Oral Answers to Questions

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

If rural communities are to benefit from the clean energy transition, it is important that they play a role in hoping to host the infrastructure. When the Great British Energy Bill went through Parliament, there was much discussion about ensuring that communities that host the new infrastructure do not lose out. I can send the hon. Gentleman details of exactly how his community can engage with that process.

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

10. What steps he is taking to improve the energy efficiency of homes.

[The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Ed Miliband)]

In 2025-26 alone, we will upgrade up to 300,000 homes through the warm homes plan and other measures. That is more than double the number of homes upgraded last year. Later this year, we will set out more details of a warm homes plan to upgrade up to 5 million homes, and there will be more details in the spending review tomorrow.

[Lisa Smart]

Happy birthday, Mr Speaker. My Lib Dem predecessor, the much-missed Andrew Stunell, pushed for the zero carbon homes programme during his time in the 2010 to 2015 Government, having brought in his first Bill on that subject back in 2004. Sadly, those standards were scrapped as soon as the Conservatives were governing on their own. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit has estimated that, had those standards been reached in 2016, households would have paid £5 billion less in energy bills as a result of living in better insulated and more energy-efficient homes. The Secretary of State earlier mentioned the future homes standard, which is bringing in welcome steps on solar panels and so on. When will the Government go further to reach zero carbon homes standards with a fabric-first approach?

[Ed Miliband]

The hon. Lady raises an important question. The failure to have a zero carbon homes standard or future homes standard in place has meant that we have built over 1 million homes since then that are now going to have to be retrofitted. That makes no financial sense. It is right to put those upgrades in as standard from the get-go, and we have done a lot of work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and house builders to make sure that can be done in a way that also means we can build lots of homes.

Gas Storage Levels

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

This whole discussion underlines the importance of electricity storage, including at the battery energy storage system in my constituency, the Bredbury substation. How can we encourage more communities to welcome BESSs to their area, perhaps by considering community benefits, such as district heat networks?

[Michael Shanks]

The hon. Lady makes a really important point about energy storage in its various forms. Battery storage technology is moving forward extraordinarily quickly, and the short duration that we can get from batteries is improving quite considerably, so batteries will have a key role to play. Importantly, there is the potential for communities to drive some of that. We have been really clear in our local power plan that we want communities to be in the driving seat as much as possible, so that they can secure community benefits. We also want them to own some of the infrastructure. In a few weeks’ time, I will visit a scheme in Scotland where the community would be able to own not just a battery storage project, but a wind turbine that fills the battery. They would get a double benefit from the energy that they are generating and able to store. We would like to see more such schemes right across the country.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ed Miliband]

This is actually to do with the disastrous economic legacy that was left by the Conservative party. The truth is that, even in tough times, the Labour Government are showing with their decisions on the MPS how we can make our society more just.

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

One of the questions I was most frequently asked when I was the trustee of one of the larger local authority pension schemes was what more the fund could do to tackle climate change, particularly in relation to investing in fossil fuel companies. Will the Secretary of State update the House on the conversations that he has been having with the Pensions Minister to ensure that pension funds do their bit to help get us to net zero?

Great British Energy Bill

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 29th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. She mentions community energy and I wonder if she recognises, as I do, the value of projects such as Stockport Hydro in Romiley in my constituency, which since 2012 has been using its two Archimedes screws, Thunder and Lightning, to power around 60 homes, thereby saving more than 100 tonnes of CO₂ a year. Is that the sort of project that she thinks the Bill should do more to support and encourage, so that we can tackle climate change and ensure that communities benefit from community energy projects?

[Pippa Heylings]

I thank my hon. Friend for that fantastic example from her constituency, which is exactly the kind of project we are talking about. We know that

“Local power generation is an essential part of the energy mix, ensuring communities own and benefit from clean power projects, and reducing pressures on the transmission grid.”

In fact, those words are taken from the Government’s founding statement for Great British Energy, and the Minister said in this Chamber that

“Great British Energy will deliver a step change in investment in local and community energy projects, putting local authorities and communities at the heart of the energy transition.”—[Official Report, 5 September 2024; Vol. 753, c. 530.]

Yet the community energy sector was brought almost to a standstill by the former Conservative Government, and barriers still exist in selling directly to customers and in the cost of connecting to the grid, so welcome words are not enough.