Electricity Grid Upgrades

Debate between Jim Shannon and Michael Shanks

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Michael Shanks)]

It is a pleasure, Sir Christopher, to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) for introducing the debate, for his approach, and for the engagement we have had on the topic in the short time that I have been in this job. While I suspect we might disagree politically on a great many things, his repeated commitment to the need for net zero is important, and separates him from some hon. Members who might make the issue of grid updates part of an excuse to avoid dealing with the climate issue. I welcome that, and I was pleased to meet him and his colleagues recently to discuss the matter.

I also thank all others who have contributed to the debate. I welcome the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) to his new role. He is not just a shadow Energy Minister now, but shadow Secretary of State for Scotland. Clearly, he did not have enough on his plate before. I do not know what it says about the Scottish group of Conservative MPs that he has two jobs, but I will leave that to one side. The debate this morning has been wide-ranging, although I confess I did not anticipate an existential question from the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) about the nature of beauty and the environment. I learned a lot from that, but I will leave the theological debate about pylons to others in the House.

I want to pick up on the general context first, and then some of the specific issues that have been raised. When it comes to the security of our energy future, few matters face us as a Government more important than the delivery of network infrastructure. It was the topic of the very first meeting I had as a Minister, and has been the topic of almost every other meeting I have had in this job, with a range of different people looking at it. Our network infrastructure is in dire need of upgrading.

I will start with the point that the shadow Minister finished on. I recognise that the impact of delivering these upgrades, while important to our national infrastructure, will be felt in individual communities; that is the nature of this. I recognise that there will be communities across Great Britain and Northern Ireland that will have to host energy infrastructure. We thank them for doing so and, while recognising the importance of upgrading infrastructure for the whole country, also recognise the need to get the balance right.

[Jim Shannon]

The Minister is always incredibly helpful with questions that I or anybody asks, which I appreciate and thank him for. For Northern Ireland to be successful, it needs support from Government here. The shadow Minister reiterated that. I ask the Minister to say something perhaps similar for the record, so that it is in Hansard. We in Northern Ireland need to be very much part of the strategy for the future. As others have said, it is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We are always better together, but there are advantages—let us see some of those advantages.

[Michael Shanks]

While I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, me repeating “better together” is sometimes tricky in my political party. I do, however, reiterate my commitment to the whole of the United Kingdom. He will know that I take that very seriously, and I have had a number of meetings on the topic with the Economy Minister in Northern Ireland, who is responsible for energy. Clearly, the role I have is different in Northern Ireland, given the transferred nature of energy policy and the whole island grid, but I take the issues very seriously and commit to that today.

The delivery of a reinforced modern electricity network is critical for every home and business across the country. It is a critical enabler for our Clean Power 2030 mission, which is designed to deliver not just energy security but economic growth, skilled jobs and cheaper energy, which the country so desperately needs. In short, transforming the network underpins our shared commitment to energy security, prosperity and the low-carbon future that the country needs. It is fair to say that this transformation is extremely long overdue. The last significant modernisation of the grid took place in the 1960s. New investment into industries of the future, such as data centres, will play such an important part in the economy of the next few decades. We need to deliver jobs around that, unlocking growth, but electricity demands will increase by an expected 60% by 2035 and double by 2050.

Fuel Poverty

Debate between Jim Shannon and Michael Shanks

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Michael Shanks]

I am always willing to take help from any Member. If the hon. Gentleman can take some of this work off my plate, I will be very happy to work with him. Of course, we will first have to work out the answer to the question of where God comes from, but if we can settle on the fact that it is self-evidently Rutherglen in the central belt, I will be happy to work with the hon. Gentleman. That spoils the joke I was going to make about his comparison of temperatures, which is that seeing him wear a very woolly jumper this morning in London made me wonder what he wears in Skye, but that is for another debate.

Genuinely, though, we want to have an open and collaborative approach, and we want to make this work. The consultation that the previous Government carried out and the feedback we have from a number of partners show that there are really good examples of community benefits working well, along with a lot of examples where they are not working well. If we could build on that approach together, I would very much appreciate it.

While we are discussing the hon. Gentleman, he made a very good point about remembering the different types of fuel that households use, and the real issue for off-grid homes—particularly in the north of Scotland, but right across the UK. Again, fuel poverty is devolved, so some of those questions are for the Scottish Government to answer—I know that the questions will be put to them—but we are aware that in England, for which the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is responsible, 12% of rural households are in fuel poverty, and those are the ones with the largest fuel poverty gap. Tackling those particular challenges in the rural context is therefore really important.

[Jim Shannon]

rose—

[Michael Shanks]

Ah! I was just going to refer to the hon. Member.

[Jim Shannon]

I am very much listening to the Minister, who was perhaps about to tell us what will happen in Northern Ireland, where 62% of households are dependent on oil. In comparison, the proportion for England—I say this gracefully, Sir Roger—is only 4%. The greater emphasis on Northern Ireland will therefore fall upon us. The Minister says that this is a devolved matter and that money has been set aside by Labour to help, but the differential is massive and cannot be ignored.

[Michael Shanks]

The hon. Gentleman, as always, makes a very good point, although I noticed that he called the shadow Minister his friend but not me. But, over time, I think we will build on that and—

Renewable Energy Projects: Community Benefits

Debate between Jim Shannon and Michael Shanks

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Michael Shanks)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again today, Dr Huq. It is good to look out and see so many of my colleagues from the Great British Energy Bill Committee here to discuss energy again. I am glad we got the Bill through Committee quickly enough for us to be here—we did not need our afternoon session.

I do not have a huge amount of time, and I want to get to as many hon. Members’ contributions as possible. Of course, I want to leave the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) time to conclude this important debate—I congratulate him on securing it. Hopefully he will see from the enthusiasm and the level of participation how important others find this subject. I know from his maiden speech and other contributions how important it is for him and his constituents.

Just a few weeks ago, I had the real pleasure of visiting the hon. Gentleman’s constituency; I went to the Isle of Eigg to spend a day learning about the community energy project there. Although in some ways that project is unique, it is a very good example of how a whole community can benefit from such projects. The community genuinely has the power in its own hands—it has its own micro-generation grid—and it has received other benefits as people have upskilled themselves so that they can understand how the grid works and manage it.

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions. I will try to respond to as many as I can, but I will briefly start with the context. This Government have come to power facing three interlinked challenges—ensuring energy security, displaying climate leadership and bringing down bills for people across the country—to which our response is our clean power by 2030 mission. Clean power is the only way to protect our constituents from the rollercoaster of price spikes that we have faced over the past few years, and to deliver the climate leadership that we need. That is why we introduced the Great British Energy Bill within our first 100 days, and why it is progressing through Parliament as quickly as possible. Great British Energy, which will have its headquarters in Aberdeen, is an important part of our plan to increase the delivery speed of renewables projects and, crucially—I will come back to this point—to ensure that the British people have a stake in that energy future. The Conservative party has for many years accepted the premise of publicly owned energy companies, but it does not support the premise of the British people being part of a publicly owned energy company—just ownership by companies from beyond our shores. Of course, we welcome their investment in this country, but with Great British Energy, we are saying that we would also like the British public to have a part to play.

A number of hon. Members made points about community ownership. Although this debate is about community benefits, I think, as some hon. Members have said, there are links between them. The Great British Energy Bill is about setting up the company, but there is a wider context in the Government’s local power plan, which commits to much more community ownership of energy, and ensuring that communities large and small have the funding and, crucially, the capacity to take forward some of those projects themselves.

Delivering on our clean energy mission, which is undoubtedly ambitious, will require action on a number of fronts. I want to touch on infrastructure, which many hon. Members have mentioned. There is at the heart of the current Conservative party’s rhetoric on that subject a fundamental contradiction. We heard it from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), but I also heard almost exactly the same words from the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) on the shadow Front Bench in the Committee earlier today, where on the one hand, there is a recognition that we need significant upgrades to the grid, and yet on the other hand, there is no desire to make a commitment to building any new infrastructure to deliver it. Both those things cannot be true at the same time.

I gently point out to Opposition Members that after 14 years of government, that is not a new problem. The grid did not suddenly fall apart in July 2024, with the Labour Government. That challenge has been facing the country for a long time. Indeed, I would meet Conservative Members halfway and say that even beyond the 14 years they were in government, there has been a challenge on the grid. However, they had 14 years to take action and did not. This Government are now moving forward.

If we want to see the connections issue resolved, and community projects able to connect into the grid, as hon. Members have mentioned, we do need to build some of that infrastructure. That requires communities to host the infrastructure, so I turn to a number of points that were raised about how we work in partnership with communities—using collaboration, not coercion. It is important that the entire mission is a national one—for Government, but also to ensure that every member of the public is part of our achieving clean power by 2030. Key to that will be reforms to planning regulations. To deliver the critical infrastructure that this country needs, nationally significant infrastructure must be built; our planning system is holding that back.

The planning and infrastructure Bill, which we will introduce shortly, will speed up and streamline the planning process. We will also be updating relevant national policy statements within the next year, in order to provide certainty to industry. In Scotland, the current electricity infrastructure consenting regime is from the Electricity Act 1989 and has not been updated in line with other legislation across the UK. The regime is too slow and is holding back investment. I am working closely with my Scottish Government counterparts on how we develop a set of proposals to reform that and speed up the new infrastructure development that we need.

I come back to the point that hon. Members have rightly made—that as much as we need to streamline the planning process because we need to build the infrastructure, communities must be at the heart of it. Public engagement and consultation will continue to be incredibly important, but so also will be a more holistic approach to planning energy infrastructure in the first place. That has been the root cause of many of the challenges that hon. Members have raised today. The lack of strategic planning for some of our energy infrastructure in the past has led to bottlenecks, which we want to avoid in future.

Finally, I turn to the point about communities living near clean energy infrastructure, including the transmission infrastructure that we need to build. Let us be clear: communities, by hosting that infrastructure, are providing a service to the country. It is essential that we build that infrastructure; it must be built somewhere. The challenge I have with some of the discussion on that subject is that we fall into the trap sometimes of saying, “Yes, we agree we need to upgrade the grid, but not anywhere near my constituency, please.” That will not work, unfortunately. We want to ensure that those communities that do host this infrastructure, on behalf of us all as a country, directly benefit from it. Communities are important, not just in terms of hosting infrastructure but in terms of the wider acceptance of the direction of travel that we are taking. We need communities to be with us if we are to achieve the necessary pace. At the moment, as has been raised, such community benefits are voluntary arrangements. They could be monetary or non-monetary schemes; there are a variety of different options across the country, some that work extremely well and others that, as many here know, do not work so well. The voluntary nature of arrangements for delivery of community benefits does lead to these significant variations.

[Jim Shannon]

As I outlined in my submission to this debate, infrastructure is a reserved matter, but back home in Northern Ireland it is a planning matter, which is devolved. The question is how the two combine. It is a very simple question. It might require a much more difficult answer, but I would really appreciate it if the Minister could answer, please.

[Michael Shanks]

That is a very important question and I was going to come to the hon. Gentleman’s specific point in a moment. He is absolutely right. Since I came into post, I have been working with my counterpart Ministers in the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Governments on how we can work together. Clearly, in Northern Ireland that is slightly different because energy is transferred, so the policy levers are slightly different. However, we do have the same outcomes in mind throughout the UK, which is really important. I will continue to work with Conor Murphy and the wider Executive to bring us together as much as possible, because the hon. Member makes a very important point.

On community benefits in particular, we are continuing—at pace—the work started by the previous Government to review how we can effectively deliver benefits for communities living near this infrastructure. We are looking at examples across Europe—we are not on this journey on our own; there are other countries that have been doing this for a very long time, and we are learning from that—and developing clear guidance on community benefits for both the infrastructure and the transmission networks. We will publish that in due course. Great British Energy’s role will be to build upon existing community energy schemes under way across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will build on that experience to contribute more where it can.

I shall now respond to a few of the specific points raised by hon. Members. The point on solar projects, raised by the hon. Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke)—who is not in her place, but I will write to her on this—is an incredibly important one. Part of the aim of the solar taskforce set up by the previous Government and reconvened by this Government is to set out a very clear pathway for these projects.

Several hon. Members mentioned standing charges. The Government are looking at that issue right now. We accept that far too much of a burden and too much of bills comes from standing charges and we are working with the regulator to do much more about that.

Although I listed 12 other points from hon. Members, I am conscious that I have eight minutes in which to cover them. To allow the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire time to wind up the debate, I will close by saying that as a Government we take this issue very seriously. Our ambition is to bring communities with us on this journey. We want to do that through a collaborative approach, with all hon. Members, but also with communities at the heart of this. We will have much more to say on that in the weeks and months ahead.