Energy Bill [Lords]

Andrea Leadsom Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

I declare an interest, as my husband is the company secretary of Sheffield Renewables, a community benefit society that funds, develops, owns and operates renewable energy systems in Sheffield.

I rise to speak in support of a number of amendments that would be vital additions to the Bill. It was a pleasure to sit on the Public Bill Committee to debate, at great length, many of the issues that have been raised today. I still feel the Bill is missing its intended purpose, as the Government put it, to

“deliver a cleaner, more affordable and more secure energy system for the long term.”

We are in a climate and nature emergency, and we are now seeing its effects. We are also facing the worst cost of living crisis in decades. Although I am pleased the Minister has listened to Members on both sides of the House on the hydrogen levy, there is still a lot more to do.

The Bill could have been our opportunity to tackle these issues head on, transitioning away from climate-wrecking fossil fuels while making energy affordable for everyone. Sadly, in its current form, it fails on those fronts. First and foremost, the Bill will fail to make energy more affordable for my constituents. National Energy Action has warned that 6.3 million households could be trapped in fuel poverty this winter, and by 2024 some households will face spending up to a quarter of their income on energy bills.

We need to overhaul our broken energy pricing system, not have more tinkering around the edges. I am proud to support new clause 36, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis), which would introduce a national energy guarantee. This idea needs to be considered, as we need to make sure that the burden of the transition does not fall on those who are least able to meet it.

Secondly and shockingly, the Bill fails to deliver any energy efficiency measures. There is nothing about how we will achieve the targets that have been set. The latest CCC report is clear that the Government need to rapidly scale up and accelerate energy efficiency to stand any hope of meeting legally binding decarbonisation targets. Obviously, the greenest energy is energy that is not used, and the more we can do to reduce the need for energy in poor-quality housing the better.

New clauses 33 and 35 aim to correct the current position by making it a legal requirement for the Government to produce an energy demand reduction plan and providing local authorities with funding for the decarbonisation of homes. I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) for tabling those new clauses, and I urge the Government to support them.

Finally, the Bill fails to decarbonise at speed and scale. Again, the latest CCC report could not be clearer:

“Expansion of fossil fuel production is not in line with Net Zero”.

New clauses 2 and 29 would prohibit coalmines and new oil and gas respectively. New clause 30 would phase down UK petroleum, and new clause 59 would decarbonise electricity supply by 2030. They could and should have been central pillars of the Bill. They are about how we can transform our energy system and meet Labour’s ambitious plans to be a green energy superpower by 2030. However, the Government have removed many new clauses that were won in the Lords—for example, the one on banning new coalmines—and Ministers are refusing to support any such measures today. Instead, they waited until MPs went home over the summer to give the green light to hundreds of new North sea oil and gas licences, without proper scrutiny, in a damning indictment of this Government’s record on climate action. Those are not the only amendments that would help to raise the ambition in this Bill that the Government have removed.

Finally, I wish to mention the importance of new clause 7. The treaty that has been outlined is holding us back and we need to be on the front foot with this. I hope that Ministers will reconsider whether or not we should be part of this treaty in the future.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

This is a great Bill and I congratulate the Government as it takes us a huge step forward. Back in 2015, when I believe the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) was the shadow Energy Minister, I was Energy Minister and we announced we were taking coal off the system by 2025. I recall that at that time the whole world was up in arms, saying, “Oh no, the lights will go out. This will never happen.” Yet by 2020 coal was almost off the system and today there is hardly ever any use of coal. That demonstrates what can happen when a Government set a direction of travel, put the funding behind it and let businesses and investors get on with it. It is a huge accolade for a Conservative Government, who then stand aside and let private investment come in. It is time that we committed ourselves to building new nuclear baseload, as that is vital. We can be proud of our achievements on offshore wind and the commitment now to carbon capture, usage and storage—that has been too long in coming but I am pleased to see it.

Time is tight, but I wish to refer to my new clause 60, which calls for a specific problem to be tackled in a specific way. We all have major concerns in our constituencies, where communities do not wish to see huge electricity pylons, great big wind turbines and great big industrial sites related to energy in their area. Yet we know that we need new onshore wind, lots of solar and lots of electricity pylons. My new clause proposes to make it much easier to build the 600 km of new electricity cabling and pylons that we need by 2030 to meet our power decarbonisation targets alongside major road and rail routes. As things stand, communities understandably object to these huge pieces of kit going through their areas, and then these things get delayed and delayed. In the past eight or so years, we have built only about 30 km of new pylons but we need about 600 km by 2030. We need to get our skates on. The Government can help by making it much easier for planning—

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)]

I completely agree with the point the right hon. Lady is making. Does she agree that Governments across the UK—transmission infrastructure is a matter where the Welsh Government have competence—should be looking at cable ploughing technology as a way forward? It enables “undergrounding” at a far cheaper cost and in a far more environmental way than traditional undergrounding.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

I have a lot of sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman says, but he will know that over their lifetime it costs over five times as much to put cables underground as overground. While I agree that burying them is better in sensitive areas, that will not offer the faster and cheaper solution that overground cables, alongside major roads and rail tracks, would offer.

Energy Bill [Lords]

Andrea Leadsom Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

The reality is that the Government have committed to those targets, as has the whole House, because the law has already been passed. We have the carbon budgets, one to six; I think we exceeded one, two, three and four, but we are on track for five, and a few weeks ago, I set out in “Powering Up Britain” how we plan to meet carbon budget six as well. The conversation about whether the regulator has an individual duty is an interesting one, but the reality is that in truth, we are all headed towards that cleaner energy system.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend will recognise that, to keep costs down, to get electricity to the places where it is needed and to avoid us having to pay offshore wind producers to switch off when there is no capacity, we need something like 600 km of electricity wires between now and 2031. Over the past eight years, we have built only about 32 km. Can I press him on the proposal in the 1922 Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee report that there should be a new planning allowance to have those cables going down the side of transport corridors such as motorways and train lines?

[Grant Shapps]

I met my right hon. Friend to discuss some of the ideas in the report and I am grateful for all of them, including the idea of cables running along existing transport routes. I am pleased to let her know that we are taking forward many of the suggestions from that particular committee, as well as those from elsewhere in the House. There is much in the Bill to assist with organising and planning, but there is much more to do as well. I am grateful for her assistance in all this.

By introducing business models, we want to get the advantage of that long-term potential geological storage, with revenues and a potential CCUS industry that could support something like 50,000 jobs, with another 12,000 in hydrogen by 2030. We will also build the market for low-carbon heat pumps to 600,000 installations a year by 2028, and accelerate the transition to ultra-efficient electric heat pumps to reduce our reliance on the volatile global gas market and improve our own energy security in return.

We will also bring forward reforms to test new methods of decarbonising heating, which is where we come back to the hydrogen trials. We will have a first-of-its-kind hydrogen village trial that will convert up to 2,000 properties to hydrogen for heating, instead of natural gas, and repurpose the existing gas network infrastructure for 100% hydrogen. Through that, we can find out about the efficiency, or otherwise, of building a hydrogen heating network. I put on record that I understand there are challenges, which is why we want to test this first.