Queen's Speech

Lord Jenkin of Roding Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, I hope that the right reverend Prelate will forgive me if I do not follow on from his speech. I would like to say a few words about the subject touched on earlier by my noble friend Lord Teverson and the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, and talk about energy.

Let me say at once that I very much welcome what my noble friend on the Front Bench said about the future of new nuclear build. She will be aware that some anxiety was voiced when the Secretary of State at DECC was appointed, having regard to his well publicised, long-standing opposition to the nuclear industry. However, having read the coalition programme and read his speech in another place last week, I am now wholly reassured that the policy will continue as it has in the past and that we will get the new nuclear programme that is essential to the security to which the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, referred. I say to the Benches opposite that the only sadness is that it has all come 10 years too late because they thought they were winding up the nuclear industry and only discovered a few years ago that that would not be possible.

I also welcome the coalition’s policy statement about the need for a floor under the carbon price. This is widely regarded as essential by the nuclear industry. It is a crucial provision because it makes it clear that there must be a major incentive for low-carbon generation and a difference between that and higher-carbon generators. I understand that it is a matter for the Treasury—I am mildly surprised, but I am told that that is the case—and that DECC Ministers are hopeful that something may be said about it in the emergency Budget. All I would say to my noble friends on the Front Bench is that it would be a welcome assurance that would help to counter the uncertainty that is the real enemy of investment in this field.

Another anxiety that has been expressed by the industry is about changes that my noble friends have announced for the planning system, in particular, the abolition of the Infrastructure Planning Commission. I find it very reassuring that the Government have made it clear that the IPC will be abolished as a decision-making quango, but that its staff and the people who have been recruited to the commission will make sure that the application and planning processes for major infrastructure projects will continue and will be part of the Planning Inspectorate, with the hugely important change that final decisions will be made not by an independent quango but by Ministers accountable to Parliament. I was in touch with the chairman of the IPC, Sir Michael Pitt, before the election, and I discussed these proposals in detail with him. I was greatly reassured when he said that he regarded them as entirely workable. I hope that Ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government, who are in charge of the planning system, will do their best to see that planning timetables will be no longer, and possibly shorter, than those envisaged in the Planning Act 2008.

In the last couple of minutes, I shall mention climate change. There is time to do only one thing: to draw the attention of the Government to a very important new report, called The Hartwell Paper—because it was put together at a conference at Hartwell House—describing a new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009. We have had the failure of Governments to reduce carbon emissions under the Kyoto process. We have had the failure, which has been referred to more than once in this debate, of the Copenhagen process. We are also faced with the rising tide of public scepticism about climate change. They all inevitably lead to the likely failure of the successors to Copenhagen. There is not time even to outline the case made in The Hartwell Paper. I hope that it will be given attention because the theory behind it is that if you make cutting carbon and climate change the central objective, requiring unpopular decisions to be taken by a range of people, you are bound to fail. I shall quote one of the authors of the paper:

“It is not possible to have a ‘climate policy’ that has emissions reduction as the all-encompassing and driving goal. We advocate inverting and fragmenting the conventional approach: accepting that taming climate change will only be achieved successfully as a benefit contingent upon other goals that are politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic”.

Those are the conclusions of a long, carefully argued paper, but I have come to the conclusion that if we are to fight climate change and reduce emissions, we cannot, to coin a phrase, go on as we are.