Road Fuel Prices
Debate between Liz Saville Roberts and Graham Stuart(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Patchy public transport contributes to high costs for rural households, as many people have no choice but to use their cars for essential journeys. Despite this, the rural fuel duty relief scheme does not apply to a single area in Wales. Will the Minister commit to pressing the Treasury to reconsider the scheme to take into account access to local public transport networks, as well as providing a guarantee of inclusion for Welsh areas?
Graham Stuart
I thank the right hon. Lady for her question and will ensure that His Majesty’s Treasury is aware of it.
Prepayment Meters
Debate between Liz Saville Roberts and Graham Stuart
Graham Stuart
I agree with my hon. Friend and it is important to make sure that people do not find themselves caught in a cul-de-sac. He asked about the Government laying out the rationale for higher costs. I believe I have said this on two occasions, so I hope I have at least set out the rationale, whether or not people agree with it. The one that we inherited and that subsists today is that this is cost-reflective. Ofgem, the regulator, supervises this and ensures that no charges are imposed that do not reflect the additional costs of providing energy through that particular methodology. Whether we should change that is a separate matter, but I hope I have at least been clear in explaining the rationale that we inherited from the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) and others previously.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
People living in north Wales are at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis. Last year, many of them paid the highest electricity prices in the UK, and the costs for those on prepayment meters was higher still. Recent figures from Citizens Advice show how precarious access to energy is for prepayment meter customers in Wales, with 32% being disconnected last year because they could not afford to top up. We have heard that the Minister will not ban the forced installation of prepayment meters, so will he give the Welsh Government the power to step in and put people before private energy profit?
Graham Stuart
I entirely reject the premise of the right hon. Lady’s question. We are not putting people behind the private energy company profits—quite the contrary; we are trying to ensure that we have a system that stops vulnerable people getting caught in debt, having bailiffs coming to the door and being further impoverished by a system that does not help them. That is what we are seeking to balance. As I have said, we are going to consider this in the round going forward, because the system and, most of all, people such as those she refers to are under a stress that has never been seen before.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liz Saville Roberts and Graham Stuart(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is right to highlight the need for skills and training if we are to meet our ambitious net zero targets. On 20 September, the Government launched the latest phase of the £9.2 million home decarbonisation skills training competition, which will fund training for people working in the energy efficiency, retrofit and low-carbon heating sectors in England. We are confident that there is enough training capacity to meet demand for heat pump upskilling as heat pump deployment increases.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
The UK imports all medical radioisotopes used for treatment and diagnosis, mostly from European facilities that are due to close down by 2030. What assessment has the Secretary of State made of the need to ensure security of supply of nuclear medicines?
Marine Renewables: Government Support
Debate between Liz Saville Roberts and Graham StuartWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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Graham Stuart
The broad parameters of allocation round 5 will come out this month, and the more detailed criteria will come out on the eve of its launch in March. I can say no more than that, but I think the direction of travel is fairly clear.
The results of allocation round 4 confirm that tidal stream is a home-grown industry of considerable promise, as colleagues have noted. The UK remains the world leader in tidal stream technologies, with half of the world’s deployment situated in UK waters. Given my passion when I came into this job, the last thing I want to see is British research and development and British invention turned into billion-dollar businesses in other places rather than here in the UK, which is what has happened so often. I want that development to happen here in the UK, and I want to work with colleagues.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on his chairmanship of the APPG, with the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland as his deputy chair. It is so important that we have these specialist interest groups, which can keep Government honest and act as a ginger group—a caucus—to make sure that we think about and get our policies right, so that the promise is delivered.
Europe’s foremost tidal and wave energy testing centre—the European Marine Energy Centre—is on Orkney, as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland said. We have new marine energy hubs developing on Anglesey and the Isle of Wight. In answer to the question asked by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland, I would be very happy to meet him and discuss EMEC and its future.
We have a raft of brilliant developers designing and building tidal stream devices in the UK. That picture is so positive in large part because successive Governments have provided more than £175 million in innovation funding, of which more than £80 million has come since 2010. In 2018, thanks to the extensive support afforded under the renewables obligation mechanism, we were able to build the largest tidal stream-generating array in the world in the fast-moving waters of the Pentland firth.
Liz Saville Roberts
It is evident that the Minister understands the potential associated with marine energy for the levelling-up agenda, which I really appreciate. Could he give me a sense of what will happen in Wales with the national grid? Improvements to the grid will be critical if we are to increase generation in Wales, and the timetable for that is essential, because otherwise these are just abstract concepts.
Graham Stuart
The right hon. Lady is absolutely right. Since taking this job—about three months ago now—I have been seized with the centrality of that issue. For all the fascinating issues with the different forms of deployment, if we do not have the grid to bring it all together, we will not have a successful system. I am co-chairman of the offshore wind acceleration taskforce as we seek to move from 13 GW of offshore wind, or whatever it is today, to 50 GW by 2030. That is our ambition, and one of the biggest challenges to that is making sure that we have the grid in place to do it, and are carrying colleagues with us while we do so. I am meeting with a group of colleagues today from East Anglia to discuss the onshore impact of that technology.