Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Tankerness Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for having this session, which is very helpful. I agree that it should be in Grand Committee because as the session unfolds there might be quite a lot of detail and I suspect that it may be easier to tease out some of that detail in this venue.

In these amendments, the Government have addressed a number of the issues that were raised by the industry about the grace period with regard to planning, lack of investor confidence leading to some projects being frozen, the grid and radar and aviation. In speaking to the amendments in my name and those of my noble friends, I shall probe some of them because although when these amendments were announced last Thursday the industry felt that a number of concerns had been addressed, as days have passed more and more anomalies seem to be coming to light. I wish to identify some of these anomalies and get the Government’s response to them. The purpose of the amendments we have tabled is to allow an opportunity to tease out some of these anomalies. I am not saying they are all covered but I hope the Minister will be able to respond. I do not think we have covered everything comprehensively with our amendments, but there will be an opportunity to come back on Report in the light of what the Minister says.

As the Minister rightly indicated, the three conditions required for a project to fulfil approved development conditions are planning permission, grid connection agreement and land rights. Proposed new Section 32LJ(4) relates to the date on which planning permission was granted. The date chosen is the date when the Secretary of State made her announcement of the early closure of the renewables obligation for onshore wind projects. To some extent, it is an arbitrary date. No doubt the Downing Street grid said it would be done on that date and not the day before, the day after or the week after. So there is a degree of arbitrariness in all this and, in many cases, that has led to considerable unfairness.

Our first amendment probes whether there is any need for this planning permission rule, given that grid connection agreements and land agreements would already be in place. If the Government insist on having a cut-off date, there is a possibility that that date should be later. We have suggested that it should be the date of the publication of the Government’s grace period amendments or that all projects that were already in the planning system should be considered for eligibility. Those in the industry will tell you that submitting a planning application is not something you do on a whim when you wake up one morning. Considerable work goes into the application before then and considerable money has been invested in making it in the first place. In many cases, that investment will be for naught if what is proposed is so rigid.