Net-zero Emissions Target: Affordability

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate. I fully support my noble friend’s policy on trying to achieve net zero. We have heard many noble Lords speak about the need to do it—most noble Lords anyway. I would just like to say a few words about how to achieve it, because the issues relate to—as we have heard some noble Lords already mention—cost and reliability. Does the technology work or is it something in the dim, distant future? How is the energy distributed, what fuel does it replace, how it is produced? Of course, there is also security.

I will give two examples. The first is a pump storage scheme, which I worked on—it must be 50 years ago, I am so old now—on the River Severn. The great thing about pump storage—which has now come up again in people’s ideas—is that you can predict when it can produce energy, because you know when the tides are going to come in and out. It is quite simple. The key is to get a good place and planning and the right energy to make that work and produce low-cost energy at a reliable time.

I spoke about my second example briefly in the debates on the energy Bill. I have to declare an interest: I am one of 4 million people who live in a house in the country which does not have gas, and therefore we have to burn oil or use electric. There are a lot of—some 25,000—people working in this industry and it is quite a well-developed source of energy, which avoids you having to convert to air or ground source heating, which, as noble Lords will know, will probably cost between £15,000 and £30,000, and is actually quite beyond most people’s means. The main question is: where does the source of the fuel come from? The answer is it comes from second-hand cooking oil and things such as that.

It also needs distributing. It is worth looking at the way energy needs, assuming they are going to go down the wires in the future, will get distributed around many parts of the country which do not have it at the moment—we cannot see it at the moment.

My noble friend spoke about what is happening in Scotland, and I am told that the cost of increasing the amount of power needed to change the infrastructure in Scotland is somewhere between £900 and £1,300 per home. That is a lot of homes in Scotland. We have to look at the cheapest and easiest way of achieving this without having to change your boiler or having to keep the electric switched on.

This is why the Governments of Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have all committed to using these new fuels as a key part of their decarbonisation strategies. I rather worry that some members of our Government seem to be more keen to build a third runway at Heathrow and use second-hand cooking oil to fuel all the planes that may need it. I hope that is not serious, because there is a greater need of this material for other things, besides enabling you to get to Guatemala rather more quickly.

I have two requests for my noble friend the Minister. First, will he acknowledge the needs of the rural, off-grid households within the forthcoming warm homes plan? If not, the Government will not have fully recognised the issues that these households are facing, and it is a serious issue for people who cannot afford it. I imagine that it applies to churches as well, because we do not want to be shivering either in churches or at home.

Secondly, we have the primary legislation in place via the Energy Act 2023 to create the necessary obligation mechanism, which would give the necessary market signals and certainty to the industry to roll out these fuels for home heating and reduce cost to the consumer. It does not need a public subsidy, grants or even Treasury money. All we need, I am told, is the Secretary of State to activate Section 159(3) of that Act and launch a public consultation to gather the views of the stakeholders involved. Will my noble friend commit to that when he responds to the debate?

In the meantime, I congratulate all noble Lords who have spoken in favour of net zero, and let us hope we keep at it.