Energy Policy and Living Standards

Debate between Douglas Carswell and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Douglas Carswell]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely spot on. It is irrational and uneconomic on so many levels. The irony is that the Government talk about windmills and wind turbines, using the language of sustainability, but the truth is that without the subsidy, it simply would not be sustainable. Unlike solar, it simply will not make economic sense to generate electricity through 13th and 14th-century windmill technology.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Does he accept that the Government’s policy is very illogical in this area? For example, we are spending taxpayers’ money in order to enhance the setting of a world heritage site at Stonehenge, while at the same time using taxpayers’ money for subsidies for offshore wind turbines that are going to wreck the world heritage site on the Jurassic coast?

[Douglas Carswell]

The hon. Gentleman makes a brilliant point. He is extremely sound on this issue, as on so many other things. There are things on which it is good to spend public money, and securing the future of something like Stonehenge is wonderful, but one of the downsides of subsidising windmills is that they damage the countryside. It is not good conservation practice to industrialise the countryside with these subsidised wind turbines. It is not good for the environment or our heritage sites. It is not good, either, for people in Jaywick and west Clacton in my constituency, who are deliberately being priced out of being able to heat their home. Why? Because an out-of-touch elite in Westminster and Whitehall believes that that will somehow save the planet from excess carbon dioxide emissions. It is the Alice in Wonderland world of SW1 that has come to believe that. Ministers are competing to be the mad hatter, but it is a ridiculous state of affairs.

The Climate Change Act 2008 was a mistake. I should have listened far more carefully to the late, great Eric Forth MP and voted against it. My failure to do so is my biggest regret as a Member of Parliament. My new party looks to help me to right that wrong, or rather I look to help it to right that wrong.

Government schemes promising to insulate homes have been a flop. In Jaywick and west Clacton, in my corner of Essex, thousands of householders were led to believe that they could get free home insulation. For all that, it has happened only for a handful. The green deal has failed, and alongside it the Minister who presided over the scheme. Should we now follow the right hon. Member for Doncaster North, who has declared that he wants energy prices to be fixed and a prices policy for energy? He may have committed his party to a price freeze, but that will not mean lower energy prices for everyone. If we hold down the price of something by Government fiat, we end up constraining the supply of it. That policy will lead directly to black-outs.

The real reason for higher energy prices is the public policies that were put in place by the right hon. Member for Doncaster North when he was the Energy Secretary, and which all three parties now support. All three parties have had a say on energy policy and all three parties have got us to this sorry state of affairs. We need a return to the idea of an honest energy market. The Minister might pay lip service to the idea of a free market, but where it counts—when it comes to what he actually does in office—he is cheerfully defending a system of energy production that is anything but free, so let me remind him of what an honest market in energy production might look like.

If we had an honest energy market in this country, suppliers would compete to supply householders with energy at a price that they were willing to pay. There would be no requirements on them to produce a particular mix or quota of energy. Innovation and competition would mean giving customers more for less. Capital and technology would come together to satisfy customers. Instead, we have a system in which lobbyists and quotas meet in Government Departments in pursuit of renewable targets. It is a corporatist racket, not an energy policy that is remotely competitive or free. Coal, gas, fracking, nuclear—who knows what mix we might get if we had innovation, capital and a free, honest market in energy?

If the Minister finds it hard to imagine what a free market in energy might look like, may I suggest that he look across the Atlantic? Gas prices for domestic consumers have fallen by 26% in five years in the United States. As our prices have risen, over there they have fallen. It is not that the laws of physics are any different on that side of the Atlantic. The laws of physics are the same. It is public policy on this side of the Atlantic that is so fundamentally flawed and needs to change.

Voters who struggle to pay their heating bills this year should rightly blame those on all three parties’ Front Benches, who put this dreadful scheme in place. We need to make a change. We need to scrap the subsidies. We need to love the new technology, but subsidies must be abolished.