The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Amanda Solloway)
I am going to go through my speech as fast as I can, because this has been an incredible debate. I would so much have liked to have had more time, but I want to allow my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) to come back in at the end.
I welcome the opportunity to debate this important issue, and I thank all hon. and right hon. Members for their contributions. We have had an informed and interesting discussion. I particularly thank my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire for bringing this important topic to the House. I also pay tribute to her for the important work she did in advancing the nation’s energy and climate security as Secretary of State with responsibility for those matters, as well as in her role as Energy Minister prior to that. I welcome the work that she and other Members have been doing more recently to contribute to this policy debate.
I agree with my right hon. Friend about the creation of the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which I am sure that the whole House will welcome. It will deliver policies at the heart of the Government’s agenda and tackle the energy trilemma. Indeed, the Secretary of State was mindful of the trilemma as he laid out his priorities, which are:
“To set Britain on a path to energy independence, in other words, delivering energy security.
To bring bills down as soon as possible, and keep them down, so wholesale electricity prices are among the cheapest in Europe, delivering consumer security.
To decarbonise energy as part of our commitment to net zero, delivering climate security.”
As the Minister with responsibility for energy consumers and affordability, I will be working hard with the Secretary of State to bring down energy bills for households and businesses and to tackle fuel poverty.
The Government have a clear plan to deliver our priorities, set out in our Energy White Paper, published in 2020, and in our “Net Zero Strategy”, published in 2021. The British energy security strategy, published in April last year, charted a pathway to reducing our dependence on imported oil and gas and achieving net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.
In the 2022 edition of the index, the UK was ranked fourth overall, as the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) mentioned, ahead of G20 competitors including France, Germany and the United States. We are clearly doing something right. We should not consider the three aims of having secure, affordable and clean energy as being in competition with each other. In fact, enhancing security means decarbonising electricity, and both mean keeping energy bills affordable. To illustrate that point, I highlight the role that wind and solar play in our energy mix. They are not only the cleanest sources of power that we have, but the cheapest, and they contribute to our energy security by reducing our reliance on imported fuels.
I want to mention the contributions from a couple of other Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) has a great depth of knowledge and brings real experience to the subject. He has a genuine commitment to the subject, and he mentioned carbon capture, usage and storage. That is a priority for the Government, and we are progressing as quickly as we can. The funding package announced at the Budget is unprecedented and demonstrates His Majesty’s Government’s strong commitment to delivering CCUS in the UK.
Amanda Solloway
I am so sorry, but I just do not have time.
I would particularly like to mention my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan), who is a strong and consistent advocate for energy security and net zero. The UK currently does not have access to large naturally occurring geothermal resources that countries such as Iceland have, but I welcome the review he is doing and look forward to reading it.
To meet our ambitions on renewables, I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire that we should accelerate the planning processes and networks infrastructure vital to bringing these projects to fruition. That is why the Government have committed to dramatically reducing timelines for delivering strategic onshore transmission network infrastructure by around three years, with an ambition to halve the end-to-end process by the mid-2020s. We look forward to the report from the Electricity Networks Commissioner, Nick Winser, this summer, and will take action in response to his recommendations.
We are committed to ensuring that projects benefit not only the nation as a whole, but the communities in which they are built. Members rightly call for an electricity system that is smart and flexible, and by the end of 2022 there were 31.3 million smart and advanced meters across Great Britain. The flexibility of the system is underpinned by a growing pipeline of electricity storage projects, with nearly 23 GW of storage already online.
Members have rightly pointed out the crucial role in energy security of reducing consumption through targeted energy efficiency measures, and we are already off to a good start. In 2010, only 14% of homes were in energy performance band C or better, but thanks to Government and industry action, 46% of homes now meet this benchmark.
The Government are bringing all this work together through the Energy Bill, which is the vehicle for delivering our strategy. It will modernise the way that we heat people’s homes, it will turbocharge British technology and it will liberate private investment, scaling-up jobs and growth.
To sum up, the UK is firing on all cylinders to deliver a green, resilient and independent energy system, with these three elements going hand in hand. As my right hon. Friend will know, the UK is a global leader not just in clean energy, but, as the energy trilemma index confirms, in cheap and secure energy. So it is only right that our ambition is to completely decarbonise our power system by 2035, subject to ensuring security of supply. This will provide the cheap, clean and British energy we need for decades to come.