Energy Bill

Lord Bishop of Chester Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Roper]

My Lords, this amendment was originally tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, who very much regrets that he cannot be here today, and therefore I shall speak to it. He asked me first of all to make it clear that he is not personally involved in any microhydro scheme although in the west country where he comes from, and elsewhere in our countryside, a growing number of families and individuals are trying to make the best use of our many rivers, old mill leats and mill houses to create small amounts of renewable power both for themselves and their communities. Therefore, it seems odd that one part of government, DECC, should arrange a subsidy to encourage such investment through feed-in tariffs and ROCs, while another part of government, the Treasury, through the Valuation Office Agency, seeks to remove part of that subsidy.

The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has set out nine reasons why microhydro should not be assessed for business rates and, with the Committee’s indulgence, I shall quickly go through them. Domestic hydro sites may be located on rivers that are able to provide much more power than the owners require for their own consumption. It is obviously in the interests of the nation that domestic owners be encouraged to generate as much power as their sites are able to provide and consume as little of their output as necessary, otherwise the potential benefit of their hydro plants’ contribution to the grid and the community as a whole is diminished.

Domestic owners do not want the complication of their residential property being designated as a business. There is already clear evidence of gaming around the capacity bands chosen for the feed-in tariff, and some owner-operators will perhaps downsize the scale of their investment to avoid non-domestic rates being levied, which, again, cannot be in the interest of the nation as a whole.

The Valuation Office Agency’s rating models have not been designed to accommodate domestic hydro plants, where there is no landlord, no tenant and no market rents to test the validity of the office’s assumptions. Indeed, its rating model and the DCLG legislation on non-domestic rates are insensitive to yearly variations in the weather. For example, the output from the run-of-river site may vary by more than 40% from one year to the next, depending on rainfall. There are no operating costs that an owner-occupier can cut to offset the consequential losses in revenue.

A site’s revenue will be reflected in the income of the owner and taxed accordingly, taking into account capital allowances for this very long-term investment. The approach of the Valuation Office Agency to calculating rateable value does not allow for the repayment of loans or the cost of borrowing and assumes that funding will be through equity, which, in the view of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, is a ridiculous assumption for domestic microhydro. Non-domestic rates have been applied retrospectively, creating havoc and uncertainty for a number of domestic-scale financing plans. Indeed, according to evidence supplied by DECC, no allowance was made for non-domestic rates when the state subsidies were originally established.

A further example of the inflexibility of non-domestic rates means that when the subsidy ends, the drastic reduction in revenue—a reduction of 40% in the case of the renewables obligation and 75% for the feed-in tariff—will not be acknowledged or included in the calculations for rateable value until the five-yearly antecedent valuation date arrives. It will then be another two years before the adjusted rateable value comes into operation. Clearly, these two systems are incompatible. It is also worth pointing out that no other domestic renewables, for example photovoltaic solar panels, are charged business rates on the amount of power they export. This is a strange anomaly, and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, was right to bring an amendment in these terms to the Committee. I look forward to hearing the response of my noble friend the Minister.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment. This may well be the last time I speak in this Committee and I thank the Minister for the way in which she has conducted herself and for writing to me with answers to some previous questions that I raised.

In addition to the reasons which have been so clearly enunciated, I would like to inject into the discussion the issue of culture, because much of what we are about in energy policy in this country is working on a change of culture. It has become a fashionable word. The Second Reading of the Financial Services Bill was all about changing the culture of banking and financial services, and that is absolutely right. However, the same applies in the energy realm. The sort of installations that we are talking about are relatively small in themselves but speak more widely.

I will digress very slightly to a non-domestic instance. In Chester in the 1920s, the tram system was powered by a small hydroelectric plant on the River Dee. The University of Chester, where I am president of the council, is in the process of bringing that hydroelectric plant back into operation, partly to satisfy its obligations to HEFCE vis-à-vis its green credentials but also as a very reasonable project in itself. It will have a cultural impact in Chester quite beyond the actual electricity component of the project, and I think that the same will apply in the circumstances we are discussing.

There is something about hydroelectric power that goes with the grain of the countryside and nature rather better than windmills and some of the other things we are doing. We should do more to encourage local use of natural resources. If the projections about future rainfall are right, there will be even more rain flowing into our rivers to power these microhydro projects. Although I cannot comment on the precise terms of the amendment, it seems to me that the spirit of it is absolutely right at the present time.

[Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan]

I rise stimulated by the right reverend Prelate’s remarks, partly because when hydropower developments took place in Scotland, the nature of the opposition to them was very similar to the nature of the opposition to wind turbines today. Indeed, if you read any of the histories of hydropower in Scotland, you find the same arguments and the same kind of protagonists. Indeed, as I recall, one of the supporters of hydropower in the 1930s was expelled from the Perthshire hunt on the grounds that they were going to deface Pitlochry. Anybody who knows Scotland will know that Pitlochry is a great tourist attraction on the way up to Inverness and that the jewel in the crown of Pitlochry is the hydroelectric dam and the salmon leap there. If anyone were now to try to say that they wanted to close it down because it is spoiling the countryside, they would get rather a lot of fleas in their ears from the kind of people who say that they want to have hydropower but not wind power. That has to be taken into account.

Hydropower is one of the most attractive forms of generation. It is also interesting that subsidies for refurbishment have been made available to small-scale hydro, which may well be the case in Chester as well as in Deeside in Scotland. I had the opportunity of visiting one site some years ago because the kit had been refurbished in my constituency by the Weir Group of Alloa. The output had been increased from 70 megawatts of power to 81 megawatts, which was a considerable achievement. This is far smaller, but we can bring into play hydro opportunities that have perhaps fallen into disuse. It would be better if they could get the best possible deal because river flow—drought notwithstanding—tends to be pretty reliable. One would imagine that this, out of all the renewables, would be less prone to interruptibility and that therefore an amendment of this nature seeking to give a bit of extra assistance would be extremely helpful at this time. I support the amendment.