Energy: Feed-in Tariffs

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marland]

The noble Baroness is completely right. The modelling was incorrect. We inherited it and we have sought to get it right. As I asked earlier when I talked about government priorities, do we think that this is a game changer in electricity supply and that it is in the best interests of the consumer? The answer from Consumer Focus is no. As regards the game change in the electricity supply of 0.1 per cent, even if every house had them the figure would get to only 0.3 per cent. Therefore, this goes down the list of priorities. I am afraid that it is not a government priority, given the massive problem that we will have for electricity in the 2020s.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, first, I declare my interest: I chair a very small community interest company, a social enterprise, that was set up in order to get cheaper, more sustainable fuel into poor and deprived communities. It has had a good success rate in doing that and the next phase was to seek to introduce solar PV. I am interested that the Minister thinks that it is not very successful. I could take him to some elderly residents in my previous constituency who have solar and which works remarkably well for them. They were looking forward to solar PV to deal with electricity. The reality is that the Government are taking a huge risk with the market. I want to be sure that they are watching that they do not kill off the market altogether with these actions.

The other issue is that nationally—not just in the north-east and Yorkshire from where the company to which I referred operates—the work on due diligence, tenant consultation and so forth has meant that very little work has been done in terms of installing solar PV on social housing. I want to be sure that in the changes the Government will not penalise tenants in social housing. I confess that I have not read all of this very thick document, although I have tried to do so, but I am not convinced that the Government have really thought their way through getting to social housing. Will the Minister tell us what his thinking is? Would he also meet people and a delegation from those organisations concerned to tackle fuel poverty and to use solar PV as one of the means of enabling social housing tenants to avoid paying the high end of energy costs, as they often seem to do at the moment?