Energy Security Strategy

Debate between John Redwood and Peter Dowd

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Davies. The fact is that if we took the approach of the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), we would not have moved on from the use of coal. In the 19th century, coal powered virtually everything, but then oil and then gas started to power things. We have to move on. There has to be a short, medium and long-term strategy. It is fine if people want to ask me, “Well, what are your plans for next week and the week after that?” We can have lots of plans for next week, but there also have to be plans for the medium and long term, and that is what the energy strategy is about.

[John Redwood]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Dowd]

I will in a moment. The right hon. Gentleman also asked about the alternative energy supply if wind drops off. It has to be part of a comprehensive package—that is the issue. Energy has to be available and one does it in a variety of ways. It is not simply about a turbine going down and that being the end of the matter. There are designs available out there, for example in Cape Cod, where a company, developer, Government or state—call it what you will—can ask about an area’s topography and then design wind turbines to maximise the capacity, and that is built into the strategy. That is how it is done—through technological use of the topography, so to speak.

[John Redwood]

The hon. Gentleman completely misrepresents my views. I was an adviser to the new electricity-generating system at the time of privatisation, when we encouraged and designed a system that carried out a massive switch out of coal and into gas because it was cleaner and a lot cheaper. That was the first green revolution. I hope he will withdraw his slur on me.

[Peter Dowd]

If telling the truth is a slur, I certainly will not withdraw it. The fact of the matter is that the right hon. Gentleman has to come into the 21st century. The system is not working. We have a privatised, market system that, quite frankly, is not working. The problems we are now having because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine just reaffirm that the model is not working and that we do not have the disparate energy supply that we actually need.

I agree with much of what the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) said on market reform, so I will not go into that. He also raised the issue of tidal power. My constituency is on the Mersey and overlooks a lot of turbines, but for a long time, since I was a member of Merseyside County Council 40 years ago, we have also been trying to get the Mersey barrage. There are lots of examples of barrages working well across the world—I did have a list of them, but I do not have it to hand—and they are priced relatively well. That is also case in other countries that are pushing the green agenda. The Netherlands are using their topography, as are the Spanish. The Japanese are now virtually in the position where they can have 100% efficiency with wind and a variety of other sustainable energy plans. India, Australia, France, Germany, China and the USA are moving ahead. Yes, the UK is doing well, but we are not doing well enough. We have to move on as much as we possibly can.

One of my concerns is the Government’s approach to community energy companies. A letter from the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to a colleague says:

“The right to local energy supply already exists under the Electricity Act 1989 and Ofgem, the independent energy regulator, has existing flexibility to award supply licences that are restricted… Changing the licensing framework to suit specific business models risks creating wider distortions elsewhere in the energy system, which could increase costs for other consumers and further unintended consequences.”

I do not believe there is any evidence whatsoever for that—quite the contrary—so it would be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say about it. In my opinion and that of many other people, that letter is not factually correct. For example, in a local network, energy loss through the system is significantly lower. That has not been factored into the Government’s strategy, but it should be.

The Secretary of State’s letter effectively pooh-poohs the idea of local community enterprises on the grounds that they will distort the market—well, if we do not have a distorted market at the moment, what precisely do we have? We are here today to push the Government to create an energy market that serves the country. I do not want to go into the issue of nationalisation and public ownership of the energy sector, because my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) has already done so, but at the very least we have to have a good look at it, because the market is not working. It is as simple as that, and I would challenge anybody who tells me it is. We have to move on, and as the coalition Government said in their July 2011 UK renewable energy road map—we came to a bump in the road somewhere between 2011 and now—

“The nations of the United Kingdom are endowed with vast and varied renewable energy resources. We have the best wind…and tidal resources in Europe.”

That is as true today as it was 10 years ago, but I am afraid we are not using all the advantages we have as a nation. We have almost an inbuilt potential energy supply, but we are not using it. It is about time that the Government get to grips with that and use what we have now, not just in the future.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Redwood]

Once again, the hon. Lady is in denial. She will not answer the intermittency problem. Does she ever look at the hourly and daily statistics on the grid to see, quite often, how little of our power is renewable-generated? That is because of physics and weather. We have to find technological answers to that. Now, there are technological answers, but at the moment they are not being adopted. They are not commercial and they have not been trialled properly; there may be safety issues and all sorts of things.

[Peter Dowd]

Yes, they have.

[John Redwood]

The hon. Gentleman says that they have been trialled. Why are they not there, then? Why can I not turn on my hydrogen tap now? There are all sorts of commercial issues and issues about how to route it to every home and so forth.

[Peter Dowd]

The right hon. Gentleman is so fixed on this idea of commerciality. There will potentially come a point when the taxpayer—for the sake of argument—decides that the Government are going to invest. I know that the right hon. Gentleman has an ideological obsession with the Government not doing that. However, in the current situation, does he not agree that the state might sometimes have to do just that?

[John Redwood]

But that is happening. We already have one of the most over-managed systems because successive Governments have put in all sorts of subsidies, tax breaks, interventions, price controls and all the rest of it to try to send those signals. That is why we have the current mix—it is not the exact mix the market would have produced.

I fully accept that there is often a role for Government when we try to develop new technologies. I have no problem with that. However, it does require agreement on what that technology is, agreement on the scale of the effort needed and realism about how many years it would take. It is all very well for the Members present to say that they have a vision of everybody using an electric car and having a heat pump. However, if their constituents cannot afford it or do not want it, it does not matter what Members think—they have to deal with the world as it is. We cannot lecture our constituents into having a heat pump. They will have a heat pump when it is affordable, when it is a good product and when they think it makes sense, and they are nowhere near coming to that conclusion at the moment.

The crucial question in this debate is what more the United Kingdom can do at this critical moment. We have to help our allies and friends on the continent who are gas short and oil short and want to get Russia out of their supply system but cannot do so because it would collapse their industry, while Russia is financing a war by selling its oil and gas into Europe as well as elsewhere. I think there is a lot more we can do.

I urge the Minister to see it as both a patriotic duty and a crucial duty to our allies to work closely with our producers and owners of oil and gas reserves in the United Kingdom and maximise output as quickly as possible. Some of the output can be increased quite quickly; for others, it will take two or three years to get the investments in. Will the Minister do everything he can to expedite it? We owe that to our constituents, because gas and oil are too dear—every little extra that we can produce will make a little difference—and confidence in markets might be affected. Above all, we owe it to our allies, who will otherwise be financing Putin’s war.