Energy Update

Debate between Margaret Greenwood and Greg Hands

Monday 5th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

The hon. Gentleman is tempting me to go down the road of Her Majesty’s Treasury announcements on tax and other matters, which I am afraid I will have to resist doing. I think he will hear before too long what the Government propose to do on these vital matters.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

People are really frightened about how they are going to get through this winter. One of my constituents, who is a widow with long-term health issues, has written to me to say that she will have to cancel insurance for her pets—so if her pet becomes ill she will not be able to take them to the vet—and will get rid of her car, which is vital for her to get to medical appointments. She says that her gas and electricity bill was originally about £85 a month, but she has now received a direct debit statement saying that it will go up to more than £255 a month; her energy costs will basically triple. She is terrified about how she will manage this winter, as are many of my constituents. Will the Minister give us an assurance that he will impress on the new Prime Minister the scale of the catastrophe we face if the Government do not come forward with a major increase in support for people facing these bills?

[Greg Hands]

I am concerned to hear about the hon. Lady’s constituent. Indeed, many of all our constituents are facing difficulties and prospective difficulties at this time. In relation to her constituent’s car, the Government have reduced fuel duty at the cost of about £5 billion to the Exchequer, and that will help people to run their cars. We are acutely aware of the difficulties faced by consumers, but we have risen to the challenge. The £37 billion package announced for this year so far is a considerable amount of public spending to help consumers with bills, and there will be more to come.

Home Energy Efficiency: North of England

Debate between Margaret Greenwood and Greg Hands

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Energy, Clean Growth and Climate Change (Greg Hands)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on securing this important debate. As ever, it is excellent to have so much good representation in the north of England from our party.

This Government’s unwavering commitment to decarbonise the country’s 30 million buildings has the welfare of those who most need energy-efficient homes at its very core. Getting to net zero is not just a legal commitment; it is the right policy for this and future generations. Improving the wellbeing and living conditions of northern communities is a key part of the levelling up of all our towns, cities and regions as we build a green Britain that works for every part of the country.

Underpinning all our work in that area is the heat and buildings strategy, a copy of which I have brought to this debate, published at the end of October 2021. It explores different options for low-carbon heating, from hydrogen trials to heat networks and increased use of heat pumps, to meet the challenges of each region of our country, recognising that there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.

At the same time, we are taking a fabric-first approach to retrofit, ensuring that emissions are reduced first, regardless of how buildings are heated. That will be supported through a commitment to invest £6.6 billion during this Parliament, which is funding technology trials and capital schemes such as the home upgrade grant and the boiler upgrade scheme. In the past year alone, we have committed more than £1.3 billion to domestic retrofitting schemes, which was one of the central points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington and, indeed, other Members.

We have prioritised the worst performing low-income homes to receive measures such as external wall insulation and clean heating systems. That has already lifted thousands of households out of fuel poverty, and future phases of home decarbonisation will upgrade over half a million more. Families who would not be able to afford energy efficiency improvements for themselves will be able to face future winters knowing that they will be warm, sometimes for the first time.

Our local authority delivery scheme and home upgrade grant empower local authorities, which know their communities and housing stock best, to decarbonise local homes according to specific needs. In the north, around £226 million of funding has been allocated to local areas through the latest phases of those schemes. As many Members have said, the north of England has benefited disproportionately from the energy company obligation. Since that scheme started under this Government in 2013, over 13% of homes in the north-west and over 12% of homes in the north-east have received energy efficiency measures. Indeed, 12.2% of households in Darlington have had their homes improved under the energy company obligation, compared with an average of 9% across Great Britain.

My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington, who is vice-chair of two relevant APPGs and knows the engineering heritage of his town so well, made an excellent speech. In researching it, he sat down with local housing providers such as North Star Housing, which quoted some striking sums regarding the costs of retrofitting a home relative to the value of that home. My hon. Friend made some thoughtful arguments about how we should evaluate the cost efficiency of those different measures. He also pointed out that 64% of properties in Darlington are rated below brackets A to C on energy efficiency, which shows that despite the progress we have made on energy efficiency—particularly over the past decade—there is still much work to do. That is why we are investing £6.6 billion over the course of this Parliament.

We had an intervention from the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who is not in her place anymore, to say two things. She attacked the Government’s record on renewables, nuclear and energy efficiency. I found it startling, considering that when the last Labour Government started their period in office, they said that when it came to nuclear, they saw no economic case for new nuclear power stations in this country. That was at the start of their 13 years in office.

On renewables, we have taken the amount of energy generated from renewable sources since 2010 from 7% of the energy mix to 56%. That is an incredible increase in our renewable output as part of our energy mix.

[Margaret Greenwood]

The Minister is right that my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) is not in her place, but would he not agree, or concede, that it was a Conservative Government that pulled the funding for solar on people’s roofs, stymying an industry and making it much more expensive for people to install solar? Precious years have been lost, and we could have had many more solar panels on our roofs.

[Greg Hands]

I fundamentally disagree. Solar has done incredibly well in this country. We have a big capacity in solar—I think around 14 GW. Our ambition is to grow that to 70 GW. Part of that is thanks to the VAT reduction that we saw this year. I do not remember the hon. Lady supporting that VAT reduction on solar panels. The Government are taking active measures to increase and support solar energy.

On energy efficiency, when we took office in 2010, just 14% of properties in England were rated “energy efficient”. That has risen to 46%, which in 12 years is an incredible increase. However, that shows that 54% of our properties are still not sufficiently energy efficient, so we still have work to do, but we can only do it by making investment. The last Labour Government said there was no money left. Perhaps if they spent a little more on energy efficiency in those 13 years, we would not have been in a position where only 10% of homes were rated A to C when we took power.

My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington asked when the new energy company obligation scheme will begin. I think the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), also raised that same point. A three-month interim delivery phase was introduced between 1 April to 30 June 2022 under the previous scheme rules to enable delivery to continue subject to some measure limitations. Obligated suppliers may choose to deliver under the new scheme rules backdated to April 2022, when the underpinning legislation was put in place. We are pleased to announce that we laid the draft Electricity and Gas (Energy Company Obligation) Order 2022 before Parliament on 22 June. We expect the regulations to be made and come into force in July.

My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington also asked about energy advice. Our simple energy advice service, launched in 2018 in response to the Government-commissioned “Each Home Counts” review, provides homeowners with impartial and tailored advice on how to cut their energy bills and make their homes greener. The service has been accessed by over a million users.

Shale Gas Production

Debate between Margaret Greenwood and Greg Hands

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for his continued interest. I am always happy to meet with his group to discuss these issues. He is absolutely right: domestic supply is very important. This is not the time to be wanting to increase imports of foreign LNG. That is one reason why we want to see a robust UK continental shelf producing UK natural gas. The point he makes about investment, jobs, tax revenues and so on would be considered in the round, but I point out the earlier point about seeing the scientific evidence first and the local community support as well.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

Many Wirral West residents are extremely concerned that petroleum exploration and development licence No. 184 covers Wirral West. The Government’s failure to ban fracking leaves my constituency at risk of this dangerous technology that would extract fossil fuels at the very time that we should be moving to renewables. I led a successful campaign against underground coal gasification in the Dee estuary in 2013 and last month the Government told me that they no longer support the development of UCG. Can the Minister reconfirm whether that position is still the case, or whether it has changed, and will he ban both fracking and UCG?

[Greg Hands]

I have laid out clearly that our policy on fracking is unchanged. The hon. Member illustrates well the need to keep community support. When it comes to renewables, this Government’s record is one of the best in the world in delivering on renewables. We have the world’s largest installed offshore wind capacity, a new dedicated pot for tidal, and a lot of progress on solar and on onshore wind. All these things are helping the UK to produce a very diversified set of energy sources, which is a key part of our response to the current crisis.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Margaret Greenwood and Greg Hands

Thursday 14th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Trade Policy (Greg Hands)]

The United Kingdom has long promoted its values globally. We are clear that more trade does not have to come at the expense of our values. While our approach to agreements will vary between partners, it will always allow this Government to open discussions on issues, including on rights and responsibilities.

[Margaret Greenwood [V]]

Following on from the Minister’s response, successive UK Governments have believed in the principle that all new trade treaties should contain clauses allowing those treaties to be suspended if the other party engages in serious abuses of human rights, yet the UK recently signed new treaties with Singapore, Vietnam and Turkey, none of which had those clauses, despite ongoing concerns about the records of those countries. Can the Minister please explain why?

[Greg Hands]

The hon. Lady might be misunderstanding the nature of the continuity programme for rolling over existing agreements. I point out that, on Turkey, the underlying agreement dates from 1963, and there were no human rights clauses in that agreement, but that does not mean to say that we do not have a robust discussion with Turkey on human rights. The EU-Vietnam framework agreement was separate and was not necessary to achieve trade continuity, but again we have a good dialogue with Vietnam on human rights. The UK and Singapore have agreed a UK-Singapore political joint statement to reflect our close partnership. Once that is signed, it will be published on gov.uk.