Solar Power (Feed-in Tariff)
Debate between Caroline Flint and Andrew Bridgen
Caroline Flint
Such companies are worried about the policies on the table, and they will be waiting with bated breath to see what happens. There are containers full of panels on our docksides all round the country not being used because sales orders are being affected by the Government’s policies.
Since we introduced feed-in tariffs nearly 90,000 families have benefited. That has helped those who want to do the right thing and green their homes, while also trying to protect themselves from soaring energy bills. However, under the Government’s plans nearly nine out of 10 households in England will be excluded from solar power and denied the chance to get just a little more control over their energy bills. That is because properties will be eligible for feed-in tariffs only if they have a minimum energy performance rating of C or above.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Will the right hon. Lady give way?
Caroline Flint
No, I will not give way.
However, the most recent estimate showed that 86% of properties in England had an energy efficiency rating of D or below. Those households will be excluded from solar power. The Government’s plans are unfair, too, not least because they could hit people who have already installed solar power. In fact, the cuts could hit people who installed solar power before the Government even announced the changes. That is the problem with a six-week deadline, when it takes up to seven weeks to get a solar installation on the FITs register. Those people are going to lose out. In answer to a parliamentary question the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle, said:
“We recognise though that some prospective FITs generators who have incurred or committed expenditure may not be able to complete their installations and submit their applications for FITs before the proposed reference date.”—[Official Report, 10 November 2011; Vol. 535, c. 409W.]
What the Minister calls “prospective FITs generators” are people—thousands of them—who have already installed solar, but not yet registered. They will be caught up in a mess entirely of the Government’s making. They include, for example, the pensioners who wrote to me telling me that they had invested their savings in solar power to try to get their heating bills down and give themselves a little income in their retirement.
By cutting the tariff by an additional 20% for councils, housing associations and community groups, on top of the 50% cut, the Government’s changes will all but end solar power for social housing. Across the country, from Cambridge to Wrexham, Torbay to Leeds, Reading to Haringey, councils are already scrapping their solar plans; and last week it happened in Doncaster, too. As a result, those councils are forgoing funds that they could have invested—and that they planned to invest—in other energy efficiency measures for their tenants.
All Governments get accused of not listening, but it takes a special kind of arrogance—not to mention a healthy dose of incompetence—to launch a consultation that is half the normal length and closes after the cuts on which it is consulting come into force. What happens when the consultation closes on 23 December and all the responses tell the Government that their cuts go too far, too fast, and will kill the solar industry? What happens to all the projects that have already been scaled back or scrapped altogether? What happens to all the families who have already decided to cancel their solar installation? What happens to all the firms that have had to lay off their staff—to all the engineers, technicians and installation teams who have lost their jobs before Christmas? What happens to them? What all this says is that the Government do not care what anybody thinks; and what it shows is that they are completely out of touch.
When the economy is flatlining, unemployment is rising and even the Prime Minister admits that his plan is failing, what sort of Government choose to kill an industry that is growing and creating jobs? When energy prices are at record levels and millions of families are struggling with their bills, what sort of Government choose to exclude nine out of 10 households and everyone in social housing from installing solar to cut their bills? When Ministers are flying halfway around the world to Durban next week to try and reach an agreement on climate change, what sort of Government choose to cut back on policies that will increase our supply of renewable energy and reduce our carbon emissions?
From the CBI, the Mayor of London and the man who installed the Prime Minister’s solar panels, all the way to the Welsh Liberal Democrats and Friends of the Earth, everyone is backing our campaign and telling the Government that they have got this badly wrong. Today we have come to a crossroads. Much damage has already been done. Many projects have been ditched. Confidence has been dented, with future investment possibly lost for good. However, we can step back from the brink. We can put feed-in tariffs on a sustainable footing, in a way that is fair to the public and which secures the future of one of our brightest industries. Today I call on all hon. Members to support our motion—to tell the Government to scrap their 12 December deadline, to stand up for an industry that is growing and creating jobs, and to stand up for people who want to do the right thing and protect themselves from rising bills. I commend this motion to the House.
Amendment of the Law
Debate between Caroline Flint and Andrew Bridgen(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Caroline Flint
They still had people living in them. The hon. Gentleman should come to the constituencies of Labour Members to see the investment in social homes, and the partnerships that were developed with the private sector to ensure that we had social homes alongside private developments. The previous Government were putting an end to the division whereby social homes were in one part of the community and private homes were built in another. That is the Labour way, and I am very proud of it.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
The story the right hon. Lady tells is not one that I recognise in my constituency, which had the worst quality council housing in the whole country. Seventy per cent. of our housing was not up to the decent homes standard, and it has taken a Conservative-led coalition Government to deliver the £21 million to bring them up to standard over the next four years.
Caroline Flint
People throughout the country benefited from the decent homes programme and other housing initiatives that helped them to get on to the property ladder and to ensure that they had choices. In the first six months of 2010, before the election, the number of new homes built went up by more than 20%, but in the last six months of 2010, after the election, the number of new homes started fell by nearly 20%. If the Secretary of State wants that debate, I am always happy to have it with him—or with any of his colleagues.
The country wants to know what the Secretary of State and his Government will do to help to build the homes for which communities up and down the country are crying out. Whatever he pretends, the reality is that the Budget brings very little good news. It promises help for first-time buyers. The Opposition welcome the Government’s U-turn—their decision to bring back Labour’s homebuy scheme, which they insist on calling “Firstbuy”—but less than a year ago, the Minister for Housing and Local Government described that policy as an “expensive flop”. That was not what thousands of first-time buyers thought about it or what the housing industry made of it. The Home Builders Federation said that it
“was judged a major success by the industry”.
Only a matter of months later, with his customary humility, the Minister has been forced to admit that he called it wrong. We have wasted 10 months in which we could have ensured that people had a better opportunity to own their own homes. He has done too little, too late, and the measure does not go far enough, because while more than 3 million hopeful first-time buyers try to get a foot on the property ladder, the measure helps only 10,000 of them.
No one is convinced that the new homes bonus is the panacea to the housing crisis that the Government believe it to be, least of all the 21 Tory council leaders from the south-east who wrote to them earlier this year warning that they were not convinced that the plan provides enough of an incentive to communities for them to welcome development. The Budget was crying out for measures to support housing, but they did not happen. All it comes up with is the idea of allowing commercial properties to be turned into homes without requiring planning permission. When the Government get around to establishing exactly which sort of commercial properties will be allowed to turn into residential properties and under what conditions, we will look at their proposals carefully, but if the Secretary of State really believes that the answer to the country’s housing crisis is turning some empty offices into luxury penthouses, or asking people to live in disused out-of-town business parks or derelict industrial estates, he had better think again.
The biggest disappointment is the failure to address the deeper problems of housing supply and the lack of available mortgages. In their submission on the Budget, the Home Builders Federation is absolutely clear that mortgage availability
“is the biggest immediate constraint on demand and house building.”
Figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders published as recently as 18 March show that mortgage lending has stalled. It says that lending is
“weaker than a year ago”
and that the housing market is “stuck in a rut”, but on that, the Budget is silent.
Before we move on from housing, let us remind ourselves of another matter on which the Government have not lived up to their promises. Just a few weeks ago, the Minister for Housing and Local Government told the Zero Carbon Hub annual conference:
“The commitment to Zero Carbon remains in place—there’s no ambiguity about that”,
but when reading the small print of the Budget, we discover that that is just another broken promise, because from 2016, new homes will no longer have to source all their energy from carbon-neutral sources, which goes back on a commitment that the Conservatives made in opposition and repeated in government. Those standards were about not only protecting our environment, but driving innovation and creating new jobs in the green economy. The Government’s failure on that undermines not only their green credentials, but the ability of our economy to compete for new jobs, new investment and new industries.
Let me deal with the underlying economic nonsense at the heart of Government policy. They hope that the UK economy will be saved by an export-led recovery, which I call Osborne’s see-saw, because the Chancellor views the public and private sectors as opposite ends of a see-saw. He thinks that the harder, deeper and faster he cuts the public sector, the sooner the private sector grows to fill the space and suck up the unemployment. One does not have to be an economist to know that there is no reason why cutting home helps, police officers and council cleaners will lead to the UK selling more electrical equipment, cars or IT services abroad. However, I do know that if we cut public investment in roads, regeneration and house building, and shred the school building programme, the private sector takes a huge hit. The construction industry nose-dives and hundreds of thousands of skilled workers and those who manufacture and supply to them lose their jobs.
Localism Bill
Debate between Caroline Flint and Andrew Bridgen(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Caroline Flint
I will give way again in a little while.
Let us look at Islington council, of which Labour took control in May. The previous Liberal Democrat administration appointed a chief executive on a salary of £220,000. The Labour council cut that salary by £60,000—a significant sum and a good example of a Labour council delivering value for money. However, that is a drop in the ocean against the £40 million-worth of savings that Islington has to find. The Secretary of State knows that the Bill does nothing for councils up and down the country that are struggling with the most difficult finance settlement in a generation. It is not localist to cripple local councils with devastating cuts and to stop them delivering the essential services on which local communities rely.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Has the right hon. Lady noted that Moody’s, the credit rating agency, stated last week that it is only the coalition Government’s deficit reduction plan that is saving our triple A rating? If we lose that, the markets will force far higher cuts on us.
Local Government Funding
Debate between Caroline Flint and Andrew Bridgen(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Will the right hon. Lady give way?
Caroline Flint
No, I will not give way.
Councils are cutting not just staff in back-room functions but teaching assistants, social workers and street cleaners—hundreds of thousands of people delivering essential front-line services. There will be 140,000 of them this year alone, according to the Local Government Association, which has upped its prediction from 100,000. In Birmingham, 26,000 staff have been warned that they could lose their jobs, and in Bradford the figure is 10,000. They, along with the people who depend on the services they provide, will pay the price for the coalition Government’s choices.
It is no good the Government trying to use last week’s Office for Budget Responsibility forecast to obscure the heavy job losses that will be inflicted on local government. The OBR forecast shows that Whitehall Departments will lose fewer staff than had been feared, because the cuts were slightly less than had been predicted in the Budget. However, the cuts to local government are deeper and faster than had been expected, and, as a result, the LGA says that more workers, not fewer, will lose their jobs this year—40,000 more of them, all because the Government chose to impose such heavy front-loaded cuts on local councils.
Caroline Flint
I will give way to the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), but after that I shall take no more interventions. Hansard will show that I have already taken more than my fair share.
Andrew Bridgen
I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. My local council in North-West Leicestershire is already right-sizing its top management to protect essential front-line services. Is that not the way forward? She will be well aware that almost a third of Government spending is channelled through local government, so no credible deficit reduction plan can leave local government immune. Without a credible plan, and in the absence of her telling us what a Labour Government would cut instead of local government—perhaps defence, health or education—she has no credibility whatever in the debate.
Caroline Flint
I agree with the hon. Gentleman in so far as there has to be a sharing of the reductions across the different sectors of public spending, but I do not agree that the disproportionate expectations of local government are fair. I just do not think they are fair. In a less partisan arena, the hon. Gentleman might agree that even if we were to pursue the level of cuts proposed by the Government, it would be worth thinking about staggering them over the four-year period rather than expecting the largest amounts to be cut in the first year. Local authorities have been set an incredible challenge in that respect. In a more reasoned environment, most sensible people would recognise that fact and say, “Let’s do something about it before the financial settlement is announced and try to put right some of the wrongs created by the package following the comprehensive spending review.”
In so many ways, the motion says that the Government are not listening. Let me tell the House and the country that Labour is listening and that there is an alternative. The financial settlement is yet to be settled; there is time to put this right. Savings need to be found and, yes, cuts will need to be made in local government—but not like this: not in this way and not in this time scale.
Today, the Government have a choice. They can plough ahead with their plans and impose huge cuts on local councils, forcing them to find savings in the next few weeks—councils will have to decide their budgets by February 2011. They can impose cuts that will unnecessarily cost jobs, undermine the voluntary sector, hit front-line services and create huge uncertainty in the private sector. They can force through cuts that will hit the poorest communities the hardest, or they can choose to listen. They can listen to Members throughout the House—publicly or privately—who I know will take the opportunity here today, and in other forums, to speak about the damage that huge front-loaded cuts will cause. They can listen to the people who work in local government and provide the services on which we all rely, often with very little reward. They can listen to the voluntary sector, and to the small business community.
Will the Secretary of State ensure that any reductions in funding are more evenly spread over four years? Will he introduce more flexible capitalisation arrangements, so that local councils are not forced to make even deeper cuts in services and jobs to meet the cost of redundancy payments? Will he introduce damping measures to stop our poorest communities being hit hardest? Those are the three questions that the Secretary of State must answer today.
I commend the motion to the House.
Housing Benefit
Debate between Caroline Flint and Andrew Bridgen(14 years ago)
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Andrew Bingham
I will not give way, as I have nearly finished and many others are waiting to speak. [Interruption.] I can talk as long as anyone wants, but I am conscious that some Members have been in their places a long time and are waiting to speak.
It is wrong that hard-working families in my constituency and others who are living within tight budgets—