Immigration Bill
Debate between Mark Reckless and Barry Gardiner(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
I am proud to speak in today’s debate. The speeches of my hon. Friends the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) were quite magnificent. They dealt with this issue from their own experience, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, who always speaks so eloquently on these matters. I would even say—those who know me will know how much it costs me to do so—that the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) also made a very good speech.
The quality of the speeches comes from the nature of Members’ constituencies. It was instructive that the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) should say that when the Bill was published he received correspondence from his constituents who, of course, are the landlords, while the constituents who wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East and to me are the tenants. Each of us in this place is properly reflecting the views of our constituents, but, on behalf of those against whom the Bill will be so penal, I hope that hon. Members who do not share the same constituency issues and problems might take note of some of the speeches that have been given already.
I want to focus on the heart of the Bill, which is that the Home Office argues that the immigration appeals framework is flawed. To whom will it give the work? An internal Home Office review estimated that approximately 60% of the volume of allowed appeals are due to casework errors. The Home Office believes that the appeals framework is flawed, but part of the problem with that framework is the poor quality of its initial decisions, which then clog up the appeals process. How can the Home Office believe that an administrative review process will properly go to the heart of the problem? It will not.
As the Bill stands, refused applicants will be required to apply for administrative review within 10 days of receiving the decision. All of us who have extensive correspondence with the Home Office know that most of the decisions come back to lawyers. So lawyers will be required to make that administrative review application within 10 days, but the Home Office must know full well that that simply will not happen. It is not happening at the moment. Many of our constituents do not receive notification from their lawyers until several weeks after even a positive response has been received from the Home Office. The very idea that such a review could be made within 10 days is quite simply incredible. Those officials who have told, written to and persuaded Ministers that this can be done know only too well that that is false.
Under clause 11, where there is right of appeal to the first tier tribunal, refusal decisions made on erroneous grounds or without reference to highly relevant information simply cannot be challenged. The option to raise challenges to unlawful decision making before the High Court in judicial review proceedings will remain, but that means that the time of the High Court judges will be used in pointing out basic errors in Home Office decision making. The Home Office states that the immigration appeals framework is overtly complex, slow and expensive, but reducing the number of appeals will cause the number of applications for judicial review to soar. That will be more expensive, slower and less effective, but it will be the only lawful option left for many cases. The High Court is likely to become the first port of call for those opposing deportation decisions. Again, immigration officials in the Home Office know that. They know that they are taking a bottleneck from one part of the system and putting it in another part where it will be more costly to the public purse.
In the light of the proposed reforms to judicial review funding and challenges to legal aid, including the proposed adoption of a residence test, judicial review will not be practically accessible for a number of cases, leaving individuals without any form of redress and the Home Office with no imperative to improve its processes.
Energy Bill
Debate between Mark Reckless and Barry Gardiner
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
I am pleased to join the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) in supporting amendment 11 and voting for it later today.
The Secretary of State is in a bind. His party believes in a 2030 decarbonisation target—it is Lib Dem party policy, after all. His party put the issue in its manifesto. Many of his MPs went further and actually signed a separate pledge in support of a decarbonisation target. Have they not learned the Lady Bracknell rule of politics: to break one pledge may be regarded as a misfortune; to break two looks like contempt for the electorate? The Secretary of State is, however, a decent fellow and he has told me from that Dispatch Box that he favours a 2030 decarbonisation target and would be happy to implement one were it not for the fact that he struck an agreement with the Chancellor. I understand that he refers to this agreement as “the grand bargain”. Hardly: it is more of a Faustian pact.
The Secretary of State was right to negotiate £7.6 billion under the levy control framework to support renewables up until 2020—but a bargain this was not. Old coal will be allowed to provide base load beyond 2023; gas will be incentivised to provide base load right the way up until 2045. All pretence of meeting our carbon budgets and emissions targets will be abandoned, and the jobs and growth that leadership in low-carbon industries would generate will be lost. The combined value to the UK economy of all this is worth many times more than the paltry £7.6 billion that the Secretary of State has negotiated up to 2020. A grand bargain? Not since Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage has a worse deal been struck.
Just 10 days ago, the UK’s independent Committee on Climate Change produced its report on the electricity market reform. The report compared and analysed the relative benefits of investing in a portfolio of low-carbon technologies through the 2020s rather than investing in gas-fired generation. The report finds that investment in low carbon would save consumers between £25 billion and £45 billion. If, however, one uses the higher-end estimates of gas and carbon prices, the Climate Change Committee’s estimate then rises to £100 billion.
Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman tell us what the figure would be if we were to use the lower end of the estimates for gas prices instead?
Barry Gardiner
Of course. The hon. Gentleman must be forgiven for not having a memory retention of more than 10 seconds. I did, in fact, say that the lower-end figures were £25 billion to £45 billion, and that the higher end of the spectrum led to the estimate of £100 billion. There we have it. If we compare the £7.6 billion that the Secretary of State has negotiated with the lower-end range of £25 billion to £45 billion, we see what the Climate Change Committee has said the gas strategy might cost us in comparison with a low-carbon investment strategy.
Critically, the Climate Change Committee says:
“Only if the world abandons attempts to limit risks of dangerous climate change would a strategy of investment in gas-fired generation through the 2020s offer significant savings.”
Mark Reckless
Yes, there is an element of that. Moreover, we will be unable to do anything about it, because a future Parliament will be stuck with the contracts.
I fear that the sum might be larger than the £9.8 billion. Policy Exchange has released a well-considered analysis that adds up the total additions to gas and electricity bills within the levy control framework to £16.3 billion. Even that does not take into account two significant factors: first, the carbon tax floor, which is a tax and not in the levy control framework, which applies to spending; and secondly, the cost of banning coal production—coal production will be banned by shutting down plants through the EU directive, and through the domestic and unilateral legislation to ban the construction of new coal-fired plants. We could be looking at amounts equivalent to 4p, 5p or 6p on income tax.
Almost all hon. Members seem to be prepared to drive that measure through, but almost all of my constituents that I speak to do not want to pay those amounts on their electricity bills. We are forcing the measure through. Obviously, lobbyists and the industry understand this complex area, but it is important that Members get to grips with the Bill and the extent to which CFDs will drive higher prices. The more I understand the Bill from the point of view of my constituents, the less keen I am on it.
The amendment confuses two issues, the first of which is the Climate Change Act 2008 commitment to an 80% reduction in carbon gases by 2050. The commitment applies to the whole economy, but the amendment seeks an electricity decarbonisation target. The Minister persuasively drew attention to that inconsistency. If we are looking to hit the 80% reduction target in 2050—the target strikes me as an enormously ambitious and costly one, and I doubt it will be met—we need to decarbonise large sections of the economy, and not just the electricity sector. As part of that, we must persuade significant sections of the heating and transport sectors to convert from current fossil fuels to electricity. However, the amendment would accelerate the decarbonisation of electricity still more, which will shove up the cost of electricity so much that it will be hugely unattractive for those sectors to switch to electricity from their current fossil fuels. Therefore, even on its own terms, the electricity decarbonisation target risks setting back its avowed goal of helping towards the purported 2050 target for the decarbonisation of the economy as a whole.
None the less, one might say in the amendment’s favour that it potentially exposes the contradictions in current policy. We have heard a lot of the “grand bargain”. The hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) was honest in setting out how much the Lib Dems have gained from it and how little they have given up in consequence. I do not, on balance, support the amendment, but I am not sure why the pass has been sold on so many other issues to avoid having to make a decision in 2014—we are quite happy to kick it down the road and make it in 2016.
The inconsistencies in the proposals are significant. The hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner)—I am pleased he is still in his seat—suggested that it would be cheaper to go down the route of renewable electricity rather than electricity largely from gas. He cited a Committee on Climate Change report, but did not mention the basis of its calculation. The report states:
“Beyond 2030, bills would fall in a low-carbon system as new low-carbon capacity is commissioned at lower cost than the older capacity (assuming learning in deployment leads to cost reductions). In contrast, for a system with a major share of generation from unabated gas, bills would continue to increase as carbon prices continue to rise.”
The basis of his argument is predicated on the assumption that the massive carbon tax will rise—that is within the system, but also endogenous to his own model.
Barry Gardiner
Had the hon. Gentleman paid attention, he would have noticed that I mentioned the basis on which the Committee on Climate Change made its assessment. The Committee concluded that we could assume that the price of carbon will not continue to rise only if the rest of the world gives up its aspiration to avoid dangerous climate change. Only in that scenario could it make economic sense for the Government to pursue the strategy he suggests.
Mark Reckless
On both the occasions that I sought to intervene or have an exchange with the hon. Gentleman, he replied that the problem was my failure of understanding rather than his failure of explanation. Might we perhaps together put on the record the key facts behind that assumption?
Barry Gardiner
The hon. Gentleman has made an important point, so I want to respond to it. He will, I trust, have read the Committee on Climate Change report on EMR, in which it states:
“This conclusion”—
the conclusion that he has just rubbished—
“is robust when possible impacts of shale gas on the gas price are accounted for. Shale gas could play a role in the gas mix that helps to balance intermittent power generation, and meet demand for heat, provided appropriate environmental safeguarding regulations are put in place.”
Mark Reckless
Yes, it is robust in that sense, but the reason it is robust is because almost any conceivable change in gas price is completely swamped by the enormous increase in the carbon tax from £16 now—and less than £2 in the ETS—to up to between £200 and £500 per tonne by 2050. Of course the conclusion is robust. If we assume that there will be a massive tax on carbon, it will be cheaper to have lower carbon rather than higher carbon, but so what? CFDs are included in the Bill, but they have virtually nothing to do with this amendment. We keep on hearing that it is about electricity decarbonisation, but it is not. That was only inserted in the Committee stage of the Bill.
The amendment is about hitting the renewable energy directive for 15% of all energy production in this country—not just the electricity sector, which makes up approximately a third—to be from renewables by 2020. However, that will set back decarbonisation across the whole country, because it is a very expensive way to decarbonise. All the savings we can make through energy efficiency, better insulation of people’s homes, or, I hope the Minister will not mind me saying, through different lighting that saves money across the network, are no good or will only work on the denominator, because we are forced to hit, by 2020, the 15% renewables target—33% of electricity—set by the EU Commission. That will be grotesquely expensive and will lead not to innovation in low-carbon technologies, but to the rolling out of fairly mid-tech current generation onshore and offshore wind at twice the price. That will absorb a huge proportion of the £9.8 billion and lead to very little advance in technology compared with what we could do with proper R and D focused activity. That will happen not because of decarbonisation, but because the EU directive that states that this must be done through renewables.
Domestically, we are making the situation even worse by inserting further restraints, such as a 12.5% cap on biomass. One way to get closer to hitting the EU target is to use dual firing, where half coal, half wood pellets emit approximately the same amount of carbon as gas, earning a half-renewable credit on the real constraint, the 2020 EU target. We are not allowing that, however. We could pay other countries—Germany, Spain and perhaps Poland—to do a lot of those things far cheaper than we could do them ourselves. We have a new Government in Iceland, and £2 billion is the estimate of the capital cost of an interconnector to Iceland for its renewable electricity. These measures are not being considered. Even if the objective is to reduce carbon, that can be done so much cheaper than the proposals that will be forced through by the Bill, which will be millstone around our constituents’ necks for decades to come.
Energy Bill
Debate between Mark Reckless and Barry Gardiner
Mark Reckless
I am sorry to hear the hon. Gentleman not focusing on his constituents’ heritage. Climate reduction and the carbon issue should relate to cost. The coal price has collapsed globally largely because of the success of shale gas in the US and its export of coal, and that means that the cost of the proposals is now far larger than it was. Global temperatures rose until 1998 or 2000. Since then, projections of an exponential increase in temperature have not been borne out by recent data. We have cut our emissions by 24% since 1990, which I think is larger than any other country. What we are left with is a complete mess of policy in the Bill, with various subsidies interacting and greatly increasing bills for our consumers, and I am not sure what the effect will be on reducing carbon emissions compared with, say, the US, which has had a big decrease.
We should look at the cost of coal and the extent to which carbon may be reduced by different things. In this country, we have a price of £16 per tonne on carbon. Under the EU emissions trading scheme, it is less than £2. We are making a great unilateral cross that we must bear when other countries in Europe, for example Germany, are constructing more unabated coal. We will have to buy electricity through the interconnectors, which will hurt our balance of payments and increase the cost to our constituents while we shut down our cheap coal plants. At the same time, shale gas has not come on stream due to the moratorium, as well as ownership and other regulatory restrictions. We will end up with some of the most expensive energy in the world and it is not clear what the impact will be on reducing carbon output.
At the same time as we are closing existing power plants because of the EU, we are banning unilaterally the construction of new plants. The cost of how much we are putting up electricity prices for our constituents should be added to the £9.8 billion figure. We would be much better off if we had a proper market in electricity production, rather than a market rigged against consumers. The Minister, through clauses 38 to 40, wants to introduce a huge network of conflicting subsidies that will let the Government, ex-post, change the conditions of someone’s electricity supply contract. All that will do is increase the price of investment to guard against that risk—yet another thing moving us away from the free market in electricity that might drive down prices for consumers who, certainly in my constituency, are finding the costs very difficult to bear. The previous Government’s policies were bad enough, but the Bill will lead to long-term contracts that may be impossible to get out off, and which will force consumers to pay higher prices for energy for years into the future.
Barry Gardiner
I rise to speak to amendments 148 and 150 in my name, and to amendment 179 in the names of my right hon. and hon. Friends.
Under the large combustion plant directive, 8 GW of old coal has to close by 2015. Of that, 6 GW has already gone, with the remaining 2 GW being considered for conversion to biomass. That leaves 20 GW of old coal set to stay on the system. Of that, approximately 15 GW is being considered for all options, which means that it could be opted into the integrated emissions directive, investing in air filters for NOx and SOx in order to comply. This plant would then not have to close in 2023, and would naturally seek to maximise its return on that capital cost by continuing to provide base load generation capacity unconstrained by the EPS.
Amendment 148 would ensure that where substantial pollution abatement equipment properly dealing with the oxides of sulphur, nitrogen, heavy metals or particles is fitted to the generating station in such a way that makes it compliant with the EU IED while still emitting above 450 grams per kWh, the plant would then be brought under the EPS framework. Without the amendment, many plants will succeed in circumventing the EPS, which would undermine the EMR, the UK’s carbon budgets, the incentive to invest in CCS and the coalition agreement, which committed the Department of Energy and Climate Change to introducing an EPS as a backstop to unabated coal. Remember, these old coal plants have already recouped their capital costs. Allowing them to avoid the EPS cannot therefore be justified, and I dispute what the Minister said about the importance of not accepting the amendment in order to allow new coal to recoup its costs.