Green Economy

Joan Walley Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys), who serves with distinction on the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, on bringing the debate to the Commons this afternoon, and I note that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith), is in her place, because if we really are going to make progress on this most important issue, we will do so only if the Treasury puts the whole issue at the core of its policy making.

It has always seemed to me perverse that we have a Green Book that is anything but green, so the time has come to ensure that the Treasury’s guidance on the national infrastructure programme, in particular, guarantees that every single policy is appraised and joined-up in taking further forward the agenda of securing more renewable energy and more energy efficiency.

I shall try very much to comply with the limit on speakers—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. The limit is eight minutes, and we will not go beyond that, so if we can please keep to it that will be much more helpful. I do not want to have to use a big stick, as I want to get everybody in.

[Joan Walley]

I, too, want everybody in the Chamber to get into the debate.

Let me bring to the attention of the House the two reports that the Environmental Audit Committee has produced, and which for the benefit of Members we have tagged on the Order Paper: the Committee’s twelfth report on “A Green Economy” and its sixth report on “Budget 2011 and Environmental Taxes”, which shows how we have examined the Treasury’s role in the matter.

We intended the two reports to be a starting point and an overarching basis on which the discussions that now need to take place throughout business, local government, the private sector and international development might be brought together, so that our policies—including what we do, and how we keep scrutinising what happens, in Parliament—can be tied to that agenda. We found that two years after making the commitment to increase the proportion of tax revenues accounted for by environmental taxes, the Government still have no strategy for achieving this commitment. In addition, they have not published their definition of an environmental tax. In our further follow-up inquiries, we will do what we can to obtain that definition and to scrutinise what is happening so that we get some real progress.

A further relevant aspect is the Rio+20 summit that took place last week. Its outcome was extremely disappointing given the lack of a highly ambitious outcome and follow-up action plan. However, all the different parties who were there, from business people, to legislators, to parliamentarians, to members of civil society were in absolute agreement that if the high-level leaders cannot come up with significant outcomes, everybody else has to raise their game. So it is with our Parliaments. I urge the Economic Secretary to demonstrate that she understands this issue by saying what she is doing through Treasury policy and in making sure in Cabinet meetings that there is a joined-up approach towards environmental taxes.

I want to raise issues relating to my own constituency, because we will not deal with this situation nationally or internationally unless we can deal with it locally as well. It is a matter of great concern to me that a large number of people in Stoke-on-Trent are living in fuel poverty. Indeed, of the 40,678 households in Stoke-on-Trent North, 10,120 are in fuel poverty, which is absolutely outrageous. It is a rate of 24.9%, which compares with the UK average of 18.6%—and even that is shocking. If ever there was a reason we should be getting support from the Treasury to address these environmental issues, it is that. We have a commitment to eliminate fuel poverty by 2016, and we will not achieve that unless we scale up everything that is done and look at how revenues can be reinvested so that whole communities see the importance of moving towards the renewables future that is so urgently needed.

I say this as someone who represents a constituency where the industrial revolution started because of our reliance on carbon.

[Ben Gummer]

Will the hon. Lady comment on the fact that the Labour Government spent almost £5 billion on trying to eradicate fuel poverty through various measures, with the consequence that fuel poverty went up in their 13 years in power?

[Joan Walley]

I am not going to get involved in any kind of partisan debate. Unless we can bring in measures that deal with fuel poverty in the short term and the long term, and get people’s commitment to work on this agenda instead of making political capital at the expense of everybody else, we will not deal with the problem.

In Stoke-on-Trent, we want to work with the coal authority to extract geothermal heat, which we see as one part of the solution in the context of all the other things that need to be done, to provide the jobs that are required, to provide training for people in the skills that will be needed for the new investment in renewables, and to see what we can do to bring about district heating schemes for city centre developments. We want to use the water that is underneath our city—albeit in what is, to date, an innovative way—to do what other countries, such as the Netherlands, have done to get the investment that is needed. We cannot do that without fiscal changes and incentives, and ways of getting innovation and new technology on board very quickly.

On fuel poverty, yes, we have had investment, but we have seen that piecemeal investments do not deal with the whole issue. That is why the previous Government invented the CERT—carbon emissions reduction target—scheme. If we deal with whole communities, often in areas of Victorian housing where there are huge issues with energy efficiency, it is possible to get the investment that is needed in one fell swoop. That is the kind of scaling up that is now so urgently needed.

We have aspirations to decarbonise our city. We have an untapped renewable resource, but at the same time we recognise the need for investment across a wide range of different industries and sectors. If this debate helps to take that agenda further forward, and if our Select Committees can examine and scrutinise every single action that the Treasury is taking to make these aspirations a reality, given the urgency of the need for greater energy efficiency, it will have been worth while.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lilley]

That is fine, but my hon. Friend has read her speech. It is a question I was hoping for.

The growth of such sectors is either natural, in which case it is splendid, or it is the result of subsidies, in which case it is tosh. Subsidies can boost one sector at the expense of the rest of the economy, but we cannot make ourselves richer by providing subsidies. If a person moves a pound note from their left-hand pocket to their right-hand pocket, they are no richer. Subsidies can make us worse off, however. If we invest in offshore wind, which is twice as costly as conventional energy generation, we get half as much energy for a given sum of money. That makes us worse off, not better off.

[Joan Walley]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Lilley]

Only if the hon. Lady is going to prove that we make ourselves better off by producing half as much electricity for a given sum of money. She is not. If she gives up on that, I am glad.

The only way in which subsidies might conceivably generate an economic revolution is if we subsided the producers of goods and services that we could export;, but we are not allowed to do that under European rules. Instead, what we do is subsidise users, consumers and those who install generating capacity in this country. Unlike the Chinese and the Koreans, we are not allowed to subsidise those who manufacture wind farms or photovoltaic cells. We may want to, but we are not allowed to. The pretence that the subsidies that we are giving will promote infant industries is untrue.