Lord Reay
Main Page: Lord Reay (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)
Lord Reay
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for enabling us to have this debate. He does not shrink from listening to views that are at variance with those which he as a responsible member of the Government has to advance—as he again made clear today.
I first refer to some good news that has recently come from my noble friend’s department. It really does look at last as though we are likely to see eight new nuclear power stations in operation starting from about 2018. The previous Government, of course, had already started down this road, after having lost 10 years when, despite enormous parliamentary majorities, Tony Blair made no attempt at leadership on the subject. I therefore congratulate the Government on taking us a step further down the road towards energy security and, if one has been persuaded that it is important, towards further carbon emission reduction. I hope that we will one day go further still down the nuclear road.
I was also pleased that the Secretary of State modified the usual mantra of “no subsidies for nuclear power” by acknowledging that a cap would have to be considered for clean-up liabilities, due in part to international treaty obligations. But the Government continue to gloss over the subsidies which wind power, in particular, has enjoyed and, without which, no investment in it would be taking place. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change even said in the other place that studies had shown that there had been,
“a dramatic reduction in the cost of onshore wind. The result is that it is competitive in a free market with other sources of energy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/7/10; col. 875.]
In that case, one might ask, why subsidise it? Perhaps my noble friend could tell us when the Government intend to reduce the subsidies for wind power if it is now becoming so efficient.
So-called wind farms are not wind farms; they are subsidy farms. Developers are promised that they can sell all the electricity that they can produce at about twice the market rate and, if they are offshore producers, at three times the market rate. That is what the ROC system is paying for, or rather what the electricity consumer is paying for, at an annual cost of well over £1 billion. That cost is expected to rise to £6 billion by 2020 or until the Treasury intervenes, whichever moment comes first. Why should the Treasury intervene? It is because those subsidies are effectively a tax on the electricity consumer, both business and private, the proceeds of which go not to the Treasury but to developers, including energy companies, to enable them to carry on an otherwise uneconomic activity. From them, they go to landlords, including the Crown Estate. They remove a taxable opportunity from the Treasury and, in time, will reduce the tax base by making industry less profitable. They will undoubtedly drive parts of it out of the country altogether.
The Government are also fond of saying that wind power contributes to our energy security. The logic of this claim is equally incomprehensible since, as wind is not available on demand, there will always have to be sufficient power available from other sources to meet peak demand, just as there would have to be if we had no wind power.
Apart from disingenuously trying to give the impression that the market will choose between nuclear and wind power on a level-playing-field basis, the Government are insinuating, equally unconvincingly, that a level playing field operates within the planning system. Replying to a debate on onshore wind farms in Westminster Hall last month, the Minister of State at the department, Mr Charles Hendry, said:
“In the spirit of fairness, we all believe that it is right that if an application is turned down at one level, people should continue to have a right to appeal for a redetermination”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/10/10; col. 138WH.]
This seems very misleading. In the first place, it is not people, in the sense of local communities, who have the right to appeal against local authority planning decisions. If the application by the developer is granted, there is no appeal against that decision. It is only the developer who has the right of appeal if his application is turned down. That might be thought not unreasonable, but any idea of fairness is made a complete mockery of by the subsidy system. If a local planning authority’s rejection of a planning application is appealed against, the issue normally goes to a public inquiry before a planning inspector. That is a very expensive procedure. The inquiry typically goes on for several weeks, with legal representation on all sides. The developer, very likely to be a large foreign-owned energy company, has the comfort of knowing that, if he wins, he will earn in the order of £0.25 million per year per 2 megawatt turbine in subsidy alone, and that, if he loses this appeal, he may win the next. Local objectors, if they organise themselves to oppose the appeal, will have to find in the order of £50,000 to £60,000 to meet the cost of expert witnesses and the very cheapest of lawyers. The local authority will have to find even more, perhaps in the order of £100,000, to fight the appeal. This is an incentive to local authorities to allow applications in the first place.
Nevertheless, despite this pressure applied by the Government through the subsidy system, and despite the pressure applied directly on local planning authorities to get them to accept responsibility for achieving the Government's renewable energy targets, there has recently been a most heartening tendency across the country for wind farm applications to be rejected at one stage or another in the process.
An unpublished report, apparently produced by the Renewable Energy Association, which is the trade association for the wind industry, was referred to in several newspapers last week. It apparently declared that in the face of increasingly organised opposition throughout the country by what amounted now to more than 230 local campaign groups, planning approvals for onshore wind farms had fallen to an all-time low, with only one in three applications getting the go-ahead from councils.
I live in a beautiful part of the country in the north-west, the Lune Valley, in a corridor between areas of outstanding natural beauty and two national parks, an area celebrated by Ruskin and Turner, which has been targeted by wind farm developers. In the past year or so, four applications have been turned down, one of them at a public inquiry, yet still the developers keep coming back. Most recently, an application was made for 20 monstrous turbines on high ground six kilometres inside the area of outstanding natural beauty of the Trough of Bowland. It was emphatically—indeed unanimously—turned down by the planning committee of Lancaster City Council, despite there being two members of the Green Party on it, following a strong recommendation to do so by their planning officer and strong pleas to do so by various statutory consultees, including Natural England.
However, the developers, who have no experience in the business but deep pockets, have appealed. Have they calculated that the local authority, at a time of cuts in local authority grants, will not have the stomach for an expensive full-blown public inquiry and may offer them a compromise? Most probably.
It is a sad sight to see Mammon subverting democracy—in this case, local democracy—and the Government cheering on the sidelines. As yesterday's White Paper on local growth reveals, the Government are proposing to bribe local authorities to grant more approvals by allowing them to keep the business rates so generated. As the campaign groups are for the most part not motivated by money, unlike the developers, they will certainly not disappear, so the effect will simply be to sow even more discord than there is already in local communities.
It will be taxpayers' money thrown with the deliberate purpose of overwhelming those who are trying to protect not simply the value of their homes but our finest landscapes, famous throughout the world, a magnet for tourists, one of our precious national assets. What is that great sacrifice for—of the living standards of ordinary families, of the competitive health of our industries, of our future prosperity, of our scenic fame? It is supposedly in the cause of reducing our carbon emissions, but once you have taken account of all the emissions produced in the manufacture, installation and maintenance of the turbines, and then of the same with regard to the fossil-fuelled power stations, which are being inefficiently ramped up and down in response to the fitful generation of wind power, it is highly unlikely that we will get any carbon emission savings at all.
The wind industry is a subsidy-driven farce, a distraction from the serious pursuit of energy security and a complete negation of what the Government insist is another of their priorities—the promotion of economic growth. The subsidies will cost far more jobs in the rest of the economy by raising the cost of energy than they will ever produce in the wind power industry itself. It is deeply depressing to see the Government still feeling obliged to keep in existence this green albatross.