Fourth Carbon Budget

Chris Williamson Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Huhne]

It is certainly one thing that we intend to consider. It is important, but there are obviously technical issues to be resolved and discussions are ongoing within Government. When we reach a conclusion, we will make an announcement.

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

This issue should transcend party politics, but I regret to say that some of the Secretary of State’s actions do not live up to his rhetoric. This morning, I met representatives from East Midlands airport whose ambition is to make its ground operations carbon-neutral. The plan was to provide 36% of the airport’s energy requirements through a major photovoltaic scheme that has now been made unviable as a result of the wholesale butchery of feed-in tariffs. Will the Secretary of State tell the House whether he has abandoned photovoltaic cells as a way of generating energy and what advice can he give to East Midlands airport about its ambition to deliver a carbon-neutral target?

[Chris Huhne]

The hon. Gentleman should perhaps be aware that the intention of the feed-in tariff scheme was to encourage microgeneration. Any proposal that involves less than two tennis courts-worth of solar photovoltaic cells will be completely unchanged by the review that we have announced, so he is clearly referring to a scheme that is very much bigger than that. All I would say is that we have to look at value for money. I am surprised that Opposition Members think that that is a revolutionary concept but it is important to consider value for money. If we had not announced the review, we would have found that a very large part of some of our finest shire counties would, instead of disappearing under oil seed rape or some more conventional crop, have been disappearing under solar photovoltaics. That was not, I am sure, the intention of the Opposition. It certainly is not our intention and that is why we have acted.