Great British Energy Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Young of Old Scone]

46: Clause 5, page 3, line 8, at end insert “which in his or her opinion will assist the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, improvements in energy efficiency, the security of energy supplies and a more diverse ownership of energy facilities (including community ownership) that benefit people and communities.”

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, if one were of a nervous disposition, one would be alarmed at the clearing of the Chamber that the simple act of standing up to move an amendment can provoke in this House.

I will speak to Amendment 46 in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman—who, alas, cannot be with us today due to family illness—and Lady Boycott. It deals with the priorities that the Government will set for Great British Energy, and returns to the issue of community energy, which was given an airing by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, in the previous Committee session.

Amendment 46 inserts into Clause 5 a specific requirement that the strategic objectives of GB Energy should include delivering reductions in emissions, improvements in energy efficiency, security of energy supplies and a more diverse range of ownership of energy facilities—especially community energy schemes—whether connected to the grid or providing energy solely for local communities.

The mention of community energy in the debate about Clause 3 was very much about the objects of GB Energy. The amendments in this group are more about framing the articles of association of the company, in line with the strategic priorities that the Government impose on GB Energy. Clause 5 is more specifically about what the Government will determine on the strategic priorities and plans for GB Energy. I believe that the Bill should specify that the key issues outlined in this amendment be included in the objectives and plans. Clause 3 is about what GB Energy could do; Clause 5 is about what it will do. It is important that these priorities are on the face of the Bill.

In the case of community energy schemes, your Lordships will be glad to hear that I do not intend to repeat the excellent case made by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, in speaking to his amendment to Clause 3.

The grouping of amendments in Committee on this Bill has been interesting—I think that is the word—but it has had one silver lining in that it has given us opportunity to debate energy community for a second time. One can never have too many debates about community energy.

Much of the promotional material around Great British Energy has been clear that it will play a role in supporting community energy. Community energy schemes are important if we are to persuade local communities that the disruption and downsides of renewables development and rewiring the grid have something for them by way of cheaper, greener, more secure energy in which they have a stake.

Local power plans, including community energy schemes, are one of the five priorities for Great British Energy that were put forward in the founding statement. If all these assurances and promises represent genuine commitment, why not put this in the Bill, as my amendment proposes, as indeed does Amendment 50 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, which I also support?

During the debate on his amendment in the previous Committee session, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, indicated praise for Jürgen Maier, who is on record supporting a role for GB Energy in community energy. But Mr Maier is also on record as saying at a parliamentary hearing that he did not believe that community energy had the potential to generate gigawatts. This does not gel with the assurances that we have been given by the Government both in their manifesto and during the passage of this Bill in the other place.

I very much welcome the fact that my noble friend the Minister undertook to give greater consideration to community energy schemes and their place in the Bill between Committee and Report. I hope he will reach a conclusion on the basis of that consideration, which would result in the role of Great British Energy in community energy appearing in the Bill to ensure, above all, that confidence is not lost by communities or investors alike.

[The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath) (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for giving way. She has asked me a question so I might as well answer it. What that means is that the Government have not committed ourselves to a position, but we are looking seriously at the arguments that we received when we debated this issue last time.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that intervention. It reveals the importance of having more than one debate about community energy that he has now said that twice. I beg to move.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I will speak to my Amendment 46A and to Amendment 46, to which I have added my name. I also support Amendments 50 and 51A in this group, among others. I tabled Amendment 46A because I want to ascertain from the Minister whether this was something that GB Energy would or could be doing. As drafted, this amendment, very simply, requires Great British Energy to deliver a public information and engagement campaign on the work it is doing as part of the transition to clean energy—about renewables, reducing greenhouse gas, improving energy efficiency and contributing towards energy security.

The first inquiry that I was part of in the then newly established Environment and Climate Change Committee, which was under the wonderful chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, was on public engagement —or, to be quite honest, after many months of looking at it, the lack of it. Shortly after that inquiry, the Skidmore review also identified that public engagement is the missing piece of the puzzle. I am really not sure how much the dial has moved since then in this Government and certainly in the previous one. With GBE being a government-owned company, we could decide here and now, today, that the Government are going to take an active role in this; I think, and many others agree, that this would have a very beneficial knock-on effect.

The reason it is important may not be abundantly obvious at first, so I shall just lay out why I believe it is crucial. As we found on the committee, 32% of emissions reductions up to 2035 rely on decisions by individuals and households, while 63% rely on the involvement of the public in some form or another. We need to tell the public what we are doing and why we are doing it. We know that the public support the transition to net zero. Even last week there was a new poll that found that across all the major parties there was a high amount of support for anything to do with the environment. But you cannot expect people to support something if they do not know the reasons or what it is going to mean for them. We are not shepherds herding sheep, but we need to explain why it is happening,

I have real faith that the public will largely—if not exclusively—support all the energy infrastructure that we need to decarbonise the grid, including pylons wherever they have to be put, and they will be up for getting EVs and charging them in the middle of the night at times when electricity is abundant. They will do all these things because if they can buy into the common good, then you are in a win-win situation. But we must engage them, and the continued absence of a public engagement strategy leaves lots of space for lots of very negative voices to chip away with misinformation about why we do not need to do this and how we are not really in a climate emergency. Explaining these changes and how they are going to come in is crucial to secure public consent and address all the concerns that both the public and too many sections of the media, sadly, have.

I also fully support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, who made a wonderful introduction to it. I just add that with such little accountability, as the Bill stands, and as the Minister has said, we are not going to see a draft strategic priority statement before the Bill passes. It is important that there is some constraint around what the statement includes. The contents of this amendment are fully consistent with the objects in Clause 3 but correct a wrong area where GB Energy has the ability to invest in a wide range of “things or areas” but has no long-term security of knowing roughly what its strategic priorities will be.

I do not believe that this is too prescriptive. It seems to be wholly consistent with everything I have heard the Minister say in this House—and, indeed, the Secretary of State in the other place. I challenge the Minister to come up with something that he thinks GB Energy ought to have a role in, either now or in the future, that does not feasibly come under the list in this amendment.

It has to be said that my amendment is broad, so a few points apply to both it and the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I will say a few words on emissions reductions. This has to be the overarching purpose, which, from conversations we have had with the Minister, I think is the case. But it is important that as a principle it is a publicly funded company which is not at present aligned to our emissions reduction targets. We should have no issue in including this in the Bill as its priority.

Everything to do with energy efficiency must be an area where GBE has a meaningful contribution by bringing in investment. The CCC has highlighted that we are really behind and that progress is slow. The warm homes plan—which I greatly welcome; indeed, I tabled an amendment to the last Energy Bill, now an Act, which included a warmer homes and business plan—aims to see 300,000 homes upgraded over the next year. I ask the Minister whether his department has yet produced a credible plan for the year after that. I am thinking particularly about the target to reach 600,000 heat pump installations by 2028.

These are large numbers. I remind noble Lords that we have 29 million homes in this country—more each year—which at present are likely to need retrofitting. As for security of the supply, I understand the Minister sees this as critical to what GB Energy will achieve. Indeed, his department’s 2030 clean power target, which this Bill helps to achieve, will mean more renewable energy. There should be no issue about including this as well. I also include community energy, which I can see has had a lot of airtime already. That is really important for bringing the public along on our journey, because if you can look out of your window and see a turbine and think, “That is powering and heating my home” or “The solar panels on my roof are feeding into the grid as well as cooking my dinner”, we will come up against a lot less opposition to all renewable developments.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords who took part in this debate, including the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and my noble friend Lord Grantchester. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, is no doubt watching Parliamentlive.tv and cheering us on as we speak. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Offord, for his party’s support for community energy and for the remarks about land use, which we will come to in Amendments 67, 73, 104 and 105. It highlights the need for a land use framework for England. I was kind of hoping that we would get it for Christmas, but it looks like it might be slightly later. We were supposed to get it last Christmas, as well.

I was delighted to hear that the Minister welcomes the further amendments on community energy, tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, that will come up in our next session. It will be the third opportunity for the Minister to tell us that he is pondering. Perhaps I should change my wish for a land use framework this Christmas to a wish for some new arguments in favour of community energy before our next debate, because it is becoming slightly repetitive. On the other hand, a good case can bear repetition.

The Minister clearly understands the importance of community energy. I am not sure he quite understands the distinction I was making between the objectives of GBE—which are about what it can and, by implication, cannot do—and strategic priorities and plans, which are what, in the Government’s view, it must do and do now. That is a material difference. In order to inform these reflections between Committee and Report, and in view of the wide support around the Chamber for community energy issues being addressed in the Bill, will the Minister meet with some of us who have indicated that very wide support?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

I would be happy to do so.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that. In the meantime, I will withdraw the amendment, though perhaps not before dwelling briefly on the statement from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. She talked about looking out your window and seeing the local wind turbine in which you would have some skin in the game as a result of a community energy scheme, and so think kindly on it rather than it being the enemy. That reminded me of how the Labour Party used to feel about Arthur Scargill: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”. There may well be hope for this policy.

In begging leave to withdraw the amendment, I reserve the privilege to decide, when the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, is back in harness, whether this should return on Report. That will very much depend on what the Minister tells us about the outcome of his reflection between Committee and Report. I wish him a happy Christmas while he does that.

Amendment 46 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 116, which is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who cannot be with us today, and to which I added my name. I was greatly encouraged by the Minister’s words at Second Reading that he looked forward to discussing biodiversity further in Committee. I do not think I have ever heard a Minister say that before, and now is his moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has previous with this sort of amendment, having tabled similar amendments to a variety of previous Bills, so colleagues may now be familiar with her modus operandi in this respect. The amendment aims to address the challenges of how the objectives, strategic priorities and other functions of GBE fit with the legally binding targets in the Climate Change Act 2008 and the Environment Act 2021, which the Government have a statutory requirement to achieve.

At Second Reading there was recognition that when making decisions about the rollout of renewable energy, clean power and the associated infrastructure, it is important that we bring together all the different responsibilities, issues and trade-offs in one scheme—one structure or place—so that Great British Energy and the Government are fully equipped with all the information to weigh up these decisions and to take account of all these different factors in an integrated way, rather than in the siloed approach to decision-making that we distressingly see all too often in government. This is particularly important where there are legally binding targets that the Government have to achieve and where it would be distinctly unhelpful if Great British Energy were working in the opposite direction.

We have a real opportunity here to set the long-term strategic direction by putting in place the right frameworks to provide a stable structure for Great British Energy to make decisions and to be as transparent as possible in its decision-making, both now and into the future. The aim is to try to make sure that the projects invested in are the most effective at delivering on GBE’s objects but operate in such a way that they do not militate against the Government’s achievement of the binding climate change and biodiversity targets. We want to be cunning; we need to learn to walk, talk and chew gum at the same time. We want to achieve the strategic climate objectives that Great British Energy is there to deliver but we also want to achieve other objectives—it is both/and, rather than either/or.

The amendment does not imply that in every single case Great British Energy needs to contribute to the statutory binding targets, but it does aim to ensure that they are considered from the outset when Great British Energy makes decisions—and indeed when the Government make decisions—about strategic priorities; that it factors them into the decision-making process and, where reasonable, contributes in a positive way to the statutory target achievement; and certainly that it does not make it more difficult for the statutory targets to be achieved.

I have said that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has previous on this. Noble Lords who took part in the Crown Estate Bill recently will have heard the her argue for a clause very similar to this. She successfully persuaded the Government of the need to join up the functions of the Crown Estate with the climate and nature targets. During that Bill’s passage, the Minister agreed both in Committee and on Report that:

“It is right that the public and private sectors make every contribution they can to help achieve our climate change targets”.—[Official Report, 14/10/24; col. 75.]


I hope we can persuade the Minister that this is an even more important case than the Crown Estate having an eye to the climate change and biodiversity targets, and that GB Energy will have an appreciable impact on both of those targets. We need to hardwire it in from the outset, particularly since, as was outlined in the previous debate, we have not yet seen GB Energy’s strategic priorities and plans.

I hope the Minister will accept that what was good for the Crown Estate goose applies equally to the GB Energy gander. I want to make a festive allusion, if noble Lords will pardon my lame attempt: I hope the Minister will agree that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that GB Energy should have a similar requirement laid on it as was accepted and passed for the Crown Estate. I hope we can persuade the Minister of that.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, very briefly, I offer Green group support for Amendment 56 and, in particular, Amendment 116, which has broad support, as we see from the signatures. I declare my interest as a member of the advisory committee, as I think it is now called, Peers for the Planet. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, has already said many of the things I was going to say. I just add that I can go back even further than she did, to the Pension Schemes Act 2021. That was an historic moment, with climate being written into a finance Bill for the first time ever.

I have been in your Lordships’ House for five years, and we have had win after win, as the noble Baroness just outlined. It really is time for us to stop having to bring this to the House to be inserted, taking up so many hours of your Lordships’ time to get us to the point at which clearly the Government should have started.

I will add an additional point to what the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said. In the recent election, Labour explicitly said that it was aiming to take a joint nature and climate approach to its way of operating the Government. This surely has to be written into the Bill.

To set the context, a nature recovery duty was discussed in the other place. My honourable friends Siân Berry and Adrian Ramsay were prominent in that, along with people from other parties. We are one of the most nature-depleted corners of this battered planet, but our statutory duty is at the moment only to stop the decline, not even to make things better. We surely cannot be creating such an important new institution as this without building nature into its statutory obligations. The Government regularly remind us that the economy and GDP growth is their number one priority, but the economy is a complete subset of the environment. The parlous state of our environment is an important factor in the parlous state of our economy.