Energy Bill [HL]

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 5th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, and although we do not always agree on absolutely everything, I reckon that I agree with about 99.5% of her speech.

First, I declare my interest as chair and director of Aldustria Ltd, an energy storage company; I will try to avoid too much discussion of that area. On these amendments, I very much thank the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, for having opened our debate today. I very much agree with the principle of what the Opposition Front Bench is trying to achieve here. What this Bill does not have—the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, put it very well indeed—is great focus or coherence. It would be good to start trying to improve that through a type of preamble that puts context, including strategic context, at the beginning of the Bill. I hope that we can refine that more on Report; it may not be perfect, but perhaps we can find a way of doing that between us.

I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about the pricing of electricity and how that works. As he says, our European colleagues are looking at that very strongly now. There must be a better way of doing this; it cannot make sense to the public that we charge and price our main energy sources on the marginal cost of the last producer. Clearly, that does not make sense, and it does not do the reputation of the fossil fuel industry any good either. Yes, they might use their money to give back to shareholders—hopefully they will use it for different types of investment and diversification—but it besmirches the whole sector, and we need to find a way around that.

Where I would disagree very strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is around trying to game or look at alternative dates for net zero. It seems to me that in September 1939 the Cabinet probably did not look at whether to declare war on Germany this month or two years later or four years later. We may criticise Neville Chamberlain for all sorts of things in retrospect, but I guess that is not one of them. It was an absolute threat to our future security, and we made a decision. If we think of the costs to this country, and to us and consumers, of our right stand on Ukraine, I guess that we have not done those calculations either—because we know that Putin’s war has to fail and that, for European security and our long-term security, we in the western world need to pursue the tactics that we have.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for her amendments, particularly in mentioning rural aspects of oil—my own household is on oil, and we are not covered by a price cap—and in particular business. In all the media coverage that we have had on this very real energy crisis over the past months, it is funny how business has very much taken second place to households and consumers. Clearly, households and consumers are ultimately the most important, but business is completely fundamental to our economic performance and being able to solve this crisis in the long term.

I am not absolutely sure about energy from waste plants. Clearly, it does not make sense to export it, but the real challenge there is in starting to raise recycling again, or even AD in terms of other parts of household waste. I was so impressed by the forensic look by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, at investment need and the scale of the challenge, and also at how we need to measure that and put proper planning into how we meet it.

The one other area that I would like to mention comes back to 2013 and the then Energy Bill, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. At that time, one big thing that we discussed was the energy trilemma of security, cost and decarbonisation. The noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, brought that back up again. But what this crisis, and the almost a decade between these two Bills, has shown, is that it is no longer a trilemma—they all work in exactly the same direction. Renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels, as we know—it is why we have the huge price increases that we do. Our security is reinforced by having much more renewable generation on our own seas and our own land—and, as a result, we have lower costs and a decarbonised energy system as well. We have moved on since that time.

We need to have a focus in this Bill, and I support the amendments. We need to move on in this debate, but I am absolutely sure that we will need that coherence when we get to Report.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the whip, the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, has spoiled a lot of my fun today, because I was going to tell the Government exactly what they needed to do if they were going to produce an Energy Bill that deals with the crises that we are facing. We are facing three immense crises at the moment, and one of them is, of course, the climate crisis. There are strong whiffs of climate denialism in your Lordships’ House, which I find absolutely staggering, considering that the science is so very clear on it. However, it is a bit last century, that sort of attitude, so I understand why it might exist here in your Lordships’ House. But we have those crises—the climate emergency, the ecological crisis and the cost of living crisis—and this Energy Bill is so topical. It is exactly the sort of thing that we need to bring forward so that we can deal with all these crises, and I guess make life better for millions of people in Britain and the rest of the world.

I agree with a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said. He made the point that this does not do the job. Also, I am very sympathetic to Labour’s initial amendments. I understand why they are in there, but it reads a lot more like the sort of issues that a Labour Government would bring forward—hopefully not too long in the future.

I am concerned that our time is going to be wasted on this Bill, because we have a new Prime Minister—a climate-wrecking ideologue who will make it incredibly difficult for us to get the sort of issues into this Bill that we need. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, and other noble Lords also mentioned nuclear. We have to get real on the fact that nuclear is not the answer. Nuclear power stations take a long time to come online. There will be all sorts of problems even getting them started, so they are not the answer. We have to think faster than that; they just will not work.