High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill: Select Committee

Debate between Joan Walley and Alan Whitehead

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Joan Walley]

The right hon. Lady is absolutely right about that. We are increasingly understanding that environmental issues are cross-cutting and that public health concerns are at the core. All of those need, somehow or another, to be costed and factored into the decision making. It is incumbent on the Government to say how such issues will be taken forward at a later stage, given that no precise instruction is being given to the Select Committee on that.

Let me say a brief word about Crossrail, because we have heard a lot about how it had the best way of going about this and so on. We cannot compare the geographical scale of HS2 and Crossrail, as HS2 dwarfs it. We have just heard about the biodiversity and environmental impacts of HS2, particularly on ancient woodlands. My Committee received a lot of evidence about that, but it has not really been included in the debate. This is being taken forward as a hybrid Bill, with HS2 phase 1 and HS2 phase 2, and there has not been the opportunity to examine the overarching aspect, and what happens in phase 2 will be very much determined by what happens in phase 1.

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that our Committee took a lot of evidence and information on surveys, particularly those of ancient woodlands, that one would perhaps expect to have already been done in the early stages if this were any other project? The emphasis should therefore be on how the hybrid Bill ensures that the things we would expect to have been done are done as part of the project, rather than in any new effort that we would expect to be undertaken outside any other project?

[Joan Walley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, because he is not only a dedicated member of our Select Committee, but an incredibly knowledgeable one. The fact that we had so much evidence about the failure to map areas and the huge gaps in information shows how unfit for purpose the environmental assessment has been so far.

Energy Bill

Debate between Joan Walley and Alan Whitehead

Wednesday 4th December 2013 Commons Chamber

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

I want to try to put this matter into context. In my constituency, 6,110 households are in fuel poverty. The Lords amendment would drastically change the definition of fuel poverty. At the moment, about 3.2 million people are classified as being in fuel poverty, but that figure would go down to about 2.7 million under the new definition. There is real concern about the proposed change. I am also concerned about the change in the Government’s ambition, which was previously to eradicate fuel poverty and now appears to be merely to address it. That is no longer a strong commitment. The Minister will have to do an enormous amount if he is to convince the House that fuel poverty is really going to be addressed.

This is a cross-cutting issue. It is not just about what is going on in the Department of Energy and Climate Change; it is also about the cost to the health service and the implications for skills and employment. There are now 7,000 fewer people in the construction industry working on insulation than there were in December 2012 and, in a double whammy, we have had the announcement this week that the energy company obligation is to be cut back. There are households that desperately need investment in their insulation, but that investment is now going to be cut back. To make matters worse, the goalposts have been moved and, instead of having to complete 100,000 measures in one year, that work can now be completed in four years. Connecting all that together, we can see that there will be huge reductions, making it more difficult to address fuel poverty precisely when we should be stepping up the measures to deal with it.

The Environmental Audit Committee examined the whole issue of energy subsidy and one of its conclusions was as follows:

“To aid transparency, if the Government introduces its proposed new measure of fuel poverty, it should also continue to publish statistics on the current metric for the remainder of this Parliament, alongside the new figures. In the Autumn Statement, the Government should make clear how any changes to green levies will change the amount that those in fuel poverty will have to pay, by how much and how soon.”

I would like the Minister to respond on that.

[Dr Whitehead]

I wish briefly to speak in support of the amendments to Lords amendment 87 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) and my Front-Bench colleagues on the issue of fuel poverty.

As someone who has sat through the whole process of this Bill, from the very start to the finish this afternoon, I can tell hon. Members that during its early passage we were promised amendments in another place that would address fuel poverty. Here they are in front of us, but they are very feeble. I say that because central to Lords amendment 87 is the word “addressing”. For all the rest of the material in the Lords amendments about a strategy and so on, the amendment concentrates on the various things that have to be done to bring about a position of

“addressing the situation of persons in England who live in fuel poverty.”

Let us suppose that my wife asked me whether I was going to cook the supper tonight and I said, “I will do rather better than that. I will address the issue of cooking the supper tonight. I will have a number of recipe books at the ready and I will produce a strategy for cooking the supper. I will have some vegetables, which will also be ready to address the strategy of cooking the supper.” She would probably conclude that we would be having a takeaway this evening. That shows the central problem with Lords amendment 87: it would not ensure, whether in relation to the previous definition or the Hills definition of fuel poverty, that there will be a strategy in the future to bring about changes that move towards the eradication of fuel poverty.

The amendments to the Lords amendment 87 would simply replace that lack; they would put in targets to ensure that we can address the eradication of fuel poverty through a requirement on Government to act over the next period, rather than suggesting that they may or may not act, depending on how they wish to proceed. Let us not forget that this Bill, when enacted, will bind not only this Government, whatever their intentions, but future Governments on what they need to do about fuel poverty.

One central point about the amendments to Lords amendment 87 is that they make an explicit link between the imperative of moving forward on energy efficiency and the imperative to eradicate fuel poverty. We know that through radical measures to improve the energy efficiency of our homes, we undertake radical measures to eradicate fuel poverty, because of the congruence between people living in fuel poverty and people living in the least insulated homes in our country. It is a singular fact that the price of energy in this country is by no means the highest in Europe, but the bills we pay are among the highest in Europe, simply because of the overall energy inefficiency of our homes. Setting targets and underpinning them with an explicit assault on fuel poverty over the period is a win-win in terms of the move towards greater energy efficiency in our homes, the investment that that requires and the attack on fuel poverty that results.

If the Government are, as they state, serious about continuing to make an assault on fuel poverty, they have to do better than simply produce amendments that talk about “addressing” a position. The amendments to the Lords amendment seek to do better, and I hope that the House will support them this afternoon.