Energy Price Freeze
Debate between Chris Ruane and Lord Barker of Battle
Gregory Barker
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely wrong. He confuses the number of people who have taken up green deal finance with the number of people who have had an assessment and installed green deal measures. Once they sit down at their kitchen table, a surprisingly large number of people—thousands and thousands—elect to take all the savings immediately and install the measures.
Gregory Barker
British Gas alone has installed more than 10,000 green deal measures for customers who have elected to install them. Some 80% of people who have had a green assessment say that they have already installed measures, are currently installing measures, or are likely to do so.
Fuel Poverty (Wales)
Debate between Chris Ruane and Lord Barker of Battle(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Chris Ruane
Those affected are the most vulnerable and elderly pensioners, and, specifically in Wales, they are also those who are off grid but cannot get connected to gas because of topography, geology or geography. Dyserth is an off-grid town in my constituency. I was successful in getting gas connected to Bodelwyddan, because it was low-lying, but unsuccessful with Dyserth.
As the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) said, Wales is a net exporter of energy. North Wales, in particular, is playing its role in renewable energies, and my constituency will have the biggest array of offshore wind farms in the world. I switched on 30 turbines at North Hoyle some eight years ago, and when he was Secretary of State for Wales, my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain) switched on another 30 turbines at Rhyl Flats. Behind those, we will have 200 turbines at Gwynt y Môr and the 2,000 wind turbines at the Rhiannon wind farm array. When I was switching on the North Hoyle turbines, the Prime Minister was describing them as “giant bird blenders”, at the same time as sticking a mini turbine on his own roof in Notting Hill. He was looking both ways.
North Wales has in Wrexham the Sharp solar panel factory, which is the biggest producer of solar panels in western Europe. Sharp made its future plans when Labour introduced the feed-in tariff. It cranked up production and got all the workers in place only for the current Government to say that they were going to scrap the tariff. We and companies such as Sharp need certainty.
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Chris Ruane
The Minister will have plenty of time to address all these issues later.
North Wales has Wylfa nuclear power station, which will hopefully be replaced shortly. In Dinorwig, we have Electric Mountain, which is a hydroelectric power centre with a lake at the top of the mountain. It can produce electricity in seconds to respond to demand at peak times, such as at the end of “Coronation Street”. My constituency has all these fantastic renewables. Looking to the future, we have the OpTIC centre, which is working on fusion power. In the rest of Wales, we have the possibility of the Severn barrage, which could create 5% of the UK’s electricity needs. There is the Irish interconnector from Dublin to Prestatyn in my constituency, which will allow energy to go from north Wales to Ireland. We also have non-renewables in Wales, as we have the gas terminal in Milford Haven that brings a great deal of gas to the UK, as well as the Connah’s Quay gas-fired power station in north Wales. We create energy in Wales, but we have the highest energy bills in the UK. It is the same with water: we capture water and export it, but we have the highest water bills in the UK.
With 420,000 families living in fuel poverty, Wales already has a higher proportion of households in fuel poverty than any region in England. The problem will only get worse unless the UK Government act. The Welsh Government are doing what they can to improve energy efficiency in Wales and they have an excellent record. However, on the fundamentals of fuel poverty—lower incomes and rising bills—it is the austerity and inaction of the Tory-led Government that are hitting Welsh households hard. The Chancellor has an opportunity in tomorrow’s Budget to ease the strain that his policies are putting on families in Wales. He should adopt Labour’s proposal to force energy companies to pool the power that they generate and make it available to any retailer, as well as the requirement that energy companies put all over-75s on their cheapest tariff. In Wales, that would mean more than 250,000 pensioners being up to £200 better off. That proposal could be part of a Budget that would be much fairer than last year’s, which everybody, including some Government Members, rebelled against, and which asked millions to pay more so that millionaires could pay less.