Action on Climate Change and Decarbonisation

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Commons Chamber

(3) a further sum, not exceeding £31,481,483,000, be granted to Her Majesty to be issued by the Treasury out of the Consolidated Fund and applied for expenditure on the use of resources authorised by Parliament.—(Lee Rowley.)

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I anticipate that the wind-ups will come at about half-past 6, with eight minutes for the SNP, 10 minutes each for the other two Front Benchers and two minutes for Mr Dunne to sum up. If people keep their speeches to roughly 10 minutes, we should get everybody in equally.

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[Richard Fuller]

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s example of innovation, which could assist.

I wish to focus now on the particular issue of decarbonising home heating. We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) in his opening speech that that is essentially a £20,000 cost for a household when it is combined with insulation. He quite rightly made the point that that is beyond almost every household. I think the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), the Chair of the Select Committee, also noted that it is beyond the expectation of the ability of households to pay for it.

We also know that the economies of scale when it comes to technologies for decarbonising home heat are challenging, because the technology is already established and therefore the production economies of scale are likely to be less than in other areas, and because a large part of the costs are in the service delivery, which is people. People efficiencies are harder to capture than production efficiencies.

Not only is the up-front cost high for everyone, but it means that, without Government action and direction, we would end up with certain households doing it that might not necessarily be those that make most sense for achieving our goal. I say this as a Conservative who believes in free choice, but if we want to achieve that goal, we have to own up to the fact that relying on individual choices by individual households to achieve the decarbonisation of home heating will mean that the overall cost to society of achieving that goal will be substantially greater than going through a process that has at least a very significant part of a community-based initiative.

Again, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow was right to point to the issue of social housing. I am eager to see us move forward; we have a Bill coming and I think there is an opportunity to look at neighbourhood plans, which are about planning for our local communities. Maybe there is an opportunity there to put forward some of the suggestions for community decarbonisation of home heating. I hope that hon. Members who are interested in that will let me know, because I am thinking of tabling an amendment that would make that part of the way that we ask local communities, through the planning process, to start thinking about how they achieve the decarbonising of home heat on a community basis.

I must also urge the Government to come forward and say how they will harness patient capital to solve the economic equation of decarbonising home heat. The equation is that there is a big up-front cost and then the benefits accrue slowly each year, ideally through lower heating bills and certainly through less exposure to the volatility of carbon-based fuels. What are the Government going to do to structure a programme that can attract patient capital to do that? That is the sort of financial profile that pension funds invest in all the time.

Neighbourhood plans, a community-led approach and attracting patient capital into those community programmes seem to me to be one way in the estimates to try to get an approach to net zero, if I may coin a rather cheap phrase, at net profit to the British economy. Achieving net zero at net profit is a way to get a pragmatic answer to the idealistic but uncosted goals that this Parliament put in train in 2019.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We now come to the winding-up speeches. I call John Mc Nally.

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[Lee Rowley]

The hon. Lady shakes her head, but the alternative is closing down large swathes of industry. If she wants to make that case to the electorate, she can do so and see whether they agree. There would be a lot of people unemployed or without livelihoods, and a lot of industries that would close down. It would not benefit the world as a whole, because those industries would just move elsewhere and offshore. Those are exactly the kinds of unintended consequences that the centre left in this country need to think through, understand and work through before they suggest—as they do, incorrectly, regularly—that they have a viable solution to climate change.

The hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) is rightly keen on delivery, as am I. Having sat on the Public Accounts Committee for 18 months in the previous Parliament, I know that delivery is at the core of what we should all seek to do in this place. Policies are one thing, but making sure they are implemented can be very different. I hope the hon. Gentleman will accept that we are in the relatively early phases of some elements of the net-zero plan, and that he will give us time to develop the propositions, as we have done over the last year. We must ensure a strong delivery focus, just as my colleagues in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy have done, and I am sure that will continue to be the case in the months and years ahead.

I have the greatest respect for the hon. Gentleman. We have worked closely together on other areas, and we share a similar corporate background. He will know from our time in corporate life about the importance in project management of sending signals and ensuring that clarity about where we are going. The combination of those signals, our track record, and the road maps that we have published for carbon capture, utilisation and storage, for hydrogen, for auto, and for other things will provide some comfort that we are making progress. We obviously have a disagreement about the level of state intervention in certain areas, and I am sure we will continue to debate that in forums such as this Chamber.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) makes a number of important points about ensuring that we have a long-term approach. To take aviation as the example again, the challenge is in ensuring that we understand exactly what that will look like and where it will go. However, I accept and acknowledge his point. He also rightly made a point about the importance of dependency, in this instance on fossil fuel producers. He and I have had discussions about not wanting to switch from dependency on fossil fuels to dependency on critical minerals. That is why the Government will introduce a strategy on critical minerals in short order.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for his comments, in particular on onshore wind, which I will certainly pass on to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Energy, Clean Growth and Climate Change. He made an incredibly important point about the importance of having local supply chains where possible. On Thursday, I visited Siemens in Goole, and it was heartening to see that much of the supply chain for the amazing new facility coming to the East Riding is made up of local businesses and local people from across Yorkshire. They are ensuring that we have a fantastic train factory that will allow us to support net zero.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami) was right to highlight the importance of transition within net zero, which I have covered, and of not demonising but working with industry. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) made an incredibly important point about individual agency. He spoke about the importance of taking people with us, and of ensuring that we undertake this massive task of treading very lightly on the Earth by 2050 with the consent of the people we represent. We do that by calmly and methodically setting frameworks and defining approaches.

The hon. Member for Falkirk (John Mc Nally), in summing up for the Scottish National party, talked about mechanisms for demand in the British energy security supply strategy. That should be looked at in concert with other strategies, documents and frameworks that have been brought forward. I encourage him to do that. The Labour spokesperson, the hon. Member for Bristol East, extensively referenced the Climate Change Committee report. As I said, we will respond on that in due course. We welcome all outside organisations’ comments, but it is important that there be recognition in the committee’s document of what the UK has achieved, that it is a world leader, and that it has set the right course. It is important that we provide all of that in the round.

I am grateful for all the contributions to what has been one of our better debates in this place. This is a hugely important issue. We recognise, as did most of the contributions, that this is a long-term issue. In some places, we have made huge progress—there has been a 40% reduction in carbon emissions in the last 30 years—but we have some way to go. That is the entire point of net zero, and of the Government working with business to harness the fantastic ingenuity of capitalism, so that we can make progress. I look forward to more of it being achieved, so that we can ensure that the objective of treading lightly on the Earth by 2050 is achieved.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call Mr Dunne to wind up briefly.