Clean Energy Investment

Debate between Caroline Flint and Ian Lavery

Wednesday 25th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of clean energy investment.

It is a pleasure, Mr Bailey, to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the powers that be for accepting my application for an Adjournment debate on this subject.

Last week, I spoke in the debate on climate change, responding to the Pope’s encyclical in which His Holiness said:

“Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.”

As the Paris talks begin on Monday, it is vital that the world gets a strong deal to ensure the future of our planet for generations to come. We must also speak loudly and clearly about the new economic opportunities within our grasp. The challenge for the 21st century is how quickly we can fully benefit from the clean energy revolution.

As a patriot, I want the United Kingdom to be a global player, leading and innovating in the latest energy technologies and reaping the rewards, jobs and investment that will go to the leaders in this race. This requires an industrial and economic strategy fit for a world kept at less than 2° of warming. If that is the challenge and if that indicates the direction, I am afraid the Government have lost their satnav. The latest Ernst and Young renewable energy country attractiveness index puts the UK out of the top 10 for the first time ever. We now sit at 11th, behind Chile and the Netherlands, and the reason is simple. According to Ernst and Young it is

“death by a thousand cuts…At best it may be a case of misguided short-term politics getting in the way of long-term policy. At worst, however, it’s policymaking in a vacuum, lacking any rationale or clear intent.”

That is a damning verdict on the Government’s record over the past five years, a record with a very real cost from jobs and investment lost.

Investors do not have to choose the UK. If we do not make it attractive for them to invest in clean energy here, we will lose jobs in new technologies and their supply chains for the lifetime of those investments. That is exactly what happened when we lost out in the 1980s to other countries which saw the potential of wind energy.

I would never advocate that new technologies receive never-ending subsidies or that taxpayers and energy bill payers pay a penny more than required, but the Government’s actions cannot be justified only on those terms. The decision to charge renewable generators the climate change levy was a grab by the Treasury, pure and simple. Business plans that relied on that income have had to be ripped up. Drax lost a third of its share value in one day following the announcement, and as a result it and Infinis have launched legal proceedings against the Government. On 25 September, Drax said that policy certainty is no longer there to continue its involvement with the White Rose carbon capture and storage project.

Developing CCS is an important part of our clean energy infrastructure and I thought the Conservatives thought so too. Perhaps the Minister will confirm whether what we hear through the media—that the Government’s allocation of £1 billion to support CCS innovation is to be cut—is true. In October, the report of the Committee on Climate Change, “Power sector scenarios for the 5th Carbon Budget”, said:

“CCS is very important for reducing emissions across the economy and could almost halve the cost of meeting the 2050 target in the Climate Change Act.”

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on bringing this timely debate to the Chamber. Does she agree that without carbon capture and storage, there is no likelihood whatever of the UK or Europe meeting the emissions level targets that have been set for 2050?

[Caroline Flint]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and what is so sad is that we have the brains, the skills and the interest from investors, but we do not have the Government’s political will to be a leader in this important area of innovation. Too often, we talk big but end up following, and lose the chances that are opened up to us.

Under the coalition Government, the ambition for CCS stalled. The Government’s favoured projects, Peterhead and White Rose, have suffered from dithering and delay, and they have put a brake on the other part of CCS—the development of industrial CCS, which can protect our energy-intensive industries such as steel from carbon leakage, watching our jobs exported elsewhere in the world. Alongside that, the cheapest forms of renewable energy seem to be constantly under attack.

Climate Change

Debate between Caroline Flint and Ian Lavery

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Flint]

Absolutely. At the moment we are ranked sixth in the world for green goods and services. Just think how many more jobs we could create if we moved up to third or fourth place. The benefits would not just be at home, because we can export new technologies abroad. One example is carbon capture and storage. Not only can the technology be applied to fossil fuels, but it has industrial applications for our energy-intensive sectors.

We had an awful lot of shilly-shallying in the past five years about support for carbon capture and storage—nobody was quite sure where the money was and what it was being spent on. I ask the Secretary of State whether we will see any cuts in support for CCS in the forthcoming emergency Budget. She will obviously say, “I can’t say, that’s a matter for the Chancellor,” but I really hope that the new DECC team is putting its shoulder to the wheel to ensure that such cuts do not happen. There was too much interference from the Chancellor in the past five years—he did not work for investment and did not support this area of public policy.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Is it not a shame that although we are now in a position to develop carbon capture and storage, the coalition Government, in their last throes, denied the British deep-mine coal industry the opportunity to prosper by not allowing state aid? We will be developing carbon capture and storage for countries around the globe that import coal, but we will not have the jobs to deal with it.

[Caroline Flint]

My hon. Friend is right. It was exactly like the coalition Government’s approach to CCS, which I do not think they ever fully embraced. There were delays and delays in the state aid procedure, until it just ran into the election period and was done for. We all heard the comments of the Minister whose former responsibilities straddled DECC and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and we all know now that his warm words counted for absolutely nothing.