Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of potential benefits of the policies in the Green Alliance's Community Energy Manifesto.

Community energy has many benefits not only for the energy system but also for wider community resilience as set out in the Green Alliance’s Community Energy Manifesto.

The Government already does value communities in the energy system. The Rural Community Energy Fund, which will reopen shortly, allows communities to identify and develop schemes in which they can invest and from which they can derive significant local benefits. This programme will now include community officers in each of the five local energy hubs in England.

I am also proud of the way communities support and adopt innovation not just in technology but in business planning, in financing of projects and in engaging with the local communities they represent. As a Government we support this approach and as part of our ‘Prospering from the Energy Revolution’ programme, £40m has been allocated to 4 local future systems demonstrators and I am pleased that communities like the Low Carbon Hub in Oxford at the heart of those schemes.

As the Manifesto itself points out, 5 out of 6 current BEIS Local Retrofit Supply Chain pilot projects are led by community groups. We are also supporting Community Energy England with the essential work they do to share best practice and celebrate success, and I attended their conference in Bristol in October, as part of Green Great Britain Week, to see this work in action.