Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

I do not think that this amendment duplicates what the Government have already done; it actually focuses them on an area where we need to do better than we have in the past. If the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, chooses to test the opinion of the House, I will certainly support her.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, as I did in Committee. The reduction that she has achieved in her ambitions sits very well with what the Government have said are their ambitions. I would like to see my noble friend supporting this and saying that it is an opportunity. Giving us a tight, but not too tight, timescale to make this happen is a good way to demonstrate that.

[Lord Lennie (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make a few comments. First, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and my noble friend Lady Blake for their amendments and will make our position on them clear. Secondly, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, for the welcome changes that he made to the Bill in the other place on the housing levy and on renewable liquid fuels.

We generally welcome the passage of the Bill. It has been a long time in gestation—15 months or more—with hundreds of changes and more today. We welcome all those too, although they probably could have been made earlier.

I turn to the three amendments. First, on coal, the new new Labour Party is no longer in favour of coal. We absolutely support what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said about the coal industry, and it is time to put this in legislation. It is not enough to say that we are no longer committed to coal; we need to legislate for it and so we will be supporting this amendment.

On my noble friend Lady Blake’s amendment on energy efficiency, I will restate the facts. First, the UK has the least energy-efficient homes in Europe. Domestic energy-efficiency measures have fallen 95% since 2012 and are 20 times lower than they were when Labour was last in power. The Resolution Foundation estimates that 9 million households are paying an extra £170 a year as a result of these failings.

The Minister said that the amendment is unnecessary, because it is partly in the net zero strategy and the Powering Up Britain publication, but this is legislation, and it should state what the Government propose to achieve and by what timescale. Therefore, we support the amendment.

On community energy, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, set out very clearly her proposal to commit the Government to finding out what the barriers inhibiting the development of community energy are, and to bring forward a plan to overcome them. That is a very modest amendment from where we were the last time around, and I can see no reason whatever for the Government not to support it. We will support those three amendments should the Members wish to test the opinion of the House.