English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 5th March 2026 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Ravensdale]

241: After Clause 73, insert the following new Clause—
“Report on Local Area Energy PlansThe Secretary of State must, within 18 months of the day on which this Act is passed, publish a report setting out—(a) the number of strategic, combined, or local authorities that have—(i) developed, or(ii) implementeda Local Area Energy Plan (LAEP);(b) barriers to progress that authorities have had in the introduction of LAEPs;(c) options for introducing, within one year of publication of the report, a statutory requirement for LAEPs;(d) proposals for funding, technical support, training, and capacity building initiatives to assist local authorities in preparing and implementing LAEPs;(e) clear evaluation criteria and success metrics for the programme and any pilots carried out.”

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of Peers for the Planet and as chief engineer at AtkinsRéalis. This is another one of those areas where we have recycled amendments from the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. We had a few of those earlier. I worked on a similar amendment on that Bill with the noble Earl, Lord Russell. The response of the Government at that time was pretty much “Wait and see” in relation to the publication of various plans, many of which we have now seen, which includes the warm homes plan and the local power plan. We have an opportunity to come back to this issue and see what progress we can make. I thank the Minister for her engagement with me on this matter and for her recent letter, which helps to clarify some of the thinking within government.

This amendment aligns closely with my Amendment 3, debated on the first day of Committee, on competence for strategic authorities relating to energy. There are two key issues with the energy transition that local area energy plans will help to resolve. The first is a cost-effective transition. Of course, the cost of energy has received a lot of attention in recent years, but bringing in the local knowledge that knows the housing stock, the charging infrastructure and the grid infrastructure best in local areas is of real benefit to ensure that the most cost-effective and efficient solutions are taken forward in the transition. Also of critical importance is that buy-in from local stakeholders. There is a huge amount of infrastructure that needs to be built as we go through the energy transition, and ensuring that local stakeholders are brought into that, are taking part in it and making a lot of those decisions is of huge benefit in ensuring that the transition is successful.

I work closely with the East Midlands Combined County Authority—EMCCA—on a number of areas. I am chair of Midlands Nuclear, where the EMCCA is the secretariat for that organisation. EMCCA is blazing the trail with local area energy plans, and it is worth focusing a little on what it is doing as an exemplar in this area to illustrate what is possible. EMCCA funded a region-wide development of local area energy plans for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and it used a single provider to develop eight plans across the 17 local authority and unitary areas. Those plans will also have a digital-twin model to bring all that data and proposed interventions to life.

As part of this, those organisations have clarified the governance route in respect of how local area energy plans fit into the overall governance of the energy system. The regional energy strategic plans—RESPs—are developing with the National Energy System Operator, but local area energy plans are a key input into those RESPs. This has tested how these really need to be live documents; they cannot just be produced once and sit on a shelf but need to be constantly matured and to be integrated into governance and decision-making.

To give one example, the Nottingham local area energy plan has highlighted a number of things. There is potential for a significant increase in solar from 40 megawatts to over 200 megawatts in the dense urban area that Nottingham is; the type of retrofit that is appropriate for the housing stock in that particular area; the heat transition, heat network expansion, air source heat pumps and what the most appropriate level of technology is for heat transition in that area; EV charging; and capacity planning for the different headroom in each substation across the geography. It has shown how these local area energy plans answer those practical questions on how the energy transition needs to work for a local area. They have proven their worth.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

I thank the Minister for that response. I also thank the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for all his welcome support for these amendments.

As the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, said, all parts of the system must work together. That is what we need to focus on in the energy transition for this to work. In order to do that, we absolutely need bottom-up as well as top-down. We absolutely need a bottom-up view to inform the spatial plans that are being put together by NESO so that we can have the most effective transition.

I listened carefully to what the Minister said. I note that she referenced a lot of the work that is being done on regional energy strategic plans via NESO, which is, of course, welcome. For example, the Nottingham example that I gave highlighted the importance of having these local plans to inform regional energy strategic plans to ensure that the data and local picture are there to support those regional plans. There is still work to do to figure out how this overarching governance of the energy system will work.

I look forward to further discussions on this issue with the Minister but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 241 withdrawn.