Energy Bill

Christopher Pincher Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

Members will be relieved to learn that I plan to speak only briefly. I welcome the Bill, which is long overdue and of tremendous significance to our constituents. Who can blame them? In the past several years, gas prices have nearly doubled and the number of people trapped in fuel poverty has trebled. Between 2004 and 2010, 2.8 million more people were trapped in fuel poverty. Although the previous Government introduced remedial measures to help those people in crisis and although the current Government have done the same with the warm home discount and the cold weather payment and by freezing council tax, those measures are merely a sticking plaster. They treat the symptom, but they do not provide a cure.

It is sobering to reflect that the previous Government spent £25 billion on measures to combat fuel poverty, but those measures were swamped by the volatility of gas and oil prices. Those are not my words; they are the Library’s words. I will support any measure and any reform that will ensure cheap energy. I will also support any measure and any reform that, in the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry), who is professorial, takes politics out of energy policy.

I should like to address two matters specifically: the capacity mechanism, which is in the Bill, and demand management, as referenced by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), which largely is not.

The capacity mechanism is designed to ensure that we have a secure supply of energy. I believe that it also needs to provide us with an affordable supply of energy. I therefore hope that Ministers will listen to the calls from across the industry. Big six companies such as E.ON, gas storage providers such as Stag Energy, and the Carbon Capture and Storage Association all say that if we have an extremely complex capacity mechanism that places undue risk on generators and suppliers and that comes into effect only in 2018, it could increase their costs by between £3 billion and £13 billion. Those costs would be passed on to the consumer, adding £14 or more to energy bills. I am sure that the Government will agree that we should not introduce a measure that is intended to reduce bills but that has the perverse effect of increasing them, particularly for the poorest and the most vulnerable.

With respect to demand management, if we are serious about reducing the cost of bills and reducing our carbon footprint, we have to be serious about reducing our energy consumption, which has increased by about 75% since 1970. I therefore hope that Ministers will use the Bill to put rocket boosters under the green deal. It is an excellent concept, but it needs to be more effectively communicated. The electorate need to be informed, so that they embrace it and so that the take-up rate meets the Government’s expectations. I want the green deal not just to rely on cavity wall insulation, but to bring the installation of the best and most effective boilers and the use of the most effective smart meters, so that consumers are put front and centre in the driving seat, controlling their own consumption.

The Bill has the potential to deliver transformational change to our energy landscape and to have the biggest effect on it since privatisation a generation ago. I hope that the Secretary of State will use the flexibility that he has given himself through the long parliamentary journey that the Bill has to go on and through the mass of secondary legislation that we await to listen to the causes of consumers, the industry and investors and to deliver a robust Act that has the confidence of those investors, that reduces bills, that ensures that we cut our carbon emissions and that puts the consumer first.