced, it is a 16-hour journey. I know the same is true for the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael).

[Mr Carmichael]

Eighteen.

[Ian Blackford]

Eighteen hours for the right hon. Gentleman. Is the Leader of the House really suggesting that parliamentarians should spend over 30 hours a week travelling to have the privilege of representing their constituents, when over the course of the past few weeks we have had the opportunity and the ability to do our jobs of challenging the Government remotely and effectively? The shadow Leader of the House is correct. With the post bag we have had, the thousands of emails we have received, and the need and desire to be able to assist our constituents—we have had the time to do that—we are going to lose countless hours simply because the Leader of the House determines that on the basis of tradition we should be here--. Nothing to do with the circumstances we are in and the risks to our constituents in this pandemic.

[Mr Carmichael]

I am not going to spend 30 hours a week travelling. Not only is it logistically challenging, but it would be downright irresponsible for me to return to my community now. So I am down here now at the behest of the Leader of the House and I will be staying here until it is safe to go home.