William Bain
Main Page: William Bain (Labour - Glasgow North East)
Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
5. Whether it is his policy to decarbonise the power sector by 2030.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
11. Whether it is his policy to decarbonise the power sector by 2030.
Gregory Barker
The hon. Lady, my former Environmental Audit Committee colleague, is absolutely right to say that we need certainty for investment. The CBI has said that the Energy Bill
“sends a strong signal to investors”.
Energy UK says:
“This energy bill is a big and positive step forward.”
The right time to decide on a decarbonisation target for 2030 will be when we set the fifth carbon budget, which must be set by June 2016. It is at that point, when we can take it in the context of the whole economy and the economic effort to meet our decarbonisation targets, that we will decide whether we need to set an additional target.
Mr Bain
It is interesting that the Conservative part of the coalition is answering this question, rather than the Liberal Democrat part. Will the Minister not admit that the chief executive of WWF UK had a very good point when he said recently that the lack of a 2030 decarbonisation strategy in the Bill will undermine the certainty of long-term investment in renewable energy supply chains and that that is a clear failure of leadership by the Prime Minister?
Gregory Barker
I am afraid that I could not disagree more. If we look at the people who will be putting billions of pounds into decarbonisation, and if we consider what the industry is now saying, we can see that there is genuine transparency, longevity and certainty as a result of the Energy Bill. I understand the concerns of WWF, but now we have published the Bill the need for additional legislation to give certainty falls away. As I said, we will consider the need for a decarbonisation target as part of setting the fifth carbon budget for 2028 to 2032, which will happen in 2016.
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Mr John Hayes)
My hon. Friend is generous. I do have the wind beneath my wings. He will know that we issued a call for evidence. That has been completed and we are considering the outcome. He and the whole House, including the ministerial team, recognise that community buy-in and ownership, and communities shaping the developments in their area should lie at the heart of all that we do. We must not impose what people do not want on them.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
Do the Secretary of State and the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), agree with the recent report by Greenpeace and WWF, which states that investment in wind energy could create an additional 70,000 jobs, help us to meet our carbon reduction targets, and boost the economy by £20 billion a year by 2030?
