Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Maddock]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Teverson, and also the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I want to bring it home to people that this makes “eco-nomic” sense. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, delights in having arguments, but I agree with him on some of the points that he has made. I remember when I bought my first house, in 1966. It was a little box in Southampton, desperately hard to keep warm. As some of you will remember, there were floor-to-ceiling windows in those days, and we had one of those picture windows, so trying to keep the house warm in winter was quite difficult and the bills were quite high. Then I moved to a newly built flat in Stockholm where the winter temperature was minus 27, and I say to my noble friend Lord Jenkin that to heat that house cost me less than it used to cost to heat this box with the picture window in England. That is when I got the bug about building proper homes.

I am going back to 1969, and we still have not got there. The longer we put this off, the more it costs us as a nation. We have been spending masses of money over recent years on projects to try to bring houses up to a reasonable level of energy efficiency. It is desperate that we stop doing it any longer. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, over the years many housebuilders and other builders were very conservative and did not want to go with this, and we have been suffering from it ever since. We really must not listen to the voices of holding back any longer. It makes economic sense to stop going down that road.

[Lord Oxburgh]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support this amendment. Listening to the informative discussion by noble Lords, I have seen my foxes shot one after the other so I will not detain the Committee for long, except to agree that the industry with which we are concerned here is fundamentally conservative. If we wait until there is any indication from the industry that it is ready for this, we shall wait for ever. The only thing to do is to fix a date.

If the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, with whom I so often agree, were to look at the regulations for vehicle emissions imposed by the state of California a number of years ago, he would see that the motor industry cried that this was totally impossible and would destroy the industry. Lo and behold, within a small number of years it was not only meeting the regulations but exceeding them. We have to fix a date and the industry has to work to it.

[The Lord Bishop of Liverpool]

My Lords, I also support this amendment. However, I congratulate the Government on the lead they have taken in this Bill. I also congratulate the opposition Benches because, when they were in government, they gave an unequivocal lead on reducing carbon. It is great from these Benches to observe such common cause across the House. We need that.

I take on board a powerful point that the Minister has already made about having a light touch and not being overly prescriptive because it begs the question: when is legislation necessary? When in a process in a public debate do we need legislation? That question consumes this House on a number of subjects, but on this one it must be something to do with when the public attitudes do not yet match the public good. What we are agreed upon on all the Benches is that it is in the public good to reduce carbon as urgently as possible. Public attitudes, however, are not yet that adamant. Many of us in this House are working very hard in different ways to try to change hearts and minds on this subject. However, in the light of public opinion not changing as fast as the climate itself is changing, we need legislation, which is why I support this amendment.