Chris Heaton-Harris
Main Page: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Lisa Nandy
First, the hon. Gentleman is wrong about the figures. Wind generates about 10% of our power. Secondly, there is no question but that we need to move towards a clean energy-driven economy. I think he accepts that case, as do two thirds of the British public, who said in a survey as recently as last September, in a poll of 2,000 adults conducted by ICM, that they would be very happy to have a wind farm operating within 2 miles of their house, if the local authority or community had power over how it was operated. That is one reason I have told the Government we should not seek to block wind farms where they enjoy strong local support, and that we support the right of local communities to decide where they are based.
It looks as though the Chancellor has decided to sacrifice jobs and investment to win personal support from Back Benchers with a particular obsession with wind farms. It is unacceptable, and we will do what we can to defend wind energy from ideological attacks. The Conservative party manifesto said nothing about retrospectively shutting down this existing scheme—it was clear it would stop new subsidies for wind energy, but this is not a new subsidy; it is an existing one.
Lisa Nandy
Now that I have wound him up sufficiently, I will happily give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Chris Heaton-Harris
The hon. Lady was being quite consensual, so would she associate herself with the remarks of the former leader of her party, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who said that blocking turbines in local communities would amount to antisocial behaviour?
Lisa Nandy
The key thing is that we take communities with us. We have to go to local communities and make the case for how we create jobs, provide energy stability, cut bills and take action on global warming. If we do not take communities with us, we will not do any of that. That is why, I say to Government Members, it is completely hypocritical to argue one thing in respect of wind farms and precisely the opposite when it comes to fracking applications. I hope the Secretary of State has heard me.
Nor does it make sense to claim that the change is about affordability, as Ministers have consistently argued, given that onshore wind farms are one of the cheapest options available to help us secure our power needs and that the Government are pressing ahead with much more expensive options. A Conservative Member asked about this earlier. The Secretary of State is yet to clarify —perhaps she can tell us today—whether subsidy-free onshore wind farms will be allowed to compete for contracts for difference. As with the Chancellor’s decisions on solar energy and carbon capture and storage, this is yet another example of the Government chopping and changing their energy policy to the detriment of investment in jobs, growth and our energy security.
More than anything, the energy sector as a whole needs stability and confidence to get on and invest. I particularly recognise the urgency of supporting our North sea oil and gas industry and that peers have improved the Bill significantly since the Government introduced it. For those reasons, I will support it on Second Reading, but I hope Ministers will engage constructively with the debate and our amendments in the weeks ahead.
Mr Lilley
When the Energy and Climate Change Committee produced its report, I voted against that project precisely because I was worried that we were committing to an unnecessarily high cost, although I am not against nuclear in principle. I do not agree with the hon. Lady that it is much more costly than offshore wind. In fact, I think it is less costly. It is still unnecessarily costly, however, and we should therefore look again at options such as modular nuclear. If she were to put forward a motion to reduce the subsidies for offshore wind so that they were equal to those for onshore wind, I would happily second it. I would happily join her in that because I am genuinely in favour of reducing costs.
Chris Heaton-Harris
Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure you would agree that my right hon. Friend’s speech is spanking this out of the park. Does he agree that the way in which we have moved forward by introducing an element of the market into the mechanism of bidding for subsidy in our energy profile is the right way forward, and that the renewables obligation is the wrong way forward? I also support the Government.
Mr Lilley
I agree. It was very late in the day when we introduced that system, so at least we incurred the minimum cost of subsidy to achieve the given objective rather than just plucking out a number, which would inevitably have been high, given that civil servants always are rather generous with public money and set targets high, just so that they can say, “Oh look, we have achieved our quantitative solution, even if we have done so at unnecessary expense.”
Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen). I am not the expert that he is on these matters. I will focus on the bit of the Bill that is most controversial in this place—the removal of subsidies for the renewables obligation for onshore wind.
I will sketch out my own personal journey on this subject. I was a bit of a “greenie” when I was first elected to the European Parliament back in 1999, and I enjoyed working with the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on certain things. It confused the hell out of her, but it did not do me any harm, and we actually had some interesting areas of agreement on policy. In 2001, though, I met a young gentleman called Bjørn Lomborg, and my journey to the light side has continued since then. Between then and 2010, I was interested in energy but did not really pay it much attention. As a Member of the European Parliament there are some big issues to talk about, but one does not look at individual policy areas in the way that one does when one becomes a constituency Member of Parliament representing, as I do, 72,500 people in the beautiful constituency of Daventry.
When I came here, I had one majorly controversial onshore wind farm development in my constituency, and I thought that I would do what everybody else in this place would do. I met the developer and representatives of the industry from the British Wind Energy Association, as it was then, to talk through the problems that my constituents had with their development. When that organisation later morphed into RenewableUK, I still spoke to it about how to include communities in decisions —how to incentivise them to take onshore wind in their area by working with them, perhaps even giving them some sort of rebate on their energy bills, so that they felt they were attached to local energy production for consumption in their areas. I have to say—and I am pretty sure that history will prove me right—that the wind industry decided to ignore all my counsel.
Bringing this forward to the present day, I suggest that how the onshore wind industry has treated communities up and down this country has done untold damage to how people see renewables in total as part of our energy provision. There is history to this that goes back further than the 2015 general election.
Graham Stuart
I am not saying that there is not a moral responsibility on businesses, but they will usually act in the way that they are incentivised to act, and it is up to us to create frameworks that get them to behave in the right way. The previous Labour Government’s refusal to listen on giving a voice to local communities meant that developers felt there was little point in engaging with and listening to the local community and just went to appeal to get the decision overturned. The then Government’s refusal to listen has led to hostility in many communities, including mine, towards the wind industry.
Chris Heaton-Harris
I agree, mostly, with my hon. Friend. That is why I welcome the tone of the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) when she said that her party would now recognise the views of local communities on these matters and consider how they could be engaged.
I had to learn this for myself first hand with regard to an onshore wind development in the beautiful village of Kelmarsh—along the A14, just down from the M1 junction —where a number of 126.5-metre turbines are currently being erected. I thought, as my constituents did, that if we formed a good local campaign with everything going for us, we could win the campaign and stop a proposed development being established on what was, in most people’s judgment, an inappropriate site—a grade 1 listed site. That view was borne out by the planning inspector. Because the local council did the right thing and turned the application down, the developer appealed. The gentleman from the planning inspectorate in Bristol came to visit and made a stunning, groundbreaking statement that changed how I dealt with these issues and culminated in the pledge on onshore wind that I am so proud of in the Conservative party manifesto that saw us into government.
The planning inspector said all the things that the local community had been saying about the development being on an inappropriate site and about it being damaging to local communities, and gave a whole host of reasons why he should not approve it, but he then went on to say that national policy trumped all this, and therefore, “You are having this onshore wind development no matter what you would like.”
Albert Owen
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the same logic should apply—local authorities and local communities should have a greater say—when National Grid comes up with a plan to connect a new generation of pylons to the grid? Does he agree that the Government should devolve that responsibility to local authorities?
Chris Heaton-Harris
I would not go quite that far, because I do not know the context in which the hon. Gentleman phrases his question. However, I would always argue in favour of local communities having way more say in developments. In fact, we should go even further and take the same approach as the French, whereby local communities are massively incentivised to get involved in taking on developments that are deemed unpopular elsewhere. Indeed, they choose to get involved: they have local campaigns for what would be very unpopular planning decisions in the United Kingdom, because they understand that they will be to their benefit.
I decided that I had to do my bit to try to change national policy, so I walked around the Lobbies of this place and found 100 other Members who felt similarly aggrieved about the way in which planning and onshore wind had been developed. I got them to sign a letter to the Prime Minister on how we should change things. I also noticed that, in 2011-12, we were already hitting our 2020 targets for onshore wind development capacity. Logic would suggest, therefore, that the subsidy we were giving to onshore wind was too high. The number of developments was such that we were going to shoot past the target without any trouble whatsoever.
The subsidy was too high and local people felt that they were being ignored. I would also argue that wind farms produce expensive energy, which puts people into fuel poverty and has contributed to energy prices going skyward at a time when the cost of energy is beginning to fall. We can never forget fuel poverty or the fact that our industry needs cheap energy to compete internationally, but let us put those points to one side for a moment. If we make an argument to local people about the need for an onshore wind development on their patch when they know that the targets have been hit, that they will pay extra through their bills for the privilege, that they will not get anything from it and that developers are rubbing their noses in it, we end up with a bunch of very angry people whose idea of what democracy should look and feel like is disturbed to the greatest extent possible.
Over time, I was delighted to be able to persuade, cajole, elbow, nudge and force my own political party into changing our planning guidance. However, that did not have too much of an effect until—as the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), who is not in her place, said—the former Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government reminded the planning authorities of exactly what he meant in his policy statements by calling in a number of developments at appeal stage and making the rulings himself.
We then went further and said in our manifesto that we would cut new subsidies for onshore wind, but that was not good enough for me: I had had enough of these people and how they dealt with my constituents, so I wanted to deal with them retrospectively. In the energy chapter of the manifesto, it was generous of the Prime Minister to take on my well-registered and well-documented concerns and my ideas about how we should progress, and to state that there would be no new subsidies for onshore wind.
Anybody who drives up the M1 and comes to the gateway to my constituency, where the M1 meets the M6 and the A14, will see 126.5-metre-high turbines—I think we are going to get 102 of them—in a very small radius. My constituents are annoyed by the noise and worried about health concerns. They cannot sell their houses as quickly as they would like and there are all sorts of other problems, but they want to know that that will not happen to other people locally and nationally. I was therefore proud to sell that part of the Conservative party manifesto in the 2015 general election campaign.
There were some who tried to argue that that was not what the Conservative party meant in its manifesto and that we were saying something completely different—that we were talking not about existing wind subsidy or the renewables obligation, but about new subsidy. Those people were dancing on the head of a pin and that only upsets people in my constituency and, indeed, everywhere else, because it feeds the perception that politicians do not tell the truth or deliver manifesto commitments. Opposition parties would do a lot better than to argue against individual elements, because the language we used was absolutely black and white and it was sold to everybody as such.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I do not want to cut off the hon. Gentleman as he comes to a conclusion, but if it was so patently obvious to everyone that that was the precise meaning of the manifesto commitment, why was industry taken by surprise?
Chris Heaton-Harris
Industry was certainly not taken by surprise—absolutely not. It knew exactly what was coming its way. I think the hon. Gentleman will find that that is why it campaigned so aggressively with his party. I am afraid I have to stop there, but I want to send a message to those at the other end of the corridor that they should watch and learn about democracy before they start impinging on decisions we put in our manifesto.
Chris Heaton-Harris
I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point entirely, but I have just read a press release, dated 29 April 2015, from RenewableUK, that reads:
“Despite these facts, onshore wind projects are under threat from misguided Tory and UKIP policies aimed at stifling their development”—
blah, blah, blah. It was lobbying against a manifesto commitment that he says it did not know about.
Matthew Pennycook
We will have to disagree. I would assume it was lobbying against the closure of new investment in onshore wind, not against a retrospective change to commitments already made.
This is no way to treat investors or to ensure that the UK remains an attractive place for overseas investment. In all the months I have sat as a member of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, I have not heard one expert witness make the case for indefinite subsidy for onshore wind or any other renewable technology. What many have argued for, often powerfully, is a stable and secure policy environment and a graduated reduction of subsidy. They know that to do otherwise would risk jobs, damage investor confidence and cut the legs from under technologies that we know are delivering—by driving down prices. Those technologies, particularly solar and wind, are great British success stories, and I have heard the Minister describe them as such many times. However, those success stories, at least in the short term, now have a much more uncertain future.
I will finish by touching briefly on what the Bill does not contain. As I have made clear, parts of the Bill are sensible and other parts, when they came before peers, were removed with good reason and should not be reinserted without considered thought or appropriate safeguards; but there are also notable omissions. There is nothing about storage. It is deeply regrettable that the Bill is completely silent on the need to reduce energy demand. If ever there was a chance to make energy efficiency an infrastructure priority, which it needs to be if we are to solve the trilemma and meet our emissions targets, this was it. It is sad that the Bill, which could have done so much more, does not do so, as it stands.
Given the energy challenge that faces our country and the ambition required to realise the full promise of the historic climate agreement reached in Paris, there is a great deal of room for improvement in the Bill. I hope that in Committee we will find some way to address many of its deficiencies.