Renewable Energy Projects: Community Benefits Debate
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Jamie Stone
Main Page: Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)Department Debates - View all Jamie Stone's debates with the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero
Renewable Energy Projects: Community Benefits
Jamie Stone Excerpts(1 day, 13 hours ago)
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Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald), on securing this debate—the first of what I am sure will be many debates in years to come. He has talked about what Norway has done, and he is correct to say that my constituents look out of the window when it is cold and see the turbines going round and round, but the money heading south. That is not a good thing at all. The coldest community in the whole of the British Isles is a village called Altnaharra in central Sutherland, where on 30 December 1995 temperatures hit an astonishing -27.2°. If that is not cold, I do not know what is.
My hon. Friend has talked about taking people along with us, and that is incredibly sensible advice, because they are paying a 50% premium above other buyers of electricity. If we can take people along with us on the Orkney and Shetland model, it will work—but the key is how we go about it. He also rightly mentioned affordable housing and how such a fund could be used to address this issue. I was recently in the village of Achiltibuie in Wester Ross, speaking to young people who had summer jobs there. I asked what they did in winter when the hotel closes. The answer was, “We have to head south.” Why? Because there is no housing in a place like Achiltibuie. There is absolutely no affordable housing. That is a dagger at the heart of the viability of communities in the highlands, because it leads to school rolls falling and so on.
My hon. Friend is quite correct to place this issue before us, and I hope he will be encouraged—though I am sure he will need no encouragement—to bring it forward again. It could have been tackled some years ago, but a perceived inertia at all levels of Government to actually do something about this issue meant it never was. There is a great opportunity here. Knowing the Minister, whom I congratulate on his appointment, and knowing my next-door neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, I have every confidence that this will be the start of a discussion that, if we are positive about it, can achieve a fruitful outcome.
Mark Garnier
That is great. If people accept pylons, that is absolutely fine, but there are an awful lot of people who do not and we can look at where the alternatives could be cheaper.
Jamie Stone
Does it not strike the hon. Member as strange that SSE proposed to underground the cable in the highlands from Dundonald to Beauly, yet says that it is impossible to do so in other parts? That is a very mountainous part of the highlands, so I think there is something in what my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald), my constituency neighbour, said about it being possible.