Queen’s Speech

Lord Haworth Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the commitment in the Queen’s Speech to introduce an energy security Bill. This measure is designed to implement the provisions of the policy paper, British Energy Security Strategy, which was published as recently as the beginning of April. It has taken a war in Ukraine to finally convince the Government to actually take action to drive our energy policy, rather than leaving such matters to market forces. This is clearly implicit—one of the Prime Minister’s favourite words—in the decision to establish the “Great British nuclear vehicle”. This body will be tasked with helping projects through every stage of the development process and developing a resilient pipeline of new builds.

Whatever might be claimed to have been the benefits of the decisions on privatisation taken by Mrs Thatcher and her Government all those years ago, the effect of leaving major investment decisions largely to chance has undermined any effective energy security strategy. I acknowledge that there were some benefits of privatisation, particularly in the short term. For instance, establishing competition in the market helped keep electricity prices lower than they might otherwise have been, with the benefit, in the short term, of reducing the number of households in fuel poverty—that bit worked. I was very interested in the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, about this, because he was so intimately involved.

However, having said that, it was always obvious that leaving electricity production and distribution to market forces was a policy of simply hoping for the best. I quote the Prime Minister’s own words, in the foreword to the policy paper, where he says that

“we drifted into dependence on foreign sources. Sometimes this was through deliberate planning; more often it was the byproduct of policy fudges, decision-dodging and short-term thinking. But … the result today is all too obvious”.

Quite so.

I made my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House as long ago as February 2005. I spoke about the growing environmental crisis due to climate change and about glaciers melting and, in some cases, collapsing altogether. I had in mind those in the great mountain ranges, particularly the Himalayas and the Caucasus. The catastrophic collapse of the Kolka Glacier in North Ossetia is now recognised by the world’s glaciologists as most probably the largest glacier collapse ever identified, at least in the past 20,000 years. It barely made a footnote in the newspapers, not even in Moscow, although it should have served as a massive wake-up call. This was in September 2002, almost 20 years ago.

At that time, little was known about the fast-melting Greenland ice sheet, or the great dangers posed by melting ice in Antarctica, matters which have now been extensively researched, especially on the Thwaites glacier in western Antarctica, revealing the dangers all too alarmingly. Back then, I urged the Labour Government to urgently consider restarting the civil nuclear programme in Britain, which had stalled after the accident at Chernobyl in 1986. In 2007, the energy White Paper opened the door to new nuclear, but without quite committing the Government; a year later, the 2008 White Paper on nuclear power announced an aspiration to restart the nuclear programme, which envisaged up to eight large new stations being built on the sites of former nuclear plants already closed or closing.

What has happened in the last 15 years? One new nuclear plant is being built, at Hinkley Point, but it is not yet finished. There is a plan of sorts to build a second new plant at Sizewell, but it still awaits planning permission. It is not exactly impressive; it is a very British way of stumbling forward and hoping for the best, and hoping that signals from the Government will result in energy firms coming forward with active plans, which is a policy failure on an almost epic scale. So I welcome the initiative that the Government have finally taken and look forward to the energy security Bill finally ending the laissez-faire approach to these matters. I welcome the commitment to provide up to £1.7 billion of direct government funding to enable one major nuclear project to reach a final investment decision in this Parliament. I welcome the investment of £100 million to Sizewell C, and the commitment to invest £210 million to develop small modular reactors with Rolls-Royce.

In conclusion, the energy security Bill is welcome news; it is long overdue. A measure such as this could and should have been introduced 20 years ago—certainly after the 2006 energy review, which explicitly recognised the threat that Russia presented to the West after the temporary suspension of gas supply to Ukraine on 1 January that year. However too little and rather too late, this Bill is surely better late than never.