Great British Energy Bill (Third sitting)

Torcuil Crichton Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th October 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Uma Kumaran (Stratford and Bow) (Lab)]

It is really good to see this cross-party support for community energy. I am sure all Members here today can speak to brilliant innovations in their constituencies. I have one in my constituency of Stratford and Bow, Community Energy Newham: its vision, very much like that of the Government, is to provide clean, affordable energy to homes and public buildings across the borough of Newham.

As we heard extensively on Second Reading, GB Energy will be owned by and for the British people, to help to promote energy independence, as well as to maintain Britain’s standing as a global leader. I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouthshire. The Bill has already baked in the fact that community energy will be possible. We heard extensively from our witnesses that if the Bill does not give GB Energy the ability to innovate and advance, or to be flexible, there may be constraints in the years ahead. That is why we do not need the amendment.

Community Energy Newham is looking to provide our local library with a cleaner source of energy. As I said, many Members have exciting projects in their constituencies. That is why it is so important to maintain this cross-party support for the Bill and get it through as quickly as possible, so that not only our constituents but the whole country can benefit from Great British Energy.

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

I rise to reinforce not just the evidence that we heard from the Minister and Juergen Maier about the commitment to community energy, but the evidence we heard from private companies about foreign Governments that are willing to allow communities and municipalities to take a share in community energy.

None of what is in the Bill or what GB Energy proposes will happen without communities being involved. Communities will have to be involved at every stage —in generation, in transmission and in the purchase of the energy—otherwise we will find ourselves fighting communities every step of the way. It is vital that communities are involved. They are not just knocking at the door; they are taking over.

My constituency, Na h-Eileanan an Iar, has the largest number of community-owned windfarms in the UK. They serve as a template for what could happen across the rest of Scotland and Britain if communities are engaged and take on the challenge of producing their own power.

I was delighted with what the Minister said in the evidence session on Tuesday: GB Energy will be there to enable and help communities to get on the grid, get over the planning obstacles and the legal and financial obstacles that are sometimes in their paths. I think we should allow GB Energy to be set up and to get on with its business, and to enable communities to be engaged and involved not just in the production of energy, but in earning and reaping some of the profit that we will see from the wealth of wind.

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[Michael Shanks]

That is a really helpful point. The community energy hubs that already exist are certainly something that we want to build on. The £10 million commitment is welcome. We have committed more than £1 billion to the local power plan over this Parliament, but we are building on what is already there, such as the local hubs. In Scotland, there is the community and renewable energy scheme, where we are already working with the Scottish Government to look at how we can jointly fund the project. It is really important that we work to build on what is already there.

The Government will not be supporting amendments 2 or 9 today. Amendment 2 seeks to insert an additional object to clause 3 specifically about community energy. As a few hon. Members have said, the purpose of the Bill is to set up the confines of Great British Energy as a company in as little detail as possible. We are not seeking to fill the Bill with every possible mechanism the company could use or every possible priority it could have. We are clear that we are setting up the minimum necessary provisions for Great British Energy to function.

My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington made the really important point earlier that we are not seeking to set in train, for however long GB Energy will deliver projects, our objectives right now, in 2024. We want to give it the most minimal possible scope, so that it can go forward in an agile way and move into areas that, at the moment, we may not think are critical. Community energy will change over time—it already has changed with regard to the models we are using.

There is nothing in the Bill that excludes communities at all. The production, distribution, storage and supply of clean energy extends to large-scale offshore programmes, but I do not think we should discount communities’ involvement in those. There are some really good models around the world. In Denmark, 20% is now expected for community ownership, so there are models of large-scale projects as well, although as the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire rightly said, much smaller-scale generation projects that directly benefit local communities should sit alongside that.

Amendment 9 would require the Secretary of State to specifically set, as a strategic priority, measures to ensure that local communities benefit from low and renewable energy projects operating in their area. As we will discuss later, the Secretary of State will outline Great British Energy’s strategic priorities to ensure that it remains aligned with Government policy on energy more generally. The first statement, which we will make as soon as possible after Royal Assent—before Christmas, as was said earlier—will focus on driving clean energy deployment, creating jobs, boosting our energy independence and, crucially, generating benefits for UK taxpayers.

We have been clear that that process—I will say more about this later—will include consultation with Ministers in the devolved Administrations. We are already working on community energy with the devolved Administrations in Wales and Scotland, in particular, which are doing great work on it.

Clause 3 sets out the parameters for Great British Energy to carry out the five key functions that we outlined in the plan for it, one of which is to deliver the Government’s local power plan. We are very clear that Great British Energy’s role in delivering the local power plan will be to support and champion local community groups. In my evidence on Tuesday, I built on the comments of a number of our witnesses and said that there are two strands to our proposal. GB Energy will provide some of the funding, but it will also have a critical role where communities can access funding but lack capacity. I am thinking in particular about rural communities and local authorities across the country that previously had in-house energy expertise but are no longer in a position to lead on some of these projects.

There are great municipal schemes across Europe, and we would like to see some of them in this country. That will require GB Energy to provide funding and, crucially, capacity building.

[Torcuil Crichton]

I am pleased to hear that the Minister has such enthusiasm for municipal and community schemes. There are examples in my constituency of communities that have come together. There are three community-owned estates on the west side of Lewis with a plan for nine turbines generating 43 MW. That could bring in £4 million into that community, but it needs need pump-priming and help to get it there. Similarly, onshore windfarm schemes have been proposed and are in planning, with the offer for municipal and arm’s length companies of local authorities to take shares of up to 20%, as the Minister said. That is the kind of thing that GB Energy could do if we just get through this Bill.

[Michael Shanks]

I take my hon. Friend’s point in the spirit in which it was intended and not as an attempt to rush me through the rest of these proceedings so we can get the Bill up and running, but we will move at pace. Every time he speaks, he is very good at reminding me that I need to visit those projects in Lewis with him at some point. He is absolutely right that it is important that we give communities, in whatever form—local government, local island communities, villages or towns —the ability to come together with the capacity to deliver on their energy potential.

I fundamentally believe that the Bill is at the heart of what the Government desire to do on the local power plan and community ownership more generally. We are absolutely committed to community energy, including through things such as what the Co-operative party has put forward. There is nothing in the Bill that prevents that from happening. For those reasons, I hope that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire will withdraw her amendment.

[Pippa Heylings]

It is wonderful to hear hon. Members say how supportive they are of community energy and give examples from their local areas. In Cambridgeshire, the expertise is still there—it is absolutely amazing. We have community energy projects, including wind energy, and a whole village has an off-grid heat network, which is a national case in point.

I ask the Minister once again to take into account the cross-party support for the amendment. It is not a bauble, nor is it about crossing t’s and dotting i’s; it is about public ownership models. At the moment there is real concern, because although we talk about the great things happening, in the latest meetings we have held with advocates of community energy, we have been told that it is in crisis. Although GB Energy is removing the barriers to large-scale clean energy projects, there are barriers to community energy, which is why we have so few new community energy projects, in contrast to the past. We need investment, but it is not just about the money and capacity. It is about the rights—the ownership model and the right not only to generate but to sell locally, with an equal cost to connect.

[Torcuil Crichton]

I take the hon. Member’s point about rights. Usually, land rights prevent communities from taking a stake in energy projects. Community-owned land, which we have plenty of in the Western Isles and across Scotland, is the key—land that the community has ownership of.

The other problem, which I am sure GB Energy should and will unlock, is access to the grid, to get community companies on to the grid; GB Energy and regulation from the Department should be crucial to achieving that.

[Pippa Heylings]

I thank the hon. Member for making that point about the cost for communities of connecting to the grid, which makes it completely unviable for them to do so. It is not about capacity; the communities know what they want to do and are ready to do it. Unfortunately, although there is a right to sell energy locally, the cost of connection makes it completely unviable.

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[Andrew Bowie]

I will not detain the Committee long, but I want to express the Conservatives’ support for the Liberal Democrat amendment, primarily because of our concern about the impact of the removal of the winter fuel allowance from so many pensioners this winter, and the fact that the warm homes plan, as welcome as it is, will not be up and running until next spring, which leaves considerable concern over what might happen in and around this winter.

Those pensioners should be at the forefront of our mind as we look towards winter and as we are discussing an increase in the number of well-insulated homes in this country—on which, by the way, we had quite a good record when we were in government; we increased markedly the number of homes at EPC level C or above. For those reasons, we will support the amendment if it is pressed to a vote.

[Torcuil Crichton]

It is difficult to argue against home insulation, but I do not know whether we need legislation or an amendment to the Bill to achieve it, particularly when it is happening already in community-owned power companies such as Point and Sandwick Trust in my constituency. The company raises £1 million a year for its community, and distributed in the last 18 months £250,000 to people living in fuel poverty, to help with home insulation and heating costs. That is the template, the model and the example that GB Energy could help and sustain without need for the amendment.

[Andrew Pakes]

I share huge empathy with the sentiments behind the amendment, but I believe that the answer to home insulation sits not in the Great British Energy Bill, but in the wider clean power and clean energy mission. I find it quite rich for Opposition Members, who used to be in government, to talk about supporting an emergency home insulation programme when they decimated the apprenticeship programme that delivered the workforce that could actually insulate our homes.

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[Andrew Bowie]

The fact is that the Labour party has brought forward this legislation and is creating this company—a company that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Labour candidates, now MPs across the country, claimed time and again through the election would cut bills by £300. It was one of the reasons why Labour is creating the company in the first place, so it is surprising that it did not want to put the £300 as a specific object in the Bill, given that it was so proud of the fact that this would deliver the savings it said it would.

[Torcuil Crichton]

I, too, have been checking online—with Full Fact, which discloses that the £300 figure that the shadow Minister raises is not based on Labour’s plans; it comes from a report from an energy think-tank Ember, and it is an estimate of what people would save. There was no Government commitment—there never was a Government commitment—to such a figure.

[Andrew Bowie]

That might be in Full Fact, but if the hon. Member goes to Channel 4’s “FactCheck”, he will see that it says:

“During the election campaign Labour suggested bills would be brought down around £300 a year”

through its “net zero energy plans”, including the creation of GB Energy. The Prime Minister said:

“Yes, I do. I stand by everything in our manifesto and one of the things I made clear in the election campaign is I wouldn’t make a single promise or commitment that I didn’t think we could deliver in government.”

So the question is this: will energy bills be cut by £300 by 2030 and, if so, why is that not in the legislation before us?