Weightman Report (Fukushima)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Huhne]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. There is indeed reporting of a storm surge of substantial magnitude in 1607—the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) has raised this in the past. Fortunately, this is not quite as common an event in this country as it is in Japan, as one can gather from our having to go that far back in the historical record. We can count our lucky stars that we do not have the seismically challenged environment that the Japanese do. All I can say to her on the planning process is that it is completely transparent and open. If local people want advice from a number of different sources, they will obviously be able to go to those sources. There will be absolutely no shortage of legal or other expertise available to them to do that. I am confident that they will be able to understand the purport of the application for planning permission that has been made.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I welcome the Weightman report. The Secretary of State will know, however, that two key issues arise out of events at Fukushima, one of which is the hike in the price of gas, as a result of Germany’s approach and the decision taken in Japan to evacuate the nuclear space. What is he doing about the knock-on effect that that will have on fuel poverty in this country and about the way in which the European carbon emissions reductions targets are going to be much more difficult to meet, given that Germany and other countries will be investing in gas rather than nuclear? What discussions has he had at a European level?

[Chris Huhne]

The hon. Gentleman asks about the gas price, and he is absolutely right: if my memory serves me, outside the United States the gas price is up by about 27% over last year. One of the biggest debates in this area is what will happen to the gas price. We have clear demand pull factors from growth in the far east and the fact that a number of countries are moving away from nuclear towards gas. On the other side, we also have a substantial amount of new unconventional gas resources being discovered—not least among them those announced by Cuadrilla in the north-west of England, where the company thought it had discovered a substantial amount of new unconventional gas. The balance between those factors is not at all clear, and that is one reason why it is so important that we have a portfolio of technologies—clean coal and gas through carbon capture and storage, nuclear and renewables—to enable us to exploit them all.

On fuel poverty, the first key point is that we have made the warm homes discount statutory rather than voluntary and increased the amount of resources available to it by two thirds compared with what was being paid by the previous Government. The Warm Front scheme is gradually being phased out because we are phasing in the green deal next year, and a substantial element of it will tackle fuel poverty. I believe it will make a big difference, precisely because it will tackle the root causes of fuel poverty rather than merely putting a sticking plaster on the symptoms.