Tim Farron
Main Page: Tim Farron (Liberal Democrat - Westmorland and Lonsdale)Department Debates - View all Tim Farron's debates with the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero
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Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
When this country is at its best, we rise together to face challenges and threats. We roll up our sleeves and deploy ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit to meet those threats and challenges head on. That is what we need now: a collective patriotic endeavour to tackle climate change, cut bills and ensure that our economy is based on cleaner and cheaper British energy sources that will not run out and that are immune from the whims of foreign dictators—what is not to like? Sadly, there are colleagues in this House who do not like that, who are against that patriotic endeavour to secure the future for our children and grandchildren. It is not for me to speculate on their motives, but for the security of our country and the good of our future, we certainly need to ensure that those people never get anywhere near power.
Let’s start with the one part of this motion that we can all agree on: energy bills are far too high. The typical family has to pay £60 a month more than it did five years ago. British businesses still face some of the highest electricity prices in the OECD. That is bad for the cost of living, bad for business and bad for economic growth, so we must bring energy bills down. The simple question is, how?
Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)
The hon. Member is making a spirited speech that gets to the heart of what we are all trying to address. There are fiscal levers that we can pull to ensure that we bring down bills. Does he share my sense of disbelief about the irony in the Conservatives’ earlier motion suggesting that there should be no further tax rises of any kind while they are simultaneously willing to propose a set of multibillion-pound measures to scrap all those levies?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Back-Bench speeches are already limited to four minutes. If interventions are long, the limit will drop further. Please be mindful of that.
Tim Farron
I will limit the number of interventions that I take, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The Conservative party had a record of being, or at least presented itself as, the party of sound money. This appears to be a decision to move away from that and instead to chase after our permanently absent colleagues.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The cost of energy bills for the average household will be £1,775 this year. Charities indicate that energy companies are owed £4.4 billion by UK households. Does the hon. Gentleman fear, as I do, that the vulnerable and needy will be unable to heat their houses this winter because of the money that they owe? They cannot take on any more debt.
Tim Farron
Fuel poverty is a reality and a stain on our country. The hon. Gentleman is right to raise it on behalf of his community.
Let us get to the heart of this debate. We must bring energy bills down, and the question is how. I am afraid that the plan put forward by the Conservatives is nothing more than a mirage. They say that we should cut bills by removing the renewable obligation levy—that is great. As always, we are ahead of them and have set out our plan to do just that, but the key difference is that our plan is properly funded through a windfall tax on the extra payments that the big banks are getting as a result of quantitative easing. The plan in this motion is funded by the Conservative hand wave—a classic these days—of saying, “We’ll just cut spending.” What happened to the Conservative party being the party of sound money?
Dr Evans
In the previous debate, we talked about tax, and the funding that the hon. Gentleman mentions was also being used to deal with the tax burden on the high street. Will he explain the Liberal Democrat policy? How would they levy these taxes on social media giants and big banks, and where would that money go? It seems as if they are spending it twice in one afternoon.
Tim Farron
That is not the case. I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for mentioning two of the sources of the additional income that we would raise. It is all very well just to blandly say, “We will get the money from somewhere,” but not to say where. The Liberal Democrats have said where we will find the money. His party has done nothing of the sort. The people who support sound money and wise economics are leaving his party in droves, and many of them are coming to the Liberal Democrats.
Tim Farron
I will not because we need to let other people speak later.
Given the Conservatives’ record in government and the complete lack of detail about which spending they would cut, it is very rich that they are asking us for details—we have given some. Once upon a time, the Conservatives did not believe in the magic money tree, but today their plans seem to rest entirely on its fictional bounty. The only other part of their plan that would supposedly bring down bills is the scrapping of the current auction of new renewable projects altogether.
Let us remember what that would actually mean. It would cut between £11 billion and £15 billion of private investment in cheap, clean power.
Tim Farron
The right hon. Lady says that it is not cheap. Over the lifetime of the projects, yes, it is cheap. Does the Conservative party not understand that the up-front costs are one thing, but the input costs over time—over 20 years—are as cheap as chips? This is basic economics, and I struggle to comprehend how a party that was in government for so many years has lost touch with reality so very quickly.
Tim Farron
I will not.
That would be a disaster for our economy, our communities and our young people. Far from bringing down energy bills, it would make us even more reliant on imported fossil fuels, which are expensive. Energy bills skyrocketed in the past few years because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That shows what a truly terrible idea this is. What happened to the Conservative party being the party of national security? That idea is long gone, too, alongside its commitment to sound money. Putin would profit, while British families and pensioners struggle.
The whole argument being put forward by the Conservative party, and by our habitually absent colleagues on the fourth row back, is that bills are too high because we are investing too much in renewable power. They say that we should stop investing, scrap our climate commitments, and bills will magically come down, but it is just not true. It is not the price of renewables that is pushing up bills; generating electricity from solar or wind is now significantly cheaper than gas, even when we factor in extra costs for back-up power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. However, people are not seeing the benefit of cheap renewable power, because wholesale electricity prices are still tied to the price of gas, even though half of all our electricity now comes from renewables, compared with just 30% from gas. That is because the wholesale price is set by the most expensive fuel in the mix, which in the UK is almost always gas. That is not the case in some other countries in Europe such as Spain and France.
Graham Stuart
As this is supposed to be a debate, will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Graham Stuart
One of the hon. Gentleman’s fantastical suggestions is that he has a way of breaking the link between gas and electricity prices. I do not know which model he wants to follow—that of China, or perhaps a Korean model—but will he please explain how exactly we do that? When I was the Energy Minister, I looked to see whether that could be done, and we could not find a way of making it work. I am really interested to see the Liberal Democrats’ detailed work, and for them to explain it to the House.
Tim Farron
That the right hon. Gentleman was the Energy Minister makes me question the selection standards of the previous Prime Minister. How far do we need to look? The channel is not that wide. Look at France and Spain. France has nuclear, and Spain has renewable energy—[Interruption.] If people stop chuntering, I will explain. In Spain and France there is no reliance on gas, partly because of nuclear in France, and in Spain it is down not to nuclear but entirely to renewables. If the right hon. Gentleman had looked not very far away at the other side of the Bay of Biscay down in Spain, he would see that it is entirely possible. How do we decouple ourselves from reliance on gas? It is blindingly obvious: do not make it so that we have to rely on gas, and invest in renewables—it is so obvious that it is almost beyond belief that people who held that brief not long ago do not get it. Investing in cheap renewables, and making sure that people see the benefit in their bills—that is the answer.
The Conservative’s plan would rip up our crucial national commitment on climate change. I will not repeat quotations from previous Prime Ministers such as Baroness May of Maidenhead and Boris Johnson—Boris Johnson, now a moderate and a progressive by comparison, which is utterly stunning. It is distressing that the Conservative party has left behind traditional voters who do care about the environment and our economy.
Communities such as mine bear the brunt of the impact of climate change, as well as farmers whose businesses are blighted by ever-lengthening droughts and ever more severe floods. Communities such as Kendal, Burneside, Staveley, Appleby, and Grasmere are experiencing appalling flood damage. In just three weeks, we will note the 10th anniversary of Storm Desmond, which did hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of damage to our communities, and devastated lives, homes and communities. An apparently once-in-200-years event happened only a few years after two once-in-100-years events. It is obvious that things are changing; do not dare to tell Cumbrians that climate change is not a clear and present danger.
Fuel poverty is worse in our area too, and 27% of our housing stock was built before 1900. Those homes have solid walls, and are hard to insulate and expensive to heat. North Westmorland has the least energy-efficient housing in the whole of England, with 17% of homes classed as either F or G, but we are well placed to provide the solutions. Our coastal waters hold huge amounts of latent energy, yet like the rest of the UK they are largely untapped for tidal power. Britain has the second highest tidal range on the planet after Canada, and we are making use of nearly none of it—what an absolute waste.
Tim Farron
I will not.
Just think about all the jobs that could be created in Cumbria if we did that, all the cheap energy that we could generate and all the bills that we could slash. We have the big scale answers in our community, as well as the small scale ones. The Coniston hydro scheme has been hugely successful, but its future could be secured and the energy bills of the local community drastically reduced if only the Government would deliver the P441 code modification to make local energy markets a reality for us in the lakes, and across the United Kingdom, in every community. Local energy markets would open the floodgates—pun intended—for local schemes in every community, in every constituency represented in this House and beyond, so that households and businesses benefit from cheaper, cleaner energy created by people they know.
What would a real plan to cut energy bills, while continuing the UK’s leadership on climate change, look like? We have set it out in our amendment on the Order Paper: do not slash investment in cheap, clean renewables, but increase it, as we Liberal Democrats did when we were in government. We quadrupled the amount of renewable power generated between 2010 and 2015. We also say: make homes warmer and cheaper to heat with an emergency upgrade programme; and work with the European Union to trade energy more efficiently, cutting costs and reducing reliance on gas. In addition, we must end those expensive, old renewable obligation contracts from 20 years ago that impose levies on people’s bills and stop them seeing the benefits of cheap renewables, and move them on to cheaper contracts for difference, pioneered by the Liberal Democrats, to bring down prices and drive investment at the same time. Now, that is a real plan that treats the British people with respect, by presenting actual solutions, rather than vacuous soundbites.
In closing, the crushing poverty that millions endure as a result of eye-watering energy bills is real, and it is an outrage. The threat to our world and to our children’s future from climate change is real, and it is an outrage. Loving our neighbour means having a real and practical plan to tackle both. The motion does not provide that, but I am determined that we will.