Energy Bill [Lords]

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow such interesting and thoughtful speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) and for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), who talked about the poverty of ambition in the Bill. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden), who talked about the regressive nature of fuel subsidies. One thing that he did not talk about was the regressive nature of fuel poverty, which is something that I will talk about in my speech.

I will begin with the big picture. A couple of months ago, scientists declared that we are now living in the Anthropocene age. That is something that we will all have to learn to spell and pronounce properly. I hope that I have spelled and pronounced it properly, although I am sure that Hansard will step in if it is badly spelled. It basically means that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife has created a new geological epoch. The challenge for our age is how we eradicate fuel poverty and lower carbon emissions to keep global warming well below the 2° increase agreed at Paris, while ensuring that we reach the sustainable development goals that were agreed in New York a couple of months earlier. We must protect our planet and pass it on in a good condition to our children and grandchildren.

We take our warm homes and electricity supply for granted. I remember—as, I am sure, do other right hon. and hon. Members of a certain age—scrapping the ice off the inside of my bedroom window as a child. That was a common feature in my home in Coventry, and the discovery of North sea oil and gas transformed this country’s energy infrastructure and meant that families such as mine were able to have heated bedrooms instead of just a gas-bar heater. That has changed people’s lives immeasurably for the better, so today I will talk about warm homes, the importance of low bills, and green energy—I have perhaps a different trilemma to some Conservative Members.

Energy must be affordable, and when we were in government we understood that. We invested £20 billion in the decent home standard, making people’s homes warm and weatherproof. We installed 1 million new central heating systems, rewired 740,000 homes, and helped a further 2 million homes through the Warm Front scheme. That stands in sharp contrast to the 16,000 homes that have been retrofitted since 2013 under this Government’s Green Deal. Such things have a very real impact on people’s lives—there were more than 40,000 excess winter deaths among old people last year.

Five years ago in Wakefield, I discovered that Derwent Road and Windermere Road—both built from prefab homes—were not connected to the national grid and there was no possibility of a gas connection. I conducted a survey in 2009 with my colleague, Councillor Margaret Isherwood, and we discovered that the average fuel bill there was £2,000 pounds a year. We fought for those homes to be connected to the national grid, and we got Government help to warm up that cold spot, together with the local housing association, Wakefield District Housing, and Community Energy Solutions. Those were some of the 1,000 homes in Flanshaw, in a western area of the city, that were connected to the grid. One resident from those roads came to a recent surgery. and described her joy and how much she enjoyed seeing all the little gas boilers and their condensing pipes puffing out steam during the recent cold snap. We take such things for granted, but if someone has been paying £2,000 to heat what is essentially a metal home, that change makes a real difference. Each home that was insulated and had a new central heating system saved 2.6 tonnes of carbon every year. Warm, well-insulated homes make an impact in the virtuous circle of reducing our carbon emissions.

Sadly, Wakefield still has nearly 4,000 households in fuel poverty, and nationally bills have risen from an average of £500 a year in 2010, to £606 in 2015. The Government’s advice for people to switch tariff is simply not enough. Most people have to go online to switch, but the people that we are talking about do not have the landline, computers or computer skills to switch. I know that colleagues across the House have held switch sessions so that people can come in and switch tariff, but often the lowest fuel bills are internet-only and paperless, and people simply do not trust them. I for one will never switch to an internet-only bill—hashtag “just saying”—or banking, or anything like that.

Briefly, I want to mention the Government’s record, and particularly solar subsidies that have now been reduced by 87%. Plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank were criticised by the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I sit, for risking the bank’s unique green identity. The Government have cancelled proposals for carbon capture and storage technology, which could have been a huge new industry in Scotland and Yorkshire. People in Yorkshire were ready to bring in subsidy from the EU and to use the subsidy that the Government offered. That cancellation will have a massive impact on the creation of new jobs in Yorkshire and Scotland, and we must quickly come up with a new CCS strategy to ensure that we do not miss out on opportunities from that new technology.

The Bill also scraps support for onshore wind—one of the cheapest low-carbon energy options—and that will have a big impact on business confidence and inward investment. Figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance published today forecast that over the next five years investment in renewable energy could “fall off a cliff”. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) spoke about the big investment, but the world in 2016 is a more uncertain place for such investment. Bloomberg predicts that the country will lose at least 1 GW of renewable energy generation because of the early closure of the renewables obligation, which is not good news. As with solar feed-in tariffs, the Government are changing energy policy with very little notice, and that damages investor confidence and puts at risk jobs and our energy security.

Hundreds of those jobs, particularly in the solar industry, are in Wakefield. Kingspan Renewables has its main manufacturing plant in my constituency and employs 140 people. Crompton Solar also wrote to me five years ago with the first proposed changes to the feed-in tariffs. It is an electrical engineering company that manufactures excellent inverters that are used in solar installations, and it is based in the city. I want those high-skilled jobs at Crompton and Kingspan in Wakefield to be safeguarded and secured for the future.

The Government’s programme on smart meters is behind schedule and behind time. They have tasked energy suppliers with installing those smart meters by 2020, but will the Minister consider using that installation as a way of educating householders about the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning? More than 200 people a year go to hospital with suspected carbon monoxide poisoning, and around 40 of those people die. We have a once-in-a-generation chance of going into people’s homes. People should wear the carbon monoxide monitors so that staff are not at risk, but they should have that opportunity to educate people about any difficulties with their boilers. At a conference that I hosted on carbon monoxide poisoning in November, that was one concrete area that we wanted the Minister to consider.

In conclusion, our energy policy should focus on the trilemma of warm homes, low bills, and green energy. The Government’s track record in all those areas has been chequered, and they need to stop changing the goalposts on green energy. All changes reduce and affect our ability to meet our climate change targets. They affect families, businesses and growth, and we must live up to our past record as a leading player, not just on the big picture of climate change, but on green energy investment and tackling fuel poverty.