Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Liz McInnes and Andrea Leadsom

Thursday 24th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

As I have already mentioned, this Government have in fact committed £2.5 billion to new flood defences in the six years to 2021. Just this year, since January 2016, we have had 130 new flood schemes completed, protecting a further 55,000 homes. We have also enormously increased our temporary flood defences and all our infrastructure capabilities. including incident control vehicles, light towers, pumps, sandbags and so on, to try to deal with the unpredictable nature of these extreme weather events, but we are committed to doing more.

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

2. What progress she has made on publishing the 25-year great British food and farming plan.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Liz McInnes and Andrea Leadsom

Thursday 25th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Andrea Leadsom)]

As the hon. Lady may know, the most recent step we have taken to support renewable energy deployment is the introduction of contracts for difference, which give companies the certainty they need to make long-term investments. This has helped us to drive down costs and focus on best value for consumers by requiring renewable technologies to compete for support for the first time.

[Liz McInnes]

Last week it was revealed that we had missed our interim EU 2020 target for renewable energy generation. How will pulling the plug on the cheapest form of renewable energy help us to achieve it?

[Andrea Leadsom]

We do not accept that we have missed it. Our interim reporting covers the period to the end of 2015, and we believe that we are on track to meet that target.

The important point made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in her announcement last week was that we do not want to over-deploy onshore wind, because only a certain amount of subsidy is available to meet the requirements of decarbonisation while keeping bills down. Any over-deployment of onshore wind could cause other, important, technologies to lose out.