Energy Bill

Debate between Martin Vickers and Mark Reckless

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

Twenty years ago this country led the world in creating a competitive electricity market. This Bill promises electricity market reform, but the reality is that the contracts for difference, the capacity payments and the emissions performance standard will put an end to that market in any recognisable form. Instead, we will have a market that is fixed by civil servants.

When we hear “contracts for difference”, what that means is that instead of the price being set by the market, prices will be set by civil servants for decades in advance, with different prices for different technologies and, potentially, different prices for different consumers. They will not even depend on how much CO₂ a particular technology emits; rather, they will depend on what civil servants happen to agree in their commercial negotiations with providers, who I fear will have them over a barrel. Our constituents will be ripped off, with tens of billions of pounds of their money being transferred to producers who manage to negotiate the best deal with civil servants, who I am afraid are not up to the job of running electricity in the way that a market could in the interests of our constituents.

We should consider the price that our constituents will pay. We hear Opposition spokesmen say airily, “It is only £100 a year: it is remarkably good value.” However, the DECC levy-funded spending is to rise from £2.1 billion last year to £9.8 billion in 2020, which is almost a fivefold increase. The Department’s spending is rising even faster than our contribution to the European Union budget. Moreover, our constituents will pay a great deal more than £100 a year. If we divide that £9.8 billion by the 27 million households in the country, the result is £360 per household.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making some interesting points. Will he expand on the implications of that £360 figure? Is it connected with EU regulation?

[Mark Reckless]

A lot of it is connected with EU regulation, but many of the costs of EU regulation are outside and in addition to it. It does not include the EU’s emissions trading scheme. It does not include our own carbon tax, which will rise from £16 to £70 a tonne. It does not include what is happening with the national grid: just two days ago it was announced that that would add a further £15 to each household’s bill, and £8.50 of it will kick in next year—on top of the £53 that the national grid is already adding to bills.

The depreciated investment shown on National Grid’s balance sheet is only £20 billion, yet over the next eight years £38 billion more will have been invested. I fear that much of the investment that has taken place is merely to link wind turbines and other renewables from remote parts of the country with major population centres in order to make the grid less unstable than it would otherwise be. Because of what we are doing with these technologies, all of which are subsidised and costing our constituents large amounts of money, my constituents will have to choose between heating their homes and buying Christmas presents. I fear we have got ourselves into a Westminster bubble.

The only thing that I can say for the Bill is that it is not quite as bad as it would have been if the other lot were in charge. Debating how many hundreds of pounds we should be adding to electricity bills when 6 million, 7 million or 9 million households are in fuel poverty, with more than 10% of their spending going on electricity, is simply wrong. Sooner or later the electorate will prick that Westminster bubble, and many of us will be faced with the reality that very few of our constituents think it acceptable for politicians to load hundreds of pounds on to their electricity bills for the purpose of what is essentially a political conceit.

We hear it said that because so many other power stations are shutting down, we have to replace all the coal. No, we do not have to replace all the coal. The reason we are replacing the coal is the EU’s large combustion plant directive. It is shutting Kingsnorth power station in my constituency, with the result that 300 workers are losing their jobs, and we are losing £7 million in business rates because of the rateable value of the station. It could perfectly well go on producing electricity. It emits sulphur dioxide, which if anything is a cooling rather than a warming agent. However, it cannot be replaced with a more efficient coal-fired station that emits much less CO₂ because of the emission performance standard that we are introducing, which basically bans any new coal-fired power even if it is much cleaner and emits much less CO₂ than what it would replace.