Energy Bill

Lord Chartres Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of London]

My Lords, biblical studies teach me that when you have two amendments that look as much alike as my amendment and that of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, you must look for an Ur-text. Indeed, there is an Ur-text, as we all know, and the figures in my amendment are simply the latest figures available from the Government. This is intended to be a constructive and supportive amendment, which also reflects the concern mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Roper, about the sole emphasis on the capacity market not really catching the full subject here.

According to the Secretary of State in his own foreword to the response to the consultation, which was published in May of this year, a 9% reduction in overall demand could save electricity equivalent to the output of four power stations in one year. I do not want to pose as an expert, of which there are many in this House, but I have been trying in my own diocese of London to improve energy efficiency. I have taken a keen personal interest in the various efforts and our churches have actually achieved a 22% saving in energy consumption between 2005 and 2011.

I represent the voice of the consumer—a rather small consumer. Nationally, through the environment campaign of the Church of England, which I chair, we have invested in a mixture of retrofit measures to address the heating and lighting of a stock of buildings that were not originally built with energy efficiency in mind. Renewable technology and behavioural change have helped an institution such as ours, which emits as much carbon as a large supermarket chain, to use energy more efficiently while maintaining open buildings at the heart of the local community countrywide. I am particularly proud of the fact that our new vicarage at St John’s, Wembley, was awarded the highest score ever under the code for sustainable homes at the 2012 awards.

We are not great experts on the general theme but we represent people who are seriously anxious to support the government policy and to operate in the most efficient way possible. We have learnt from colleagues in other European countries. In Sweden, which faces greater climatic challenges, the building code for new constructions has been strengthened; smart meters have been installed in almost all households—I understand that this is proposed for the UK but not yet implemented; public funding for research and innovation has been increased; and a new incentive programme has been launched.

Of course, these and other ideas were set out in the 2012 consultation, and the Green Deal is addressing the fact that in developed western countries the built environment uses half of all energy and generates half of all greenhouse gases, and there is very substantial wastage through walls, et cetera. But even the chief executive of the Green Deal Finance Company, Mark Bayley, has admitted that complexity is one reason why the take-up has been so disappointing. Many of those in fuel poverty, a substantial percentage of whom live in London, pay inflated prices through meters in their homes, and the current position whereby the more energy you use, the more likely it is that the tariff will be reduced, is surely unsustainable as well as unfair. This Bill, which I heartily support in the main, provides an opportunity to reflect on the wider costs of our energy habits and how to make the best use of our resources without penalising the poorest in our society. In the UK 6.5% of households say that they cannot keep their homes warm, as against 1.5% in Sweden. The figures for children living in fuel poverty, at 1.6 million, are especially alarming.

The amendment relies on the Government’s own latest estimates of the potential for demand reduction. It would seem obvious that a strategy setting out cost-effective policy options that go beyond what is currently being proposed by the Government should be published to show how these reductions can be achieved.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on Amendments 50 and 51. My heart is with them completely, and I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on his award. I am sometimes involved in green awards and energy efficiency—an area that has often been left out of these debates—and it is great to have someone who has been a recipient of one of those.

The difficulty with these two amendments is that they target a specific reduction in electricity. Coming back to the decarbonisation debate that we had earlier on today, better decarbonisation can, of course, actually be achieved by having an increase in electricity. One of the big challenges of decarbonisation is moving the transport sector from fossil fuels either into biofuels or, particularly, into electricity, using electric vehicles. We also eventually want to move home heating from gas into electric—non-carbon-generated electricity. It therefore makes it very difficult in these areas to have targets on terawatt-hours or proportions or whatever; you have to take it back to exactly what the right revered Prelate said, which is energy efficiency. I am a great advocate of the green deal, and it certainly has its issues at the moment and I hope it succeeds, though perhaps it needs a number of changes to do that. At the end of the day, however, the real thing we have to do is just to go out there and, perhaps rather brutally—whether it is street by street or village by village—ensure that we upgrade domestic and industrial premises so that they are energy efficient. Going down the route of specific electricity-target reductions could actually work against decarbonisation and the way in which we are trying to reduce carbon emissions in this country. I am absolutely with the intent, but I think the method in this case has great difficulty.