Lord Deben
Main Page: Lord Deben (Conservative - Life peer)(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Deben
First, I must point out to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, that we are committed to 2016 in any case. That is what we are going to do—it is what this Government have committed themselves to and what the previous Government proposed. It is one matter that we agree about. I have to declare an interest because I have a financial interest in a business that seeks to build houses of precisely this kind of format now. It is perfectly possible to do. We are building houses that meet the requirements. The issue is that, unless you build enough of them, the price is greater. It is true that if you build them in penny packets when everybody else is building another type of house, it does cost you more. But if you start to build them as part of the general run of things, the result is that you can build them at a price not unadjacent, as Private Eye would say, to the present price for building houses that are not on eco level 6—to use my own shorthand—which is, roughly speaking, what we are looking for. At the moment, a lot of houses are built at eco level 3; we do not build any at less than eco level 4 and we are moving a whole stage up. As the machinery of being able to build those houses comes into operation, you can build more of them.
I very much support the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, because they underline the reality of what we can do. The noble Lord spoke of what was happening in Scandinavia and Germany, underlining the fact that, once you get the thing moving, you enable people to build to a price that does not make the market significantly more expensive. Most housing is done in units that are prefabricated in various ways; even in brick, many of the parts are prefabricated. They can be prefabricated to either a lower or a higher level; once enough of them are being made, the price begins to be not unadjacent to the price at present. It is perfectly possible to do it and we are committed to it.
I support the amendment because it says three things that are very important. First, it restates the commitment, and that is important because, I fear, a number of people in the construction industry have been speaking to some of my noble friends who do not want to do this. They have not done the work and do not like the fact that they are behind major companies such as Barratt and Taylor Wimpey that have done the work and know they can do it. They tell their shareholders that they do not need to do it because in the end the Government will give way. They are saying that the Government will not stick to 2016 and that they will save the shareholders a lot of money because they will not have spent money on research, and so on. The real way in which to let down the major housebuilders—which I certainly am not—who are trying to do this is to move in any way from the commitment to carbon neutrality at that date. The people who have spent the money in trying to make this work have been constantly dogged by the backsliders in the industry.
Lord Deben
It is most important that we should consider these three amendments as one because they are seeking to do the same thing. I do not have any pride of ownership for my own amendment, I just want to raise some of the issues which the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has brought forward.
It is right to say that this is a cross-party concern. There is no division between us on this and it is supported by all sorts of places, some of them not wildly likely. I would like to take up the comment of the noble Baroness about the word “resist”. There is another part which happens before that, as all of us who have been Ministers know, and that is when civil servants say, “Better not, Minister”, a phrase I remember very well. This seems to be one of those areas.
My only disagreement with the noble Baroness is this: perfectly rightly, the Government saw the particular way of reporting that we have had before with local authorities having a number of drawbacks and fitting into a pattern which the incoming Government were unhappy about. But because one gets rid of something one is unhappy about does not mean that it is better not to put something in its place, where that seems sensible. Here it is sensible. The first reason for this is because of the Localism Bill. If you get rid, absolutely rightly, of regional government and the rest of it, you are going to ask local authorities to co-operate with each other. They need a framework within which they can co-operate. This is one area where they will have to co-operate. In the borough of Ipswich, for example, much of the urban area of Ipswich is in the Suffolk Coastal district council area. To do the thing properly, local authorities will have to co-operate over the boundaries. Therefore I support this kind of structure which will enable people to start off with the same basis, so they know how they are going to do it.
I shall have the pleasure of chairing the Suffolk-wide green conference which we have every year to promote exactly these things. In an entirely Conservative-controlled local authority, county and district, everyone believes that this is a necessary part of doing what they want to do. Suffolk wants to become the greenest county because it wants to force other people to compete with it, and that seems a good thing. The Minister may have been advised that it is not necessary because this is all voluntary and we will all be doing it happily together. We are not asking for compulsion, we are asking for a framework within which people can use their several and different talents to do this job properly.
All the amendments, certainly mine, show the need to take seriously the fact that we will not meet national carbon budgets unless we meet local carbon budgets. I have spent most of the past 10, 12 or 13 years trying to help big businesses change so that they become much more corporately responsible and concerned about these issues. I have become more and more passionate about the practicalities of doing this rather than the high-flown rhetoric. The more one does it, the more one wants to say, “Can I tell you how you can cut your energy by 13 per cent simply by using some kind of regulator of the voltage? Can I help you to do these things in a simple, basic way?”.
When I looked at the Bill it seemed that the one failing I wanted to correct is that we need to engage local authorities so that they feel that they have a real part in the achievement of the Green Deal. That is why this is so important. It is to get the local authorities to think that the Government have said that if they are going to achieve these things, if they are going to do these things, local authorities are an essential part of it. A lot of the practical nuts and bolts, which is what the Federation of Small Businesses is saying, have got to be put together at the local level by the local authority working with its own community. That is why my amendment refers to working,
“in partnership with local residents, businesses and”—
I hate the word “stakeholders” but it seems to be compulsory—
“stakeholders including schools and hospitals in drawing up and carrying out the strategy”.
The joint strategy referred to specifically in subsection (2) of the proposed new clause draws attention to that co-operative element which the Localism Bill will have and points out that CO2 is not a respecter of county or district boundaries. It is very important to make this part of the way in which we proceed.
Lastly, I have suggested that we should ask the Secretary of State to introduce the local carbon budget scheme to begin at the start of the second national carbon budget period.
I would like to pick up something that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said. We do not have a long period of time to decide when it might be convenient for this or that to happen. The timetable before us is dictated by the climate change which we have caused. I will not get back to housing, but if we had known about this at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we would have done things rather better. But we did not. Now we are having to pay the price for what was vastly beneficial for the United Kingdom. We have a bigger responsibility than any other country because we got a bigger profit out of it earlier on. What is happening now is something that we caused—not quite alone, but certainly we were the leaders in what has caused the climate change that we have, because it takes that much time to work through. Therefore we have a huge moral responsibility to put this right.
There is an urgency here. In everything we do we should be asking the Government to sign up to that emergency by putting dates on it. We have had too many pieces of legislation. I remember a White Paper on energy in which the only date was 2050; every other date had been taken out. I think that even the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, will accept that, if you take out every date which the Government are unlikely to live to see, it does not make for a sense of urgency. I am very keen on having things that everybody in this Room will see. Therefore I ask the Minister to take this extremely seriously.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I am very happy to follow the noble Lord; I broadly support his amendment, along with the other two. There is a degree of repetition, but that in itself is not a problem. As we were listening to his remarks, I was almost tempted to do an AV Bill-type speech here—but I am not going to. As I think I have said before, those of us who laboured in the Augean stables of Scottish legislation in the past have over the years learnt how to make a rather thin line go quite a distance.
I am interested in something that the noble Lord, to an extent, alluded to in his remarks about the start of the Industrial Revolution. When you have been in the House of Commons for a time, boundary changes become a regular feature of your life as a politician, and quite often you move with the changes. Over the years, as a Member of Parliament, I had dealings with about five different local authorities. I do not want to go through them in great detail, but I had five coal mines in my constituency which fed coal into a power station in a different local authority, and that power station generated 2,400 megawatts of electricity. That is an awful lot of smoke going up the chimney and a fantastic contributor to pollution within Scotland. The coal mines have closed, but the power station is still generating.
Across the River Forth was the petrochemicals complex of Grangemouth, which was in Falkirk local authority; and adjacent to that was Bo’ness and one or two other places where there were petrochemicals and hydrocarbon facilities. Then you had Clackmannanshire, where there was, I think, the biggest bottle-making plant in Britain—again, spewing out industrial waste of all kinds. We also had timber-processing plants near Stirling, and the like. Therefore, in an area of 40 to 50 square miles, you had an incredible amount of pollution. The local authority is trying to keep tabs on this. It does not have a clear and specific obligation to try to reduce the pollution, although it has a kind of moral obligation to do so. However, I think that authorities would be anxious about co-operating on a collective basis to reduce carbon emissions and enhance the energy efficiency of these communities, because very often the pollution moves from one area into another simply with the wind gently pushing it along.
Lord Marland
The first point is that these amendments come under the section relating to the Green Deal, apart from the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, which comes along later. The substantive issue here is the Green Deal, but the other substantive issue is that it is not for us to impose on local authorities what they should and should not do. As I said earlier, it is for us to produce a product that they are incentivised to put into homes and which they encourage other people to put into homes. This is what we are doing with the Green Deal. There are other elements relating to the energy sector, and of course we will encourage local authorities to set themselves achievable carbon reduction targets. However, it is for local authorities to buy into that; at this point, it is not for government to be prescriptive. I know that it is a tradition of the Labour Government to decide what everyone must do, and when and where they must do it. However, that is not the tradition of this Government. We are saying, “Here we are. Here’s an opportunity. Get on and do it”.
Lord Deben
It is not from the Labour Government that this comment comes. This amendment would impose something on a local authority to enable them to do things in common. If we do not do this, different local authorities will not easily be able to do things in a common structure so that they can actually work together. There is a practicality there. Furthermore, it does not impose anything on them to say that they have to produce a carbon budget. If they really want to be difficult, they can always produce a budget that does not mean very much, but then local people will know what they have thought of this. There is a very important localist and democratic position here. I want to know precisely what the Mid-Suffolk District Council thinks about these issues and what its carbon budget is. Happily, I think that I know the council well enough to go round there and bang on their door and say, “I really want this”. But it is a piece of information that the public should have.
I ask the Minister to think again about this being an imposition. It is a request to ensure that local authorities can work together and that the public can know where they are on these matters.