Energy Bill
Debate between Glyn Davies and Baroness Primarolo
Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
I have sat in the Chamber for more than six hours today and heard many interesting speeches. It has been an extremely good debate. The Bill is important in many respects. It is the responsibility of Government to ensure energy availability, to ensure that energy is supplied at a reasonable cost and to pay proper heed to the need for decarbonisation of the energy generation market.
Whether or not one believes that man’s activities contribute to climate change—I do not think they make that much difference—it is perfectly reasonable to want to pursue a decarbonisation approach as a sort of insurance policy, so people will tend to agree with the general approach that the Government are taking. There is also general support for renewable energy projects, and there is a huge number of good projects all over the country. I opened a biomass project in my constituency run by a firm called Egnisco. If anybody is going to the National Eisteddfod in Wales in 2015, I recommend that they go to the farm buildings at Mathrafal where they will see a superb scheme. The buildings have been converted into factories and have all been heated by a biomass project that is taking timber from local woodlands. It is a wonderful project.
To me it is important that the Government pursue their objectives in a reasonable way. There are two aspects that cause me and my constituents great concern. One is the attitude that we have to the local population. We have heard the words about localism in the Chamber, but I am more interested in the deeds. I can say that, right across the constituency, my constituents do not believe that the Government care one jot for what they think and what they say.
Today the largest public inquiry into wind farms opened in Welshpool in my constituency. It is likely to take 12 months. The small rural local council has had to set aside £2.8 million just to defend the decisions that it took. This will have a huge effect on local services, but nobody cares. When the Welsh Government were asked whether there was any way they could help the council, they said, “You knew what was going to happen and you turned down the application.” I thought that was utterly disgraceful. They were going to suspend their entire planning responsibilities to avoid the costs of defending their decisions.
Another aspect is the public inquiry itself. My constituents are deeply concerned that it is dealing just with the wind farms and not with the transmission line to them. It is like dealing with houses without any roads to them. Some £50,000 was spent trying to change the position, and people believe that DECC had some involvement with the inspector when the council’s decision was rejected. I do not know whether that is true, but I wrote to the Minister several weeks ago and have not yet had a reply to reassure my constituents that that did not take place.
A further issue that causes me shock and disgust is how National Grid has behaved and is behaving. The project that I am talking about is a very big project in my constituency; it involves about 500 wind turbines and 100 miles of cable, 50 km of which are on 150-foot high steel pillars. Not surprisingly, landowners have not been keen to co-operate with National Grid and to allow it on their land, so National Grid sent in the heavies. In truth, it has sent in thugs.
I have an e-mail here that I only wish I could read out, because it is so shocking. It comes from Councillor Gwilym Thomas, a recently elected county councillor for an area affected. I can just refer to one or two points that he makes. He is a man of unquestionable integrity and he begins by saying that he was visited by two gentleman who approached the door with envelopes, and said, “Mr Thomas, I have these for you.” They looked threatening and he asked them for some ID. They said they did not have it and would get it from their van and come back. Some time later they came back but he was on the telephone and his daughter answered the door. She clearly saw a threatening individual. The daughter and Councillor Thomas’s wife retreated to the kitchen. He went to speak to the man and they finished up nose to nose with the man shouting at him, “Take these, Mr Thomas,” and he threw them out and walked away. Mr. Thomas walked after him, and as he walked away the man shouted, “Goodbye, Mr Thomas,” 10 times, in a shockingly intimidating manner.
It gets worse. Later that day Councillor Thomas called at a property that he owns. There were two vans blocking the gate so he tooted the horn to go in, and he found that it was the same people employed by National Grid to enforce its policy. During the conversation, they used the f-word at least three times, an example of gross profanity. Councillor Thomas rang National Grid to tell it, but it seemed not to care. It talked about them being process servers, not bailiffs. This is shocking behaviour.
Another councillor contacted me—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. I have been listening carefully to what the hon. Gentleman is saying, which is clearly heartfelt, and I have given him much more latitude because of the seriousness of the matter that he raises. But this is the Third Reading of the Energy Bill, and what he says must relate to that, or he might want to find another way to raise what are very important matters. He may continue with his points, but he should either make them relevant to today’s debate or perhaps stake a claim for a future debate.
Glyn Davies
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for making the allowance that you have. I thought it was important to put that kind of behaviour in the public domain.
What the Government are doing in the Bill is hugely important to the country’s future, but we will not have anyone’s support unless we take forward what we are doing with reason and working in co-operation with the local people. That is what we need to do, so I thought it right to put in the public domain what is happening in our name. This is an important Bill that I am pleased to support, but please let us take forward what we approve today in a reasonable manner that the people of Britain will be able to support.
Energy and Climate Change
Debate between Glyn Davies and Baroness Primarolo(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
I have spoken about wind farms in mid-Wales before, in particular in a Westminster Hall debate on 10 May, which I secured. It is the dominant issue in my constituency, and in the neighbouring constituencies of the hon. Members for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) and for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), who are not present today.
I am sceptical about onshore wind, and have been for a long time, and an increasing number of MPs have been contacting me since the Westminster Hall debate to tell me that they agree. I do not want merely to repeat the points I made in May, but I must outline why I am sceptical about onshore wind and why I am so implacably opposed to the mid-Wales connection project.
The cost of the huge subsidies involved is a matter of great concern, particularly to the poorest citizens in our society. Between 5 million and 6 million people are already in fuel poverty, and they are facing a choice between heating or eating. This is, in effect, a Robin Hood tax in reverse: the poorest people in society are having to pay additional sums in their energy bills and that money is being transferred to huge, powerful companies.
There is also an impact on business competitiveness. Some 1 million young people are unemployed in our country—that is 1 million lives scarred by the scourge of unemployment. We are doing what we can to find jobs for those people, but we are making matters worse by undermining competitiveness and driving jobs overseas.
There is also the impact on the landscape, which is particularly important to me. History in Wales teaches us the cost of thoughtless development. We had coal spills dumped all over the valleys, which this generation has had to pay to clear up. We have had irresponsible coniferous forestation, which caused massive environmental problems, and which this generation has also had to clear up.
I am particularly concerned about the scale of what is proposed in mid-Wales—the sheer horror of it. The mid-Wales connection is based on the largest ever onshore wind development in England and Wales. Under the proposals, permission will be granted for the erection of about 500 new onshore wind turbines in mid-Wales—the final figure depends on their size—over and above the 250 that currently exist and those that already have planning approval. There will also be a 20-acre electricity substation and about 100 miles of new cable, much of it carried on steel towers 150 feet high down one of the narrow valleys that lead from mid-Wales to Shropshire. It is scarcely believable; the scale is almost impossible to comprehend. Not even the enemies of Britain over the centuries have wrought such wanton destruction on this wonderful part of the United Kingdom.
However, today I want to speak about the impact of wind farms on democracy—that great invention that is the foundation of Britain’s constitution, and which is being disregarded so casually throughout Europe. I wanted to entitle this speech “Wind farms and democracy in mid-Wales”, but I felt that that would be deemed too tendentious.
In his response to my speech on 10 May, the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) offered some reassuring comments. In referring to wind farm development, he said that
“it must be in the right location, and it must have…democratic support”.
He warmed to this theme, saying that
“too often, onshore wind is imposed on communities that do not want it. I am keen to ensure that we address that democratic deficit…in our plans.”
He went on, adding with a flourish that
“it needs more democratic legitimacy than it has today, and I intend to ensure that that happens.”—[Official Report, 10 May 2011; Vol. 527, c. 365-67WH.]
I was much encouraged, not surprisingly.
In my speech on 10 May, I also referred to a public meeting in Welshpool, to which 2,000 people came. I asked those people to come with me on a three-hour journey to Cardiff to express their views to the National Assembly. A few weeks later, they did—2,000 of them, on 37 buses. It was the best protest ever seen outside the National Assembly. That is how strongly people feel, and as a result the First Minister changed his position on the maximum cumulative impact that could be allowed in mid-Wales. He said that a new 400 kV line and a substation were not needed. We were generally encouraged, but then the giant energy companies got to work, the way dark forces do in science fiction. These massively powerful wind farm companies—leviathans fattened on public subsidy—got to work with a mixture of threats to people and community payments, which is a way of securing support for their proposals locally. A terrific amount of pressure was applied, and there was a huge lobbying exercise.
Members can imagine my shock and disappointment at reading a BBC report two weeks ago which said that more wind farms and pylons may be built in Wales in the national interest, despite local protests. The very same Minister whom I quoted earlier was quoted as saying that
“this is a national decision…the local views are important…but at the end of the day we are making decisions in the national interest”.
In the national interest—that is autocracy, not democracy.
Even more shocking is the pressure being put on local planning authorities. They are being pressured into deciding on applications by a particular date, and conditions have been ignored. They are told that all the conditions that would apply to any other planning application must not apply to wind farm developments. Transport infrastructure, ecological and environmental information, power usage—none of these factors is known, and yet they are being pressured into making decisions. It is utterly outrageous.