Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information Regulations 2021

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is impossible for me as a Green to disagree with anything in the opening statement, because these are things that we have been saying for 30 or 40 years—so I am glad that the Government have finally caught up with all these concepts, such as lower power usage, longer life for all sorts of goods, repairing them, saving money for customers on their bills and having less waste to landfill. Those are all things that we have been arguing for for decades. However, in the statutory instrument, all I could really see is that it changes the flag on a label from an EU flag to a union flag. Please tell me if I am wrong; it is a very thick document, so presumably something else is in it, but that seemed to me the only pertinent point.

The rest of the instrument is all about ensuring that EU law continues to operate effectively in the UK. For me, it is another sad reflection of this Government’s implementation of Brexit, because they made lots of promises about how we would be free from the shackles of the EU and how it would allow us to have the best environmental protections in the whole world—world-leading environmental protections, even. But the reality is that we are actually keeping 99% of EU laws, or weakening them, and then just sticking a union jack label on. Perhaps the Minister can point me to where I have gone wrong on this.

After reading this, I wonder what happened to creativity, ambition and even, as the Minister said, innovation. I know that the Government were carrying out a consultation on higher energy standards, and I am curious about that because, although I had only a quick search, I could not see the results. I do not know whether it is still ongoing, but it will be interesting if that says anything about improving on EU levels.

Of course, as any fool doth know, the cleanest, greenest and cheapest energy that you can have is the energy that you do not actually use. Our appliances and devices still use far more than they need to. The EU’s headline energy efficiency target for appliances is for at least 32.5% by 2030. Are we going to improve on that or are we going to be left behind? The consultation to which I referred talked about the possibility of appliances being part of a smart grid—so, for example, a freezer could store the energy and might store electricity in the form of extra cold to be used when there was a bit more demand or energy is scarcer. That is an important advance in an entire rethinking of the energy system, relying on renewables and storage.

There is also talk of displaying lifetime energy costs at the point of purchase for a product, plus additional information on the cost of running it and, importantly, how easily it can be repaired, reused and recycled—namely, how durable it is. I have quite a lot of questions, but my main one is: what has happened to that consultation on higher energy standards, and has it encouraged the Government to raise their own standards?