Baroness Maddock
Main Page: Baroness Maddock (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Energy Bill [HL]
Baroness Maddock Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Maddock
Baroness Maddock
Members of the Committee will recognise that this is a similar amendment to one I moved on an earlier clause but this clause refers to tenants. However, the arguments that I used then apply to the position on this clause.
To refresh the memories of Members of the Committee but without going into huge detail, I am proposing that making regulations in this area should not be dependent on the outcome of the review in Clause 36. We had quite a discussion about how, particularly in the private rented sector and at the bottom of the market, we want to get this moving and do not want it to be held up by anything unnecessarily. That is all I need to say. I beg to move.
Baroness Noakes
I have put my name to Amendment 21B in this group and I will not repeat the speech that I made linked to a similar amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock. I wholly oppose the noble Baroness’s amendment, in particular because she assumes that regulation is the right way forward. We had a good discussion about that and I hope that the Minister will reaffirm that the Government do not see regulation as an inevitability but something that should be used as a last resort. My amendment has been tabled more to discuss how much debate we should have before we start introducing regulations. It asks for Parliament to approve the review that will be undertaken. That was by way of emphasising that regulation should not be undertaken lightly and should not be seen as a default position in this Bill.
Lord Marland
The noble Baroness is right: I think that that debate showed that there are gaps. That is why I prefaced my opening remarks by saying that we have to take away a number of issues—that is the whole point of Committee—and we shall be looking at whether we can improve those gaps, as we are committed to doing. From my point of view, it was an extremely useful and valuable debate, and I assure the Committee that we will be taking those issues away.
Baroness Maddock
I thank the Minister for his comments. I am very grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord O’Neill, and I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, for putting his name to my amendment. Between us, over the years we have had quite a lot of experience of the issue that we are dealing with here—that is, the private rented sector. I am not in total disagreement with my noble friend Lady Noakes, in that I am not in favour of unnecessary regulation. However, for those who have been dealing with the bottom end of the rented market for a number of years, there comes a point when you have to try to do something about this problem. That is particularly important when we sometimes pay out a huge amount of housing benefit on these houses. We have to remember that; I really do not see why taxpayers should pay housing benefit for substandard properties.
We are getting to the stage where we need to get to grips with this matter, and I am really pleased that this Government have grasped the nettle on the private rented sector. Therefore, I agree with my noble friend that we do not want unnecessary regulation but I am sure that we all want people to live in decent homes. With that proviso, and thanking my noble friend for the point that he made about agricultural tenancies, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Maddock
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Teverson, and also the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I want to bring it home to people that this makes “eco-nomic” sense. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, delights in having arguments, but I agree with him on some of the points that he has made. I remember when I bought my first house, in 1966. It was a little box in Southampton, desperately hard to keep warm. As some of you will remember, there were floor-to-ceiling windows in those days, and we had one of those picture windows, so trying to keep the house warm in winter was quite difficult and the bills were quite high. Then I moved to a newly built flat in Stockholm where the winter temperature was minus 27, and I say to my noble friend Lord Jenkin that to heat that house cost me less than it used to cost to heat this box with the picture window in England. That is when I got the bug about building proper homes.
I am going back to 1969, and we still have not got there. The longer we put this off, the more it costs us as a nation. We have been spending masses of money over recent years on projects to try to bring houses up to a reasonable level of energy efficiency. It is desperate that we stop doing it any longer. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, over the years many housebuilders and other builders were very conservative and did not want to go with this, and we have been suffering from it ever since. We really must not listen to the voices of holding back any longer. It makes economic sense to stop going down that road.
Lord Oxburgh
My Lords, I, too, strongly support this amendment. Listening to the informative discussion by noble Lords, I have seen my foxes shot one after the other so I will not detain the Committee for long, except to agree that the industry with which we are concerned here is fundamentally conservative. If we wait until there is any indication from the industry that it is ready for this, we shall wait for ever. The only thing to do is to fix a date.
If the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, with whom I so often agree, were to look at the regulations for vehicle emissions imposed by the state of California a number of years ago, he would see that the motor industry cried that this was totally impossible and would destroy the industry. Lo and behold, within a small number of years it was not only meeting the regulations but exceeding them. We have to fix a date and the industry has to work to it.
Baroness Maddock
The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, is known for not always being terribly polite all the time, and we have seen that today. An important point has been raised here by my noble friend Lady Noakes. This issue has been going on for some time. I have now been in the House of Lords for 13 years, and I remember that when I arrived the first Bill that I debated was on tuition fees—that famous Bill that we were not expecting because it was not in the Labour manifesto, but which nevertheless arrived.
Baroness Maddock
Sorry, that was a mistake—I should not have mentioned it. I remember the Bill coming in, and I remember that when a new Government come in they are keen to get their legislation through. What have we had in this Committee? The noble Lord, Lord Judd, and everybody else have agreed that there is a great urgency about what we are doing. So there is always a conflict about making this process in the Houses of Parliament, which goes very slowly, keep up with what you want to do and your ambitions for the nation. This is always a challenge to us, and it is partly what we are facing here. At the same time, there is an issue here.
One thing has changed since I came in 13 years ago. We have the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, which gives a whole lot more scrutiny to secondary legislation than it ever did before. I served on that committee for the four years noble Lords can serve before they have to move on, and it was quite fascinating. In the normal course of events, if you are on the Front Bench, you do the primary legislation and you are lucky if you manage to keep abreast of what is going on in secondary legislation. I had done the last Housing Bill and then went on to the committee, where all the secondary legislation was coming through—so I knew what had gone on. We have something that is a little better, and we have used some of the facilities of this House to challenge secondary legislation as we could not before. It is not perfect and, if we were reforming Parliament, I think we would do it better. Nevertheless, it is slightly better than it was before, and we should remember that.
Quite often the previous Government got into this mess, but during the Bill people often tried to bring forward a little more detail. We are not very far into this Parliament, we are all keen for this to happen quickly and the Minister is trying to get to grips with this matter with his department. I appreciate the problems that he has, but most of us would like to see a little more clarification on Report, although his officials may not want that. Given the situation in which we find ourselves, and being realistic about when we will get to Report, that gives the Minister’s department a little time to help us with this issue. It is difficult, and I have heard a certain amount of hypocrisy today from the Opposition. I have been in opposition and I know what this is like. It behoves us all if we think this is important, and if we are all saying to the Minister, “Let’s rush ahead with this”, to give him a little time to come forward with a little more detail as we go through the Bill. I hope he can satisfy us on that today.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am not against relying on statutory instruments to clarify the policy as we go down the line. All Ministers find that it takes time to work out the details, but at this stage we need to put down some markers and to have an idea of the general direction in which the Government are going.
I agree with a lot of what my noble friend Lord O’Neill said on the ECO and fuel poverty. If the Government are effectively putting all their eggs in the fuel poverty basket through the ECO replacing all other forms of intervention, as my noble friend Lady Smith said, however good the scheme which emerges under the ECO is, it will be undermined if the payment for it is on a quasi-poll tax basis. You will take away with one hand what you have given with the other. I urge the Government to think clearly about what they are doing on both sides of that equation.
However, my main point is on Ofgem. I understand that a review of its role is still ongoing. As the Minister will know, there are widely different views, not necessarily on a party basis, on what Ofgem should and should not be doing. Ofgem itself tends to change its mind on what it should be doing. Clause 67 implies that we are taking something away from Ofgem. I should like to know from the Minister whether this is part of the review of Ofgem, which I understand will end in March, when there will be a report. Ofgem is also covered by the Public Bodies Bill, as my noble friend said, and there are uncertainties relating to what will emerge as a regulator in that regard. It is important that the totality of what Ofgem is responsible for is defined before we provide measures which could, piecemeal, carve off bits of Ofgem’s role or add bits to it. Before we finish the Bill, we need to hear the result of that review and what the Government propose in total.
Baroness Maddock
“Advice on benefits of new or under-utilised technologies
(1) For the purpose of enabling the Secretary of State to assess the benefits of new or under-utilised technologies in reducing home heating costs and dealing with fuel poverty, the Secretary of State must request the advice of the bodies specified in subsection (2) on the following technologies—
(a) passive flue gas heat recovery systems (“PFGHR systems”);(b) voltage optimisation technologies;(c) standby down-powering technologies; (d) dynamic demand technologies;(e) district network connection technologies; and(f) such other technologies as the Secretary of State thinks appropriate.(2) The bodies referred to in subsection (1) are—
(a) the Energy Saving Trust;(b) the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group.(3) A request for advice made pursuant to subsection (1) may also include a request for advice as to how those technologies can assist in combating climate change.
(4) The Climate Change Committee must within 12 months of the coming into force of this section consider and produce a report on the ways in which the technologies specified in subsection (1) can assist in reducing carbon emissions.
(5) In this section—
“PFGHR systems” means technology that can use the waste heat from condensing boilers in order to heat water;
“voltage optimisation technologies” are technologies that lower the input of voltage to electrical equipment from that at which electricity is currently generated;
“standby down-powering technologies” are methods by which electrical equipment is turned off, or reduced, during periods of non-use;
“dynamic demand” has the same meaning as in the Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Act 2006;
“district network connection technologies” are technologies that enable consumers to link up lower cost and lower polluting energy generation.”
Baroness Maddock
My Lords, Amendment 30 would introduce a new clause into Chapter 4 of the Bill, which is about reducing carbon emissions and home heating costs. We have heard quite a lot about Greg Barker today, but this clause was actually tabled under the previous Government to be an amendment to the previous Energy Bill—as they have guillotines in the other House and a different way of selecting amendments, it was never discussed—and I know that Greg Barker and Charles Hendry, who both now have ministerial positions, were in support of it.
The amendment explains to people exactly what it is doing, but I thought that it might be helpful if I said a bit about what the different technologies are. Gas savers are devices that can be fitted above a boiler to track the waste heat. They improve the efficiency of the boiler because it builds up a reservoir of hot water so that when consumers turn on the tap, hot water arrives rather sooner. This has been described as “free to users” because you have not wasted the heat—you have used it to heat the water. They also reduce the wastage of water, and warm water arrives sooner at the tap; this gas saver won an award from Waterwise because of that. It heats the cold water going into the boiler, thus meaning that the boiler has to do less work to heat to the required temperature if warm water is going in rather than cold water. In a nutshell, this facility uses the waste heat from boilers to heat water. That is what gas savers are.
At some point today there was mention of the various technologies that allow us to use our power more efficiently. We have heard all sorts of figures about how much electricity we use with things that are left on standby, but currently there are no limits to how much power an appliance can use while it is on standby, and some things have to be on all the time—you tend not to turn them off, so a lot of energy is wasted. In the UK, standby represents about 80 per cent of residential electricity use. The proposal to limit standby power to between 0.5 watts and 2 watts could save 73 per cent of this wasted energy. I will not go through all the figures, but you reach 2 per cent of the total UK energy use if you take on these types of measures. Not only would they mean that we were not using the power but it would be another way of lowering people’s electricity bills.
The same goes for demand response. Another technology, dynamic demand technology, responds to the voltage in the national grid, and that was mentioned earlier today. These devices use electricity at times only at times when it is plentiful. When electricity demand is high, the appliances turn off; they turn back on again only when demand has dropped. Modern technology makes it possible for us to do this in a way that we would never have been able to do years ago. The current cost to the National Grid of dealing with fluctuating levels of demand is about £80 million, because we keep power stations running at part or half power so that they can quickly be turned up to full power when we get extra demand. If you have dynamic demand systems in appliances, that means we would need less of this type of facility, which wastes quite a lot of power. While the technology does not lead to less electricity being used by the consumer, it would help to save because we would not be running power stations at low power.
Baroness Maddock
My Lords, I am sorry that it is my amendment that has caused some disruption to the rather smoother running that this Committee has enjoyed. I understand what my noble friend is saying. When I intervened in the previous amendment, I hoped that I was being helpful to my noble friends about how we could proceed in the future and how we could satisfy some of the issues that have been raised today regarding having more detail about what goes on. It is unfortunate that we are doing this at the last minute, because that means it is not possible to get something on record about this in a little more detail. I hear what my noble friend says; I will take this away, and it may be that we look at other ways of ensuring that the Government consider these other sorts of technologies. I know that they take these technologies on board but the right signals must be sent to the markets so they proceed with them. If between now and Report we can bear that in mind, we may get somewhere.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies, is right when he says that the fuel poverty advisory group is down in another Bill. However, that Bill has yet to get through Parliament; it is not there. You write your amendment about the situation as it stands now. Having discussed these issues with the Government, I know that it is their intention that there will be a group that advises on fuel poverty issues, although it may not be called the same thing. Had the Government accepted my amendment and then introduced such a group, when it disappeared out of the Public Bodies Bill and a replacement body was there, they would amend the legislation accordingly. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.