Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Earl Russell and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee of my recorded register of interests: I am a non-executive director and a board member of the Water Retail Company. I will speak to my Amendment 79 and respond to the amendments on connections reform.

Amendment 79 calls on the Government to insert a new clause into the Planning and Infrastructure Bill under the heading of “increasing grid capacity” and proposes that, within three months of the Bill becoming law, the Secretary of State should publish a plan to achieve two simple yet crucial objectives: to reduce the cost and the time taken for new connections to the electrical transmission or distribution system; and to permit the development of local energy grids. The need for this amendment should be beyond reasonable doubt. I am concerned that, if these reforms are not made, we will not be capable of meeting the Government’s stated objective, which we share, to achieve clean power by 2030—a key step on our overall climate change and energy targets.

To decarbonise, we must electrify. Electricity demand is set to rise by at least 11% before 2030 and at least double by 2050. How we heat our homes, how we travel and how we power our industry must all be by electricity, which demands wiring everything up and ensuring that both low-voltage and high-voltage networks are fit for purpose. I would argue that this is one of the biggest societal energy changes since the Industrial Revolution and is only some five years away, which is merely the blink of an eye in planning terms. At present, the delay in getting grid connections is one of the greatest obstacles to decarbonisation, to developing new housing and industry, and to increasing our economic output as a country. Our businesses and communities are waiting seven to 10 years—even longer in some cases—before they can secure the right to feed clean energy into the system or to make power connections. Developers in grid hotspots—or “not spots”, potentially—are reporting connection waits of several years as being typical.

We need to be prepared and to get this stuff done. My amendment is designed to help do that. If we are going to be a leader in renewable energy and to get all the renewable energy in place, the grid connection system needs to be reformed. I very much recognise the Government’s recent reforms to try to update the grid connection system. In April 2025, working alongside Ofgem and the National Energy System Operator—NESO—the Government announced reforms to prioritise clean energy and infrastructure for grid access, aiming to eliminate so-called zombie or speculative projects and to fast-track the shovel-ready schemes that are set to go. The new target model option, TMO4+, introduces stricter queue management, milestone targets and progressive penalties for lagging projects, as well as prioritising the projects that are crucial for clean power and our overall economic growth.

These reforms are intended to help deliver that 2030 clean power plan, unlocking up to £15 billion in investment and supporting a more responsive and modern grid system. These are all steps in the right direction, and we definitely welcome how the Government have made progress since they came to power, but I feel that more needs to be done, hence the amendment that I put forward here. I worry that, if we do not do more, we will simply not be ready and will not hit these targets.

The second element of my amendment touches on local energy grids. Local energy grids are still in their infancy, but my party very much supports them. They empower our local communities and help them to benefit from the clean power revolution that is coming. Their efforts are quiet, modest and determined, and I want this Government to do more to support them. I believe they are essential in galvanising public support and helping the Government to take communities with them on this journey. Alongside many others across both Houses of Parliament, I fought to get community energy into the Great British Energy Act and I am delighted to have done that.

However, more help is needed to get this stuff over the line. Local energy grids are important and will benefit the country. They help to make the grid more secure and resilient. They reduce the need for transmission and the loss of transmission time, and they reduce the need to invest in the high-voltage grid overall. They take our communities with us and bring support. We all need that: this Government need that and we need that. Our communities should benefit from the revolution that is taking place. My amendment is designed to help and to support the Government. My hope is that the Government can support this amendment, or it would be appreciated if they brought forward an amendment on Report.

I turn briefly to the other amendments in this group. I recognise that the Minister has put forward a drafting amendment and we are fine with that. On Amendments 73 to 76 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, we recognise what they are about and welcome the questions that the noble Lord raises. These are important issues, which we should discuss in Committee, about the replication of policy and policy statements, and how those systems are set up and will work in practice.

However, as we go into this rapid period of change, my worry is that, if his amendments are passed, we could end up with a system that is centralised more in Westminster, is less responsive to the changes that need to happen at pace and at scale and is not as well connected to the communities and those on the ground facing change. Those would be my general concerns with those amendments, if agreed, but I look forward to the Minister’s response and I think it is important that those amendments were raised. I look forward to further debate on this group.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, connections reform is very important if we are to give the grid capacity. The noble Earl, Lord Russell, is right in wanting to speed things up and to ensure that these connections are not too costly. That matters whether you want more renewable energy in the mix or would prefer—as I would—to continue with a mixed supply, including better and continued use of North Sea oil and gas.

However, the fact is that the grid is not resilient and everything is too slow. We have too many layers of decision-making, too much strategising, too many bureaucratic rules and, therefore, not enough speed and determination. I know that that is behind the Government’s planning reforms. I fear that my noble friend Lord Lansley’s amendments could also slow things down, but he may be able to reassure me on that. I look forward to the Minister’s response on how we can ensure that these changes will speed things up and get us the reforms that we need, if the economy and the energy economy are to work well in the months and years ahead.

Extreme Weather: Resilience

Debate between Earl Russell and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Wednesday 24th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I very much echo what the noble Baroness said about the emergency services and all who are involved in this. Indeed, without the changes we have made and the effort they put in, these recent storms would have caused much more damage and perhaps more loss of life, so that is very good news.

The COBRA system, which the noble Baroness mentions, is of course already baked into standing cross-government flooding response mechanisms, as the last tier of escalation for the most severe flood events. These mechanisms are stood up to support the operational response at local level, which is obviously necessitated by the increasingly sophisticated weather warnings that we see coming through from the Met Office. We managed well across the country on this occasion and the COBRA unit in the Cabinet Office—the ministerial unit—was not needed. That does not mean to say that officials did not get together. They worked well across the country with local people and the devolved Administrations. In some sense, it is a success that it was unnecessary to have the full COBRA ministerial meeting on this occasion. I have referenced the future resilience work that we are doing. We have brought these much better co-ordination systems into the Cabinet Office and work very closely with Defra, which is responsible for building up long-term flood protection. We have also invested a lot of capital in recent years. There is £5.2 billion available for flood defence projects, which I think is a doubling on the previous period.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Statement. I join her and the Labour Benches in offering our condolences for all those who lost their lives, and in thanking the emergency services for everything that they do. UK winters are getting warmer and wetter; there is a lot of variation year to year, but winter rainfall has increased by 27% overall since records began in 1837. The impacts of climate change are here now. The NAO report Resilience to Flooding found that the Government do not have clearly defined targets or an effective strategy in place for making the UK resilient to extreme weather. They do not even track or evaluate spending on resilience to extreme weather. When do the Government plan to publish an extreme weather strategy, to include defined targets, risk assessments, and measures of outcomes?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank the noble Earl. I am glad he mentioned the NAO report, because it did welcome the work that had been done—I know this has been welcomed across the House—on setting up the Resilience Directorate and, indeed, publishing the resilience framework in 2022. Setting appropriate targets and ambitions for the level of flood resilience—in particular, for critical infrastructure because that is a key part—is part of the Government’s broader thinking on resilience standards.

There are more than 100 risk priorities in our risk register; we are working on all of these and have committed to create by 2030 common but flexible resilience standards right across critical national infrastructure, as well as across the private sector more broadly. One of the lessons of the storms we are seeing is that it is important to work with the private sector as well. One reason that people have been less affected has been the improvements that have been made in power, transport, trains and the rest—partly having early warning, partly working together, and partly having this sense of mission that we must try to respond to the warmer, wetter winters and the arrival of a certain element of Mediterranean weather in our beautiful island, as the noble Earl said.