Enabling Community Energy

Ben Lake Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship as always, Sir David. I congratulate the hon. Members for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and for Waveney (Peter Aldous) on their work on this matter and on securing the debate this afternoon. They have laid out the huge potential of enabling greater community energy across these islands. The hon. Member for Waveney went into some detail on some of the mechanisms that we believe can realise that potential—namely, a right to local supply.

In advance of this afternoon’s debate, I have been contacted by supportive Members from all political parties who were unfortunately unable to attend. They include the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb), the hon. Members for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), for North Down (Stephen Farry), for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) and for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), the hon. Members for Norwich South (Clive Lewis), for Glasgow East (David Linden), for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), for Falkirk (John Mc Nally), for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney), for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome). This is an issue that enjoys considerable cross-party support.

I was delighted to be one of a cross-party group of some 250 Members who supported the Local Electricity Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Waveney in the previous Session. That Bill proposed a mechanism to implement a right to local supply. As the hon. Member for Waveney mentioned in his remarks, that proposal has quite an impressive and broad coalition of support behind it. There is a national campaign co-ordinated by Power for People, which is a coalition of 76 national non-governmental organisations, charities and trade associations, and 70 local councils. Impressively, three of the six distribution network operators—the companies that own and run the UK’s regional energy grids—publicly support the campaign and back calls for a right to local supply as enunciated in that Bill.

It is worth reiterating that a right to local supply was specifically recommended by the Environmental Audit Committee in its welcome and thorough investigation into how to enable more community energy generation. The possible benefits, although they may sound too good to be true, are very real. The “Community Energy State of the Sector 2021” report states that the existing community energy groups operating across these islands reduced energy bills by £2.9 million last year and created £3.1 million-worth of community benefit expenditure. We should just imagine what those figures could be if community energy was fully enabled and grew from its current 319 MW to more than 3,000 MW.

In Wales, we have the highest number of community energy organisations per head of population relative to the rest of these islands, but if a right to local supply was established, even more people and communities could become electricity customers of local enterprises—communities such as Cardigan and Ceredigion, which has a budding local energy club and ample local generation of renewable energy, but where local demand is not currently being catered for by local supply. A right to local supply would help connect consumers with locally generated electricity and the knock-on effect would be seen in communities across these islands.

This measure is not just about addressing the climate crisis, as important as that is. It is also about supporting more local skilled jobs, and it is about cheaper energy bills. It is very much a win-win-win. It can be done. While we welcome the Government’s support of the principle, we believe that, if we work together with the Minister and the Department, we can get the detail right and enact a local electricity Bill that enshrines the right to local supply. I hope the Minister will be open to such a meeting.