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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

Microgeneration is at the heart of the Bill. It is an essential element of a decentralised energy policy, which could provide a substantive part of the answer to the challenges of climate change in the United Kingdom. My party, under the leadership of—[Interruption.] I paused because I was about to mention the Christian name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), which would obviously have been out of order. Under my right hon. Friend’s leadership, my colleagues are considering what substantive part we can play in future energy policy. We take microgeneration extremely seriously, and it forms an important part of the Bill. However, the amendments tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) add nothing to the Bill; they cloud it. I always thought that the Conservative party was sceptical—to say the least—about anything that could be seen as a regional solution. In England we are not a nation of regions, but of counties and cities, and steps towards regional government have been firmly rebutted, so I am surprised that my right hon. Friend vests so much faith in regional solutions. They are costly, bureaucratic, opaque and, given that we have no democratic structures at regional level, undemocratic and unaccountable. Regional targets are no good. Industry needs national targets to spark investment, and such a target could include a breakdown of how much each region should do to promote microgeneration.