Net Zero

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, who picked up many of the points that I will seek to expand on. I declare my position as a vice-president of the LGA and of the NALC. I will focus on larger councils, as well as town and parish councils. There are 129 recommendations to debate in this hour. I will focus on two of them.

The first is the recommendation to end the disjointed mess of short-term, competitive local authority funding pots. As the Skidmore report says, that would enable communities to maximise the economic and social benefits of net zero while using resources most effectively. As Professor Tony Travers often points out, local government is a very efficient spender of funds, often more efficient than central government. The Government need to sit down with local government and ask it—not tell it—how to achieve net-zero targets, starting at the local level, and realise that this is the way resources can be put to best use.

The second point the Skidmore review highlights is also a story of localism: the importance of the community energy sector, which the report says is “neglected by government” and

“a distilled example of energy security and sovereignty”.

The Local Electricity Bill has been tabled in the other place. In your Lordships’ House we have an amendment that I tabled to the Energy Bill in Committee that will come back on Report. This is a huge opportunity—dare I say an oven-ready plan?—to unleash community energy, with possibilities for net zero and local prosperity. It is sitting there; the Government simply need to pick it up. I note that there is very strong Tory support for it in the other place.

However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, just said, all this crosses over very much with the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. The levelling up fund disasters we just saw were hugely wasteful, yet we see the same model in the social housing decarbonisation fund, in various schemes for private home energy efficiency, such as home upgrade grants, and in transport decarbonisation funding. Central government throws out a random pot of money and says, “Bid for this quickly”, and local government at all levels has to scramble. That is not an efficient model. It has always been a problem, with turnarounds on bidding and spending that drive inefficiencies rather than efficiencies, but it is even more of a problem now, with inflation meaning that, for example, capping rules on spend per house have made it even more difficult to spend the allocations because the cost of insultation is going up so fast.

We saw that in the levelling up fund only shovel-ready projects were able to bid, so councils had quickly to scrape together ideas and things that were already in the pipeline rather than planning for the long term, which is what the efficient use of money and the delivery of net zero and workable schemes demand. We need the Government to allocate money strategically on the basis of need and on a long-term basis. This is the case for local government spending. In terms of community, it is simply a case of setting people free to do what they are desperate to do. Communities want to get together, find good uses for local money, build local prosperity, supply local energy and get on with tackling the net-zero challenge. A climate emergency has been declared by 409 principal authority councils. They want to act and communities want to act. As this review makes clear, the Government have to let them.