Feed-in Tariffs (Amendment) (No. 3) Order 2015

Lord Deben Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I was not here at the start of the debate, but I hope the House will indulge me if I add a few short remarks. The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, said that the policy of feed-in tariffs has been highly successful. What do we mean by that? It has been highly successful in taking money off people and giving it to other people. As my noble friend Lord Cavendish said, something in the order of £1 billion a year is now going through this programme. It is going, on the whole, from the poor to the rich because electricity bills are a bigger part of poor people’s bills than they are of rich people’s bills, and most of the people who can afford to put up the upfront costs of drawing down feed-in tariffs are on the whole rich people.

That is not the measure of success surely by which we should judge this policy. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, just said that it should be judged by its impact on the climate. So how much has it reduced carbon dioxide emissions? How much bang for that enormous billion pound buck are we getting? The answer is: a trivial effect. We know that solar power, which is the bulk of the feed-in tariffs, produced 1% of our electricity last year. Therefore, the emissions reduction cannot be more than 1%. It is probably a lot less because of back-up and other issues. We know roughly where it is and we can therefore make a rough calculation as to the costs per tonne of carbon we are buying these omissions at.

The figure for those who were lucky enough to get Ed Miliband’s first tranche of feed-in tariffs is close to £1,000 a tonne. Not even the noble Lord, Lord Stern, thinks the social cost of carbon is anything like that. He says that it is about $29 per tonne. More recent estimates, because of cuts in the feed-in tariff, show that that number has now come down to something like £200 a tonne, but it is still 10 times higher than the social cost of carbon. We do not have a successful policy. We are doing it on the backs of relatively poor people. It surprises me that the two parties opposite should in this case be taking the side of the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than Robin Hood.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, as chairman of the climate change committee, I declare an interest. I also declare a clear view that my job is to be entirely independent on these issues. Therefore, it is with care that I am going to try to navigate the discussion that we have had so far.

The climate change committee has clearly stated that we have a requirement, if we are to meet our statutory ends, to meet first of all the fourth carbon budget and then the fifth carbon budget which has been presented to the Government. The Government have committed themselves to the fourth carbon budget, and they must legislate on the fifth before the end of June. That is in the Act. No doubt, Ministers will be thinking very carefully about how they will do that because there is no elbow room in the fifth carbon budget. It is as generous as it is possible to be while still meeting the targets that were laid down—reducing our emissions by 80% by 2050—not by the climate change committee but by the Act itself.

In dealing with the Government’s proposals here today, it is not for the climate change committee to argue that the Government should not do this, should do that, or should do the other. It is for the committee to remind the Minister that the Government are committed to delivering reductions in emissions. The mechanism used must indeed be for the Government—that is the democratic balance we have established in the Climate Change Act.

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[Lord Donoughue (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be brief but I have to say that I regret—although I am not surprised—that the Liberal Democrats have brought forward this Motion. I think it is the first time in 31 years in this House that I have publicly supported a Conservative proposal but on this occasion we should acknowledge that the Conservative Secretary of State has at last done something not to halt but to slow what has been going on for some years, which has been rightly described as a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

As a member of the Labour Party for 62 years, I have always opposed that kind of approach, and for some time I have been rather surprised that my own party seems not only to connive at it but to have initiated much of it. It is a massive transfer. It is the ordinary working families that pay the higher energy prices that come from green taxes. They pay through their income taxes, supporting subsidies—I have to say that there are people here who seem to be subsidy addicts. It is employers and those giving jobs to working people who suffer from these higher energy prices. The decent working men of Redcar and Port Talbot have suffered from having higher costs, although mainly because of the Chinese moves. I recently met an employer in heavy manufacturing who demonstrated to me how his high energy costs were a major factor in putting his business at risk and where he, too, might have to make working men unemployed.

There is a major issue for me, as a Labour person, about how my party supports such measures to transfer massive wealth from the poor to the rich. There are one or two in this House who make millions from renting wind turbines, having solar panels and so forth. I am sure that they will declare their interests when they speak but that troubles me in particular. The right reverend Prelate said that it is only a little. Well, for many people a little is a lot. I notice that nobody supporting this Motion, other than him, appears even to defend the fact that this imposes such a burden on the working people. It is a small amount but it is part of a process that produces a massive burden on them.

I understand the desires to go for a green environment, where possible. I should point out to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, that while I very much enjoyed his contribution I was reminded that his father was an Anglican vicar. I think that he would have been proud of that speech, which could well have come from many of the pulpits that I have enjoyed. I noted that he claimed to be independent. I totally accept that, as I am independent in my lifelong support for Northampton Town Football Club and the Northampton rugby club, but it is a certain kind of independence. When the noble Lord very impressively and emotionally attacks those who question his position, of whom I am one although I question only part of it, he says that we do not accept climate change and all that goes with it. I have to tell him that I accept climate change; I do not know a single sceptic who does not. For me, climate change is what has always happened, in cycles. It is happening now and we accept that. I accept that the globe is warming and that human activities play a part in it. I do not know where these straw men are who seem to agitate the noble Lord so much. We wish to question—

[Lord Deben]

My Lords—

[Lord Donoughue]

The noble Lord spoke for a long while.

[Lord Deben]

If the noble Lord accepts climate change, why has he opposed every single measure to try to do something about it?

[Lord Donoughue]

It is the old problem: I do not know what evidence the noble Lord bases that on. He does not know what I have supported in the past, so I will not accept that, but we will not delay the House for longer on this. It is about querying arguments in the true Enlightenment tradition and questioning where the burden of the price goes. What we object to, although nobody proposing the Motion seems to have reservations about it, is that the less well-off in this country pay through regressive green taxes—