Energy Prices Bill

Ed Miliband Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 17th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will try to be as brief as I can to let as many people as possible speak in this debate.

Let me start by saying that Labour called for support for families and businesses in August through an energy price freeze, so we will support the passage of the Bill. I thank the Secretary of State for the conversations we have had on the Bill. This is an incredibly serious issue for families and businesses across the country.

I have to say, before I get into the detail, what a shambles this Government are. We are debating what they describe as their landmark Bill for a two-year price guarantee. It was published only last Wednesday and it has already been shredded by the Chancellor this morning. Last Wednesday, Members were in the House for Prime Minister’s questions. The Prime Minister went on and on about her decisive action of a two-year guarantee. She even derided the Opposition’s approach of a six-month freeze, seeking to spread to fear about what would happen in March, and now the Government have adopted our proposal. Never mind a vision; never mind a plan for the years ahead—this Government cannot even give us a plan for the coming week. They are truly in office but not in power. This matters, because families and businesses need to be able to plan.

I want to talk about the substantive action in the Bill and the way that the revenue to pay for it is raised, because there are important issues for the House. On the substantive action, there is a contrast with our six-month package. That was a real freeze, not a rise in bills, and £129 for millions of families across the country is significant. That even takes account of the £400. I worry about off-grid households, which we will talk about in Committee. I understand the basis of the Secretary of State’s argument. Our costed package provided £1,000 to help off-grid households. The Bill provides just a tenth of the support, and even with the Government’s measures, the University of York estimates that more than 10 million families will be in fuel poverty, so we will want to debate those issues during the Bill’s passage.

I will focus my remarks on the second set of issues relating to the way that funding for the Bill is provided, which is important. Our argument five weeks ago, when the Government announced their energy price guarantee, was that they should do everything they could to find some of the money for this intervention from the energy companies that are making enormous profits. Anyone who heard the Business Secretary’s dulcet tones on the radio last week will have heard him say that there is no windfall tax in the Bill. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) described it as a “surrogate windfall tax”, which is a new invention. However, page 3 of the Bill’s explanatory notes states:

“The Bill aims to do the following…Require certain generators currently receiving supernormal revenues to make a payment to a third party…for purposes of lowering the cost of electricity for consumers, or to meet expenditure incurred by the Secretary of State”.

Payments on the basis of windfalls received to lower the cost of electricity for consumers, or to meet expenditure incurred by the Secretary of State—it sounds like a windfall tax. It works like a windfall tax. It talks like a windfall tax. It is a windfall tax.

I want to hear during this debate that the Government will definitely use the powers to have a windfall tax that are in clause 16. That matters, because while we set out a clear plan for a windfall tax, the truth is that the Government, having resisted a windfall tax tooth and nail, have now taken the broadest and most ill-defined powers imaginable. Companies and the public have no idea from the Bill about the size of the levy, how much it will raise and how there will be fairness with the fossil fuel windfall tax that the previous Chancellor announced —to remind the House, that was four Chancellors ago, in May this year.

We will probe two issues that go to the question of whether we will raise sufficient resources from the windfall tax, or “surrogate windfall tax”, in the Bill. First, according to their press release, the Government will start the windfall tax on electricity generators only in 2023. Those months of delay matter, because it will mean billions in extraordinary profits being left—[Interruption.] I do not know why the Secretary of State is shaking his head. This is a very important point: that will leave billions of pounds of extraordinary profits with the companies, and it means that the British people will be forced to foot billions more of the bill for energy price support. If having a windfall tax is the right thing to do, why not have it from the date of the intervention in September? I am very happy to give way to the right hon. Gentleman so he can explain why he is not doing that.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very happy to explain. The right hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that the energy companies have sold their electricity forward, and therefore the profit is not accruing on the prices at which they have sold it forward.

[Edward Miliband]

That would mean that there are no windfalls, so why is the Secretary of State having a special payment made by the energy companies anyway? That makes no sense at all. We will definitely want to probe that during the debate. How can it possibly all have been sold forward, as he says? So he is saying that the energy companies are currently making no windfalls. That does rather prompt the question: why are they going to have to make special payments, if it has all been sold forward and they are making no windfall profits?

Secondly, I want to talk about the question of the level playing field in what is happening to the fossil fuel companies and to the electricity generators. The previous Chancellor but one—I think that is right—introduced a super-deduction for fossil fuel companies as part of his windfall tax. That means that for every pound invested in oil and gas and fracking, companies get 91p back. But to be clear: that is not available to renewables, nuclear or other zero-carbon technology. That is an absurd tilting of the playing field towards fossil fuels and against investments in cheap, home-grown, clean power, and that is absolutely indefensible. It will not reduce bills. We will want to use the Bill as best we can, given the constraints of its scope, to debate the merits of that provision. I urge the House to support attempts to eliminate that preposterous loophole.

In the time I have left, let me deal with the wider questions about the Bill. We will continue to be in this position unless we learn the proper lessons from this crisis. Those lessons are not some extreme fringe idea that fracking, which will not lower bills, is somehow the answer to the problems that we face. The answer is a clean sprint for clean energy—for solar, wind, nuclear as part of that and energy efficiency all together.

The other day, the Secretary of State wrote an article in The Guardian, in which he said, “Dear Guardian reader”:

“I can assure Guardian readers that I am not a ‘green energy sceptic’.”

Let him prove it. He is for fracking, which will not lower bills and is dangerous. His colleague, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is seeking to block solar energy worth 34 GW—the equivalent of 10 nuclear power stations. That is not some whim of the DEFRA Secretary, but an instruction from the Prime Minister, who said that she does not like the look of solar panels. If the Business Secretary wants to convince people that he understands the stakes and what is necessary to get out of this crisis, he needs to make a proper sprint for green energy.

The other thing that the Business Secretary needs to do—we will again discuss this during the passage of the Bill, and I think he may agree with this—is set a timetable for the proper de-linking of electricity and gas prices. We suggest that we should set a two-year timetable in the Bill for that to happen.

Let me end by saying that the Bill is necessary, because we need support to be put on the statute book, but the truth about the Government is that they are lurching from U-turn to U-turn, and they cannot provide the country with the strategic direction that it needs to get out of the crisis. The truth is that, day by day, they are showing that they are out of ideas, out of time, and now, in the national interest, they should be out of power, too.