Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

At end insert “but this House regrets that the draft Regulations fail to clearly identify their subject as the Drax wood-burning power station, and do not provide for a means for Drax to be held to account for its environmental impacts and costs; and further regrets that the Government have not justified the price premium offered to Drax or published key documents underpinning the Regulations”.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as I think the Minister has already alluded to, this amendment to the Motion closely mirrors the comments made both by our own Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and by the Public Accounts Committee. It regrets that these draft regulations

“fail to clearly identify their subject as the Drax wood-burning power station”.

I was listening closely to the Minister and, interestingly, I do not think I heard him say “Drax” until he got to speaking about the amendment. He spoke about the difficulty, as he saw it, of providing alternatives for Drax; as I think we all know, we are not going to suddenly magic up an alternative Drax out of nowhere that will suddenly start generating electricity for us. I refer noble Lords, and the many people who I know are listening, to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee reference to how this is about Drax—that is what it has to be.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise in a warm glow of unusual universal support from all corners of your Lordships’ House. Adding to the consensus from the Public Accounts Committee, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and—as the noble Earl, Lord Russell, mentioned—the Climate Change Committee, we have heard that this statutory instrument is a really bad idea and a disastrous outcome. The noble Earl and many others made the point that we already have a huge problem with public trust in politics and the way the Government have gone about this has not helped.

I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that if he looks at Hansard afterwards, he will see that I was expressing concern not just about the climate emergency and the carbon impacts but about the enormous costs being laid on the public purse.

I thank all noble Lords who have stayed until 10.22 pm now, and I also give special thanks to the staff we are keeping here to do this. I thank the Minister for his response. It has been a full debate, and I will not summarise it at length, but I will just reassure the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, that it is not a new thing for me or the Green Party to seek to pull down the false flag of greenness attached to Drax. There is a photo of me from 2016—it is the oldest I can remember, but there may have earlier ones—standing outside the power station with a nice cardboard axe saying, “Axe Drax”, because it gets the message across so well.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for a typically forensic speech. “Means testing for corporate benefits” is a phrase I may borrow from him in future.

I agree with a fair amount of what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said, certainly in terms of Drax. However, I point out to the noble Lord that the problem here is not net zero but terrible government policy under successive Governments, which has worked out very badly. Of course, we have had many decades of terrible government policy towards fossil fuel companies, which have cost the Exchequer and the country an enormous amount.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Birt, particularly for raising the excellent “Panorama” programme. I was very aware of the time, so I cut quite a bit out of my speech because I was confident that other noble Lords would pick that up in the debate.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, for stressing the need for a long-term strategy. I do not think that the Minister answered that point, which was also raised in the later intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Birt.

I have a couple of points to make in responding to the Minister, and he is very welcome to interrupt me if he would like to provide further information. We have not heard about a long-term strategy; what we have had announced very recently in the spending review was that of the previously announced £8.3 billion, which was going to Great British Energy for renewables, £2.5 billion was taken away to go to nuclear. I shall not relitigate the issue of nuclear power, but I shall make the time point—that nuclear power will not be relevant in 2031, when this SI runs out, so it does not do anything to deal with that long-term strategy that fills in the gaps.

The Minister also said that they would have better scrutiny of Drax’s sustainability. I point to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which expressed concern about the ability of Ofgem and the department to hold Drax to account—so it is not just me saying that. The Minister did not make any reference to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, about carbon capture and storage, so I shall assume from that the Government have entirely given up on carbon capture and storage when it comes to Drax.

There is one last really important point, to respectfully correct the Minister when he spoke about carbon cycle and regrowth. We are now getting horrendously close to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels of heating. As multiple noble Lords said, if the trees regrow—and that is a very large “if” in a changing climate, with huge problems with forest fires and so on—that carbon is captured decades later. That is not helping us to keep below 1.5 degrees, which we have practically lost, or below 2 degrees. Once we get into runaway territory, what happens decades hence will not help us very much at all. The carbon cycle argument simply does not add up; there is a time problem here that has not been resolved.

I come back to a comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. This is a statutory instrument that deserves the full attention of the House. I am acutely aware of the hour. I kept open the possibility of calling a vote, but I do not think that a vote at 10.27 pm would be any kind of measure of the views of your Lordships’ House—this debate has established those views very clearly on all sides of the House. With reluctance, I shall not call a vote. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment to the Motion withdrawn.