Fossil Fuels and Cost of Living Increases

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and join him in paying tribute to Warm This Winter, which has done fantastic work in gathering those case studies and presenting them to us. I congratulate the Scottish Government on their announcement this morning about a presumption against more fossil fuel exploration, because we know that getting more new fossil fuels out of the ground is driving both the climate crisis and—ironically, at a time when gas is nine times more expensive than renewables—the cost of living crisis.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

The Government seem to have no money for working people, yet when it comes to fossil fuel companies they have been able to find—from somewhere—£13.6 billion since the Paris agreement. To give the Rosebank oilfield £500 million in taxpayers’ money is a disgrace when families face immense pressures. Does the hon. Lady agree that it is time for oil and gas subsidies to be phased out once and for all?

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and she will not be surprised that I entirely agree that fossil fuel subsidies should go. Indeed, that has been said at several of the big climate global conferences—the conferences of the parties. There is supposed to be an agreement on getting rid of the subsidies, but we are certainly not leading by example, sadly.

I want to speak about prepayment meters, although I will come back to the subject of Rosebank. One of the ironies about Rosebank is that most of the oil extracted is for export in any case; we cannot even argue that it is doing anything to help us here at home. However, there is something serious going on with prepayment meters, and I am particularly alarmed by their forced installation. We have seen stories in the press, for example, of mothers returning home to find that meters have been installed while they were out. Locksmiths have come in and people have forced their way into homes to install prepayment meters. Not only that, but magistrates have been approving hundreds of warrants to install meters in just minutes—496 warrants in three minutes and 51 seconds, to be precise.

Prepayment meters should not be installed by warrant, and they certainly should not be approved en masse in such a manner, with no consideration of individual cases and individual vulnerabilities, but when I asked what assessment the Government had made of the impact on vulnerable people of the batch approval of warrants, I was shocked to receive an answer stating that

“the information which must be provided to the court is identical in each case”.

In other words, it makes no difference whether cases are considered individually or together, but that represents total disregard for individual people’s welfare and extraordinary complacency regarding the failings of the system. Surely the Minister sees that if magistrates are not provided with adequate information, they are unable to make informed decisions that take into account people’s vulnerability.

In answer to another question I asked, the Minister simply tried to pass the buck to Ofgem, but given that the Government have the power to implement a moratorium on the forced installation of prepayment meters by court warrant, that, frankly, does not wash. The forced installation of prepayment meters is hugely distressing; it is an invasion of privacy.

Will the Minister commit himself to introducing a much-needed ban and to putting an end to the intolerable situation in which vulnerable people are forced on to higher rates, which brings with it the added risk of self-disconnection? Citizens Advice has reported a significant increase in the number of people it sees who cannot top up their prepayment meters each month—from 1,119 in November 2021 to 3,331 in November last year. Forcing people on to prepayment meters quite simply should not be happening, which is why the ban is needed so urgently.

I want to emphasise that the difficulties facing households are not inevitable. Ministers are fond of blaming those difficulties on President Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, with the Chancellor pointing to what in his autumn statement he called

“a recession made in Russia”.—[Official Report, 17 November 2022; Vol. 722, c. 855.]

While that is true in part, blaming it entirely on President Putin is, frankly, dishonest. The crisis is one of political choices—choices that have been made not just over the past 12 months, but during the past 12 years of Tory rule. As we now know, the decision by the Conservatives, under David Cameron’s regime in 2013, to cut the so-called green crap has added billions to household energy bills, with installations of loft and cavity wall insulation subsequently falling off the cliff by a staggering 92% and 74% respectively in 2013.

Indeed, while there were 1.6 million installations of loft insulation, for example, in 2012, that dropped to just 126,000 the following year. Installations of cavity wall insulation dropped from 640,000 in 2012 to just 166,000 in 2013, and in 2020 there were just 72 installations of loft and cavity wall insulation combined. That is a damning indictment of the Government’s approach.

The poor state of the UK’s inefficient housing stock meant that in June last year households at energy performance certificate band D or below were effectively paying what has been called an inefficiency penalty of about £900 on average per year. It is frankly unforgiveable that in response to the current crisis the Government have once again overlooked and paid insufficient attention to the importance of energy efficiency. Their own Climate Change Committee expressed regret in November that it was now

“too late to introduce new policies to achieve widespread improvements to the fabric of buildings… this winter.”

For almost a year, the Government refused to act on what was the cheapest and quickest way to cut energy bills and address the UK’s notorious leaky houses. This is nothing short of a scandal, and it is also such a wasted opportunity, because ending our society’s addiction to fossil fuels also brings with it an opportunity to create warm, decent homes for everyone, where households are not shackled to high energy bills or trapped in dank and draughty homes, unable to turn the heating on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas]

I certainly welcome that intervention and agree entirely on welcoming the use of the contracts for difference mechanism. Tidal has huge potential and that is one way to maximise that. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, we will be looking this afternoon in the Environmental Audit Committee at ways in which we can unblock more solar power, for example, by enabling the batteries, alongside household solar, to be installed retrospectively at lower VAT rates. It is odd that, at the moment, there are reductions on VAT for solar panels but not for the batteries for households that want to store energy.

[Wera Hobhouse]

On that point, does the hon. Lady agree that the Government should seek to incentivise further private domestic installation of solar panels or ground-source heat pumps by considering an offsetting of the investment against income tax?

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Lady for that proposal, which is not one I have looked at, but which sounds interesting. I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks of that.

I will bring my comments to a close simply by saying that, in responding to the multiple crises that I have set out this morning, it is important that we do not store up more problems for the future. Rather than harking back to the fossil-fuel era, I ask the Minister one more time if he will finally prioritise the quickest and cheapest way to bring down bills for the long term, and introduce that desperately needed street-by-street home insulation programme. Again and again, we have seen Government schemes that are not working. The green deal scheme and green homes grant both collapsed and did massive damage to supply chains, with businesses unable to have confidence in what the Government were introducing.

We urgently need an end to the fossil-fuel era, which was kickstarted by coal and colonialism. Instead, we need resilience for the long term, with good green jobs in every constituency, warm homes that are not vulnerable to global gas prices, and the abundance of renewable energy with which these nations are blessed. Only then can we avoid future energy crises, create a more prosperous society and ensure that everyone shares in a transition to a zero-carbon economy.