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Energy Efficiency (S&T Report)

My Lords, I very much welcome this report from the noble Baroness and her committee. I was especially disappointed that I was unable to take up an invitation to serve on the committee, so I have read the report with interest. I was especially interested to read about the visit to Sweden. I lived in Stockholm for three years more than 30 years ago. That was where I got my first interest in this area, when I lived for three years in a properly insulated property. I came home to Britain and put cavity wall insulation in my house. I always had an ambition to build a Swedish kit house on a piece of land somewhere and so live in a properly insulated building. As other noble Lords have said, we have still not reached that level in our building standards—and I am going back 30 years. That is a great disappointment to me. As the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newham, said, the report is wide-ranging and I intend to speak only to one or two of the recommendations, which I strongly support, and shall try to explain my experience in those areas. I especially support the recommendation to try to get better co-ordination across government departments. The fact that Defra and the DTI have different responsibilities is mentioned, but, although it is mentioned elsewhere in the report, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is not mentioned there. I know that the rest of the report explains that. I was also interested in recommendation 12.14 about merging the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust. I say that because I have worked with the Energy Saving Trust for a number of years. Indeed, at one time, I recommended that those two bodies should combine. In fact, they do slightly different things—the Carbon Trust concentrates on business and industry and the Energy Saving Trust concentrates on the domestic sector—but we are very fond of setting up lots of different bodies to tackle things and, sometimes, we go a little too far. So I have a great deal of sympathy with that recommendation. The other recommendation that I strongly support concerns the role of local authorities. I say that as someone who, when I was in another place, had the opportunity to take a Private Member’s Bill through the House of Commons and, later, through this House, which became the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995. That Act set up local energy conservation authorities, based on housing authorities in this country, to enable them to draw out facts and figures about the state of the efficiency of homes in their areas and to draw up measures and plans to try to do something about it. The whole point of this was to be a starting point for the Government so that they had facts and figures to enable them to direct their money and their policies at solving the problems of energy efficiency in our homes. It is of great sadness to me that they have failed to use that opportunity. Indeed, over the years, they have not pushed local authorities to report on these matters, and the whole thing has become rather downgraded. I know from the work I have done over the years that local authorities are a good starting point. The first thing the Energy Saving Trust did was to set up a grant system, with money from the Government, called HECA—home energy conservation action. Grants were given to local authorities for projects in their areas, and it was my privilege over the years to chair the committee that distributed money in this way. The projects were wide ranging. There were all sorts of different schemes—there were local authority houses, private-sector houses and private-sector rented houses. Something interesting that came out of one of the studies was that people trusted the brand of a local authority. They would be a bit suspicious if any other flyer came through the door, but they trusted the flyer if it had the logo of the local authority on it. Therefore, if we are trying to persuade people to do things in their homes, we need to use the local authorities because we know that that helps. It has also been an enormous job creator locally. The HECA programme became the innovation programme, through which we tried to encourage people to come up with new ways of persuading people and of providing help to make homes efficient. I regret in a way that that programme has now come to an end, although the Energy Saving Trust will use all the experience that it has gathered over the years to help local authorities to replicate the best of the projects that came to our committee. Interestingly, the Energy Saving Trust has carried out a survey on how well prepared and equipped local authorities are and how easy it is for them to get involved to do the things they want to do in the areas of energy efficiency. It recently said:"““Stretched finances, limited resources and a lack of support from councillors are some of the key barriers preventing the UK’s local authorities from becoming more sustainable””." It conducted a research project—a poll of 300 local authorities—which confirmed that,"““there is widespread awareness of sustainable policies and an appetite to tackle climate change, but it is clear that local authorities need more support to translate willingness into action””." I hope that that message will go home to the Government and that they will look seriously at the role of local authorities, particularly in the energy review. This leads me to building regulations, an area that noble Lords have already touched on, so perhaps I do not need to say quite so much about it. I know from the various groups that I have worked with over years, such as the Association for the Conservation of Energy and the National Home Information Council, that despite the regulations, Part L and what we have tried to do—my noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford has also mentioned this—we know from various investigations that people are blatantly flouting the regulations and the rules. That happens in other areas of planning, I have to say, and we do not have a proper system for dealing with this. Quite frankly, we will have to deal with that problem if we really want to solve some of the other problems. I therefore very strongly support what has been said in this debate, and I hope that the Minister will be able to satisfy us a little when he comes to respond. On community heating, I declare an interest as a non-executive director of a heating company that provides district heating in Southampton from a combined heat and power plant which is supplemented by warmth from a geothermal borehole. It provides energy to the whole list that the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newham, mentioned in respect of Sheffield. It is the same in Southampton. We are also very proud that we managed to get a Barratt Homes flats scheme on to the district heating scheme. So there is private and public sector heating on that scheme. However, the economics and the barriers put in place by the Government have not been helpful. In my time here, I am afraid that I have lobbied Ministers furiously over the disincentives to combined heat and power schemes. As the noble Lord, Lord Lewis, said, the trouble is that memories—including those of civil servants—go back to the very bad schemes that we had in England. I think that there was no insulation on distribution pipes. Therefore, everyone thinks that they are not very efficient. As the committee saw, in Scandinavia, that has been going on for years and it is done efficiently. In respect of my other love, I have to declare another interest—I am president of the Micropower Council—and my interest in microgeneration. Micro combined heat and power and other microgeneration are also very important. The Association for the Conservation of Energy has said in its response to the energy review how important this is. My noble friend Lady Sharp made a point about changing people’s attitudes. Those of us who support microgeneration strongly believe that it can act as a catalyst for cultural change among consumers who put microgeneration products—for example, wind, boilers, photovoltaics or solar panels—in their homes. They suddenly become aware of a lot of other aspects of how they can save carbon and the energy that they are using, which is very important. I am most sad that the Government, who have, in many ways, done a lot of good in the small things that they have done, miss opportunities all the time. I have explained how they missed the opportunity to use the Home Energy Conservation Act. Other people have said similar things. I believe that the Government need better co-ordination and a better use of the existing mechanisms. They need to use local government more. There is a network which is ready to help to deliver many of the things that we all want to see. It is a network that can collect data and inform the policies of the Government to improve energy efficiency. I hope that in any future energy review, and in taking into account this very good report, the Government will take these things into consideration.