Lord Dixon-Smith
Main Page: Lord Dixon-Smith (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, I will not take very long. I do not have the remotest idea what the Minister is going to say. Whether or not she finds what I say encouraging remains to be seen.
I have a concern about the amendment. I find it very difficult to believe that there has not been an increasing awareness of this problem over the past 15 or 20 years—indeed, almost a crescendo, rising nowadays to virtually a scream—on just this subject. It has been there all the time. Now we are talking about putting in another body that would be publishing its advice in public and so on. In the end, though, only one thing will matter and that is decision. No one has suggested anything that will take the decision away from the relevant Ministers. They have to face that fact.
If this were happening in the commercial world, a good many people in this field would have lost their jobs long ago. Unfortunately, that does not happen to Ministers. Still, that is what is going to have to happen. In the end, the Ministers in the department will have to make their minds up.
I have almost got to the point where I do not care what they decide so long as they decide something. If they make a wrong decision you can do something about it, but the one thing you can never do anything about is no decision at all—it is impossible—and that is what we have been forced to live with for a very long time.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
As I was so impressed by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, on this issue at Second Reading, I feel emboldened to speak to his amendment even though I did not hear how he introduced it and I apologise for having come late. As an ex-Permanent Secretary, I strongly disagree with the advice just offered. My watchword was from Hilaire Belloc, who wrote:
“Decisive action in the hour of need
Denotes the hero but does not succeed”.
It is often a very good idea to take no decision, particularly if you think your Minister is about to take a silly decision.
I support the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, in his definition of the problem, as in his Second Reading speech. The inability to take the long view and the discontinuities between energy policy, environmental policy and policy on public expenditure and investment in infrastructure are such that these have come together to make a very real problem. I think that some sort of advisory board might be part of the answer. However, I cannot support the wording of the amendment put forward here because it has limited it. It talks of advice in implementing government policy objectives for energy. You have to go wider than that and you have to allow your advisers to advise you on what policy should be. If they are limited to advising purely on the execution of the policy that the Ministers have already announced, you are still stuck in the short term.
As an ex-Permanent Secretary, I also find it very odd that the amendment should state that although the board shall consist of,
“expert members appointed for their experience in or knowledge of the energy industries”,
the “relevant Permanent Secretary” shall be “in attendance”. What is he supposed to do? If the Permanent Secretary disagrees with his Minister, one of his prime jobs is to disagree with his Minister. He should do that in private. He cannot speak in public against the then policy of the Government. So he is in attendance, spending days sitting there listening to these guys. He cannot speak because the minutes will be published—he could not speak against the views of his Minister anyway. This is neither flesh nor fowl. I fear there is a danger that it might turn into a red herring. If we need independent advice, it should be independent. We do not want the presence of the Permanent Secretary and we do not want the remit of the board limited to advice on the execution of policy. We want it to tell us what policy should be.
I would put a long-term element into this as well, by putting five or 10 years somewhere in there, so that it is clear that the board is looking over the horizon. This would ease its relationship with government, because it would be clear that the timescale was not limited by the period of the then present Parliament. Therefore, I support the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, as he has correctly identified a very important problem, but I cannot support the wording of his amendment.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I suggest that there is much here for the Government to think about seriously. We need a policy that is clearly consistent in its detail as well as in its broad thrust, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, has rightly suggested that this is an area in which consistency is not readily obvious. We are looking to make clear to everyone the internal consistency that I am sure there is.
My noble friend rightly said that the key issue, as we have been arguing right the way through, is certainty for the future. Surely, if we are going to meet the obligations laid before us under the Climate Change Act, we need to make it possible for people to proceed along a sensible path. We have carbon budgets that take us all the way to 2027—that is where we are—yet we appear to have none of the underpinning activity to ensure that, side by side with that, the energy industry is able to meet the requirements of those carbon budgets. However, Parliament has passed those carbon budgets; they are part of the law of the land, as part of a structure that Parliament decided upon. We ought to make the point in this Committee that Parliament decided that as Parliament. It was not the Government who decided on the Climate Change Act but Parliament. Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Scottish nationalists, Welsh nationalists, Irish Protestants and Labour Members together said, “This is a non-party issue. We as Parliament want this to happen”. I am sure that my noble friend will know that in the House of Commons there were but five votes against that Act, including the two tellers.
I am not by any means saying that the noble Viscount has exactly the right answer to this, but I say to my noble friend that we have to recognise that unless we do something in this area, as in the previous amendment, we stand challenged in defending the claim that we are keeping to the law of the land. That is the issue for this Committee. Our job is to ensure that we obey the law of the land, and the law is very clear here. It has targets and budgets up to 2027, and I do not see how you can meet those if at the same time you are continuing and creating energy sources that are manifestly not in line with that. I hope my noble friend will be able to say at least that he will take this away and look at it again. Any other answer puts this Committee into the real difficulty of having to remind the House of Lords that we have responsibilities in terms of our legal needs to meet the decisions that Parliament as a whole has already come to.
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, I have hesitated to intervene in this section for some time, but I feel that I should follow my noble friend Lord Deben in this matter. The truth is that the 2050 target for the electricity generating industry is zero. That is the reality of the economy that we have to head into. To assume that we can have gas plants running at this level five years short of that is perhaps acceptable if they are constructed in the next short timescale, with a view to them going out of use in 2045, but it will not be acceptable for something constructed in 2040. It is as simple and basic as that.
The purpose of having a discussion in a Committee like this on a Bill like this is to enable Members to raise these types of inconsistencies and for the Government to say, and I hope that the Minister will: “There is actually a point here. We will go away and think very seriously about this”. If gas generation is to continue past 2050, it will have to have CCS fitted to it and will have to work pretty well perfectly. My opinion—I think I said this at Second Reading—is that we should stop messing about with CCS in coal because it is not going to get us there. It may get us there with gas, or we have to have other forms of generation. That is now the law of the land and we are not going to set that aside. Frankly, one would have to say to our noble friends speaking for the department that if they flatly reject this, they are asking for amendments to be brought forward on Report that will then have to be voted on, and I would rather they did not do that. They ought to be able to arrive at a more reasoned approach.