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Security of Supply

Not with only eight minutes to make my speech; I am sorry. Who will pay for the nuclear power and for the new stations? How will we get the planning permissions through, given the 15 years that it took to get Sizewell going, and given that we cannot alter the planning legislation? This Government tried to do that shortly after 1997. What about the underfunding, or unfunding, of the nuclear liabilities? Back in 1990, when the previous Conservative Government tried to privatise the nuclear energy industry, they simply could not do it. When the Energy Committee at the time asked for the financial reports on that privatisation from Kleinwort Benson, Rothschild and all the rest—believe me, you could have jacked your car up on those reports, Mr. Deputy Speaker—they discovered that the City of London and the private investors were not prepared to invest in it because it was too expensive and too risky. I cannot see anyone wanting to invest in it now, either. So who will pay for these nuclear power stations? Will the Government and the taxpayer foot the bill, then franchise them out under some private finance initiative scheme so that private industry can run them? Are we going to let private industry take all the profit while the taxpayer pays all the costs? I can see that going down very well. I mentioned coal earlier. We have an anti-coal DTI at the moment. There are elements in the DTI who simply do not want to know about British coal. They want it to wither on the vine and die away. Because of environmental restrictions, the energy supplied by coal will be down to 16 per cent. later this year anyway. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) has already mentioned Haworth; Rossington is in the same situation. In fairness, some of the mining companies that bought into the coal industry after 1994 have not been the best, but coal still has some advantages, one of which is clean coal technology. I should point out that that technology has been around for 25 years. When the Energy Committee produced its report in 1990, the first evidence that we took was from Texaco, whose representatives came to us and said, ““What are you doing? We’ve already got clean coal technology in America. Come and look at it.”” It was already there; it has been around for a long time. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. The power station at Grimethorpe copied the technology that was already running a power station in Stockholm back in 1990. Clean coal technology is already here. The other major advantage of coal is that we can stockpile it, as the Conservative Government realised in 1984. They stockpiled a lot of it for a long time. It does not run out, and we can quickly build the stations to use it. However much the DTI does not like coal, and however much people think that it is a dirty fuel, it will clearly be part of any solution, given the 10 years or so that it will take to get the nuclear power stations built. As my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) said, if we press the nuclear button tomorrow, those stations will still be 10 or 12 years away. We have coal here, now, and we can use it. The problems associated with gas are well documented. Even before the Ukraine situation, there were problems. Companies in my constituency, including Potters Ballotini, Rockware Glass and Carlton Brick, are experiencing problems. I chair the all-party group on the packaging industry, and we have made representations to Ministers. When I raised the question of gas supply at Question Time in December, I was told that there was no problem and that we had plenty of it. So why did the price quadruple in December? Somebody is trading it and manipulating the market to cause those problems. I shall finish by mentioning co-firing, or co-generation. This uses biomass with coal. At the moment, renewal obligation certificates are available to anybody—Drax power station, for example—using renewables such as oil cake, olive cake and biomass co-generated with coal. They get a 25 per cent. ROC for doing that, which will reduce to 15 per cent. That should be extended beyond April of this year.