Industrial Action
Greg Smith Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
I would be interested to hear from those on the Labour Front Bench whether it is their policy to pay a 19% pay rise and, if so, whether they can explain how they will raise the extra money. Will it be extra taxation? Will they be putting it on borrowing, with all the hikes in interest rates, mortgage rates, car loans and the rest of it that that would bring? That is the question they need to answer, and the more they waffle around the subject, rather than bringing forward serious measures to limit the impact of these strikes at the most serious point—the life and death point—the less they will get the respect of the general public.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to bring forward these proportionate measures, and not least in the urgency with which he seeks to protect the safety and lives of all our constituents at risk from strike action. Children have suffered in these strikes; many children in Buckinghamshire use the railways to get to school. Does he agree that when the consultation comes forward, the ability of children to get to school on the railways must be included in the minimum service levels?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. We have talked about workers getting to work and people losing their salaries because of these strikes, but children and their education are also being impacted. That is a crying shame, particularly after two years of covid and having to study from home, and now they are being put through this again when there is a decent offer on the table for the railways. When union bosses have actually put this offer to their members—the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, for example—they accepted it, and it was a very similar offer to the ones that the RMT and other unions refuse to put to their members. We just need some common sense from these unions and, I hope, a little pushing from Opposition Members.
Oral Answers to Questions
Greg Smith Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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The Minister for Climate (Graham Stuart)
We consider all those that have left the energy charter treaty, but we have so far supported its modernisation. We keep that under advisement.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
Grant Shapps
I do enthusiastically support our SAF—sustainable aviation fuel—industry. Actually, it is a little known fact that last year at COP26 we sent more than 500 aircraft home with sustainable aviation fuel in their tanks, and this country has set a more ambitious target for sustainable aviation fuel than elsewhere, with 10% by 2030.
Energy Security
Greg Smith Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
It is good that the electorate know what they will be getting if they vote for the Labour party. With us, they will be getting local consent: if people locally are happy to see such power production, they will get it. With them, they will get it willy-nilly.
I want to correct the hon. Gentleman on one fact: the cost projections on new forms of energy supply show that offshore wind is the cheapest available in the next likely bidding round.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s focus on securing energy security domestically, but does he agree that that must happen alongside food security, not over the top of it? We have vast swathes of land being taken for solar farms, while warehouse and factory owners cannot install solar because the grid cannot take the power. What is being done to ensure that rooftop solar can happen?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about rooftop solar; I have had it on my own house for the past 11 years, and once it is there, it just carries on producing power. We need to expand that, both domestically and on factory roofs. I will be looking at things like permitted development rights, which enable those panels to go up on top of roofs. There are currently limits to the size of the panels that can be put in place, and I think they are a fruitful source of additional power.
Energy Prices: Support for Business
Greg Smith Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is rather looking a gift horse in the mouth. This is providing a very significant reduction in energy prices for the next six months and a review will take place to see what happens next. Local authorities would be in a very difficult financial situation if this were not being done. The Government cannot responsibly commit to unending expenditure; it has to be done in a sensible and prudent fashion.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
I warmly welcome the package of measures that my right hon. Friend has set out. As the number of questions this morning has indicated, the one area that needs more detail and, dare I say it, polish is off-grid support. When he looks at the detail of that for businesses and households, I urge him not to treat it as one, but to look at the disparity in pricing between oil and liquefied petroleum gas, which have very different costs bases and need to be treated separately.
Mr Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is right: LPG and heating oil have not risen as much as natural gas. None the less, it is important to make sure that there is fairness for everybody, bearing in mind that some houses, and indeed some schools, still depend on coal for their heating.
Low-carbon Off-gas Grid Heating
Greg Smith Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones) on securing what is an incredibly important debate for many of my constituents, a huge proportion of whom are off-grid. For the sake of total transparency, my house is among those in my constituency that are off-grid.
I will pick up on the points made by the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Ben Lake), focusing my comments on drop-in fuels and the options that are available for off-grid homes, other than heat pumps. As has been mentioned, installing an electric heat pump in some of the country’s oldest rural homes can indeed cost the £12,000 figure that we have had quoted, plus £2,000. However, I have also seen estimates for some particularly unique houses—those built out of forms of cob or, in my constituency, wychert—where the cost of installing a heat pump with all the necessary additional retrofit installations can be as high as £30,000. Of course, those heat pumps only work efficiently if—it is a huge “if”—the house in question has the highest standards of modern insulation. Many older houses do not, and indeed cob, wychert and thatched properties cannot be insulated because of the way they were built—the walls simply cannot be allowed to become wet or damp; otherwise, the materials will come apart.
At a time when the cost of living is rising sharply, it is critical that consumers and businesses across our United Kingdom have a range of technologies at their disposal, so that they are not obliged—this is about choice, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd said in his opening speech—to pick an option that may not be suitable for their property or that, as the hon. Member for Ceredigion mentioned, would be unaffordable. There are clearly many options out there in the marketplace—some are available today, and some are clearly still in development but are close to being scalable to the point of production and wide-scale consumer use.
I have looked at this issue across not just the home energy sector but the transport sector, and I sincerely believe that drop-in fuels have to be part of the solution. An example is renewable liquid gas, which is a liquid fuel that resembles the same chemical and energy content as LPG but can be used as a drop-in fuel for existing infrastructure, boilers and solutions in people’s homes and businesses. However, it is produced through technology that utilises renewable feedstocks, meaning it has a low carbon content when compared with conventional LPG. Due to the drop-in nature, renewable liquid gases effectively utilise all of the existing infrastructure to deliver affordable decarbonisation solutions, particularly to the most hard-to-treat domestic and non-domestic properties that are off grid.
As rural electricity grids might need costly reinforcements as electrification marches forward in our country, as more and more people have a greater demand for electricity, not least for their personal transport and their cars, choosing a drop-in fuel solution for home heating and cooking may save not just the taxpayer money, but money and hassle for the citizens of our country as the infrastructure upgrades involved are either non-existent or very minor, as some heating engineers have told me—perhaps one or two filters in boilers having to be swapped out.
However—this is the problem that I bring to the debate this afternoon—there is currently a lack of recognition, particularly for renewable liquid gas and drop-in fuels more widely, from the Government and some suppliers. The key to enabling the supply and production of renewable liquid gas is a supportive political framework orientated to the long-term benefit of many families and businesses in off-grid locations. Are we not all seeking cost-effective and convenient decarbonisation solutions? It is critical that the upcoming biomass strategy explicitly recognises renewable liquid gas to ensure continued funding and development in this area. Affordable clean energy for families and businesses is key if we are to meet the 2050 net zero ambition.
Electrification is not always economically and technically feasible, especially not in the short term. Purchasing or, worse, borrowing to purchase expensive heat pumps and energy renovations is simply not a realistic option for many of my constituents and many off-grid people and businesses across our country, so I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to give us the good news that drop-in fuels and renewable liquid gas can be seen as a core central plank to the Government strategy going forward, so that we can avoid the cliff edge where people who cannot afford it or people whose homes cannot be fitted with it are not left with a singular option that does not work for them in future.
Oral Answers to Questions
Greg Smith Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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George Freeman
My hon. Friend is absolutely spot on. It is surprising not to hear the Scottish nationalists welcoming the North sea transition deal a bit more. To remind the House, it is a programme that will draw on the expertise in Scotland’s offshore North sea oil and gas sector and help it to lead the transition to carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, offshore wind and tidal, and it is set to create over 40,000 jobs and attract £14 billion of investment. That is the best way—and frankly, the best thing the SNP here could do is to help their colleagues in Scotland to support it.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lee Rowley)
The net zero strategy highlighted the potential importance of sustainable and synthetic fuels as part of the transition to net zero and committed to additional strategies. In aviation, the Government have already announced their ambition to deliver 10% sustainable aviation fuels by 2030.
Greg Smith
In our inquiry, “Fuelling the future”, the Transport Committee has heard significant evidence of the role that synthetic fuels can play as drop-in fuels that mean that vehicles, aircraft, ships, cars and plant do not have to be changed—the fuel just works in them. Given this, will my hon. Friend commit to ensure that synthetic fuels and their development are given equal billing with other energy sources?
Lee Rowley
My hon. Friend makes two crucial points: first, that technological innovation—the ingenuity of human endeavour—is crucially important in helping us to get to net zero in the first place; and secondly, that it is very important that we let a multitude of technologies and innovations grow and develop, working in conjunction with private enterprise, to help to solve society’s challenges.
Large Solar Farms
Greg Smith Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. Like other Members who have spoken, I am in no way, shape or form an opponent of solar energy. However, like others, I believe that solar technology and solar farms would be best placed on our factories and brownfield sites, away from the beautiful Great British countryside. I very much agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) about preserving and protecting the character of an area.
Planning guidance is already clear: where possible, large solar farms should use previously developed land. Projects should be designed to avoid, mitigate and—where necessary—compensate for impact. However, my constituents have been bombarded with applications for large solar farms across north Buckinghamshire. Since I was elected just over two years ago, I have already opposed five applications for solar farms, including in Little Horwood, the village of Kingsey, on Callie’s Farm and between the villages of Ford and Dinton. All those solar farms would have dominated rural villages and completely changed the character and rural nature of those places; in one case, it would have destroyed ancient farmland.
Most recently, I have objected to two solar farms in the peaceful villages of Leckhampstead and Slapton. My constituents have expressed concerns about the inappropriate scale and nature of the proposals. The solar farms will add no net benefits to the local area and will have a considerable impact on the environment and wildlife. They will fundamentally alter the character of those villages and the surrounding countryside.
The Leckhampstead solar farm site is on rising ground, bounded and clearly visible from the surrounding high and low ground from the west and south. The woodland bordering the northern edge of the site is a prominent feature in the local landscape. Slapton village already has one smaller-scale solar farm, which is ugly and visible from Ivinghoe Beacon. The scale of that application is such that it completely surrounds and overwhelms the northern end of Slapton.
The company behind this development, having seen my objection, tried to make out in a letter to me the other day that it would not be a blight and sent me photos of other schemes as evidence. Yet every single one of the photos it sent me were of ugly masses of grey and black plastic, metal and glass, in place of natural beauty, grass and crops. Let us be absolutely frank: there is no way on earth that replacing our beautiful British countryside with hundreds of thousands of acres of these monstrosities up and down the land could possibly be considered anything other than total vandalism and blight.
With Buckinghamshire facing a tidal wave of these solar farms and of development on greenfield sites and working agricultural land, it is vital, as others have said, that we take a step away and recognise that agricultural land is a finite resource. We need to come up with a new solution that puts solar on brownfield, and on the top of the factories and tall buildings in our cities and towns, and that protects the Great British countryside.
Oral Answers to Questions
Greg Smith Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
Simon Baynes (Clwyd South) (Con)
Amanda Solloway
The Government have helped our steel industry to compete globally by providing more than £480 million in relief to the sector for electricity costs since 2013. We want to ensure that UK steel producers can compete for and win contracts associated with domestic infrastructure investments, including HS2. We are working closely with the sector and other relevant parties to realise these opportunities.
Greg Smith
Furniture manufacturing is an enormously important part of the economy in my constituency, with firms such as Ercol and Hypnos Beds located in Princes Risborough. As a result of covid, the industry estimates a 25% to 30% reduction in UK furniture sales this year, with 10,000 jobs at risk. Will my hon. Friend join me in backing the industry’s “Buy the Best, Buy British, Save Jobs” campaign, which is also supported by the all-party parliamentary group on furniture makers, and outline what more she can do to support our furniture makers?
Amanda Solloway
I will be delighted to support that campaign. It is great to see the furniture industry supporting high-quality British manufacturing with its “Buy British” initiative. Now, more than ever, we all need to do our bit by backing British industry to drive jobs, innovation and growth.