Energy Bill [Lords]

Debate between Edward Miliband and Katherine Fletcher

2nd reading
Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)]

Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I will begin by welcoming the arrival of the Bill to the House. I thank the Secretary of State and his Ministers for their willingness to engage in discussions on the Bill, which, as I will explain, we support. Given his speech, after the next election I look forward to him providing some AI consultancy for my house, once he has some more time on his hands.

For us, the central truth that frames this Bill is, as the Secretary of State said in his speech, the energy bills crisis, with bills still double what they were 18 months ago. This crisis demonstrates the urgency of getting off expensive fossil fuels and moving to clean power. Clean power is the route to cheaper bills, energy security, long-term sustainable jobs and tackling the climate emergency. The peril for Britain is the deep uncertainty about whether the Government are doing what is required to make the transition happen with the urgency needed. Let us look at the last couple of months alone. In March the Climate Change Committee stated that the Government are “asleep at the wheel” on their 2035 decarbonisation target. In the same month the National Infrastructure Commission said that

“movement has stuttered further just as the need for acceleration has heightened.”

The cross-party Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee said in April:

“At the current pace of change, the UK is set to fail to hit its target of decarbonising the power sector”.

The common theme is one we have heard many times about this Government: they act as if this was not the emergency it is. The Bill needs to put that right, so we apply three tests to it: does it represent an all-out sprint for zero-carbon power, the linchpin of a net-zero country; does it provide a proper plan to spread the benefits of cheap, clean power to working families across Britain; and does it provide an industrial policy that means we can win the global race for the jobs of the future? In that context, we will give our support to the Bill, because we welcome many of the measures in it and believe they are long overdue. We have long called for the independent system operator and planner—I will come on to that—as well as the CO₂ licensing regime, because, as the Secretary of State said, carbon capture and storage is important for the future. We welcome measures to support hydrogen, nuclear and action on the grid, and a number of other aspects of what we might call “green plumbing”, which is largely what the Bill is about. We also welcome the improvements made in the other place, for which I thank their lordships. I will come on to those in the course of my speech.

But despite the things we welcome, set against the tests I listed we believe that the Bill still lacks the urgency and long-term strategy required. If the pace and scale at which we need to transform our energy system is akin to climbing a mountain, the Bill is a route map to basecamp, but it will not take us to the summit. It is too half-hearted on the zero carbon sprint that we need, it does not take sufficient measures to make working people the priority in the energy transition, and with the pace being set by President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act—I am sure Members hear this in their constituencies—it does not put Britain enough at the forefront of the race for low-carbon jobs. That is why we will be seeking further improvements to the Bill during its passage.

Let me start with the sprint for zero-carbon power. Last summer, renewables were nine times cheaper than oil and gas. Today, even after the recent fall in gas prices, they remain multiple times lower. However, onshore wind—among the cheapest, cleanest, and most quickly deployed sources of energy available to us—remains effectively banned in England. That is thanks to the decision in 2015 to put it in a unique category of difficulty compared with other local infrastructure, so that one objection can defeat a project. Indeed, it is now far easier to build an incinerator or a landfill site than an onshore wind farm.

This ban has meant that in the eight years since 2015—the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero was candid about this earlier this year—just three wind farms have been built in the whole of England. Since 2015, we have had five Prime Ministers and just three onshore wind farms. I make that to be three fifths of the wind farm per Prime Minister—that is my great maths. That is quite the record.

Members across the House will have different views on wind farms, but the cost of the ban—[Interruption.] The Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero is chuntering from a sedentary position, but these are his figures, which he said at Energy questions. According to Carbon Brief, the cost of the ban is more than £5 billion. That is £180 per household because of the expensive gas that we are importing when we could be using onshore wind. In future, failing to achieve the doubling of onshore wind deprives us of another 20 GW of power. Any self-respecting energy Bill would lift that ban. Even the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who is sadly no longer in his place, called for the ban to be lifted when he was briefly Energy Secretary—that was not a glorious time, but he got it right when he argued for bringing that position into line with other infrastructure. In December, in a promise made by the Government, the Communities Secretary said that, by the end of April, the ban would be lifted. We have gone beyond the end of April.

I hate to say this, but the dinosaur tendency in the Conservative party seems to have prevailed once again, and I am afraid that, on this, the Energy Secretary is actually the dinosaur-in-chief. Despite all of the evidence, and despite 78% of the public supporting onshore wind, according to his own Department’s polling, he said in the midst of the energy crisis that he was not in favour of onshore wind because it is “an eyesore”. He is the self-styled TikTok moderniser, but he is more of a pterodactyl nimby stuck in the past on this. [Interruption.] I will take Wallace and Gromit over a pterodactyl nimby.

As well as that drive for all forms of zero-carbon power, we need this. I therefore appeal to right hon. and hon. Members across the House, because this should not be a party political issue. Labour will seek to amend the Bill to bring about the simple position of the right hon. Member for North East Somerset that onshore wind, which is supported 20:1 by the public, should have the same planning rules as other local infrastructure.

[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman was engaging in palaeontological analysis. If I can bring him to the slightly more recent past, he named the number of wind farms given planning permission since 2015, but could he name the number of Labour Energy Ministers between 1997 and 2010 and how many nuclear projects they commissioned?

[Edward Miliband]

Actually, I was talking about onshore wind farms that had not just planning permission and consent—[Interruption.] I will tell the hon. Lady simply. In 2006, Tony Blair changed the policy to be in favour of nuclear. When I left office in 2010, we identified 10 new nuclear sites, and there have been 13 years since then. How many nuclear plants had been built and made operational? Precisely zero. The Secretary of State had to talk about the previous Conservative Government, who left office 25 years ago—that is indeed stuck in the past.