Meg Munn
Main Page: Meg Munn (Labour (Co-op) - Sheffield, Heeley)Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Gregory Barker
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to look to the interests of small businesses, many of which were feeling slightly excluded, because of the speed with which larger firms were gobbling up the budget. It is because we want to preserve the budget over the longer term that it will be more sustainable for smaller businesses. However, I would recommend such businesses to look not just at solar PV, but at integrating a range of technologies into their offer—in particular, energy efficiency—and at how they might offer services for the green deal.
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)
Feed-in tariffs should be about more than just solar. What is the Minister doing to help small businesses that are working on innovation and other technologies to compete and to provide a wide range of technologies for people to chose from, particularly when we get into the green deal?
Gregory Barker
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The danger was that solar, which was already taking more than 90% of the feed-in tariff budget, would take the whole lot. There are a lot of other micro-technologies out there that I want to see supported, such as micro-hydro, micro-combined heat and power, small-scale wind and small-scale biomass technologies. There are lots of different technologies that we need to come into the system and that also need fair funding. There are, of course, opportunities in the comprehensive reviews to look at the support for other tariffs, and we may even consider raising them where they act as an insufficient incentive to bring on those other technologies.