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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

My Lords, I am grateful for the widespread support for the Bill on both sides. Many of the points made went wider than the Bill, and many of them were directed at the Government rather than at the Bill. The Minister has responded adequately to the points that were directed primarily at the Government. As I said, I am very grateful for the support particularly of the Minister and Members on the Front Benches. I shall pick up on one or two points that have been made in the debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, has a long record of promoting Private Members’ Bills, and her support for a clear policy that backs microgeneration and the need for clear targets was absolutely right. Industry often tells us that one of the problems that it faces is that it cannot be certain of the exact measures that the Government will have in place in five and 10 years’ time. It is, of course, impossible to commit future Chancellors of the Exchequer to exact tax and fiscal regimes in that way, but the Government will be committed to a clear target for a certain time, which should help to give confidence to industry to invest in areas such as microgeneration and local networks, which the noble Baroness and my noble friend Lord Hunt said were very important. The second aspect of introducing microgeneration and local networks is removing the regulatory and planning barriers. The Bill provides a facility for doing both in relation to the price of electricity provided to the grid, to the Ofgem regulatory regime and to the permitted development orders, which could sensibly ease the installation of both local and individual microgeneration and more generally. It was not clear why the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, said in his initial statement that he thought that the Bill would bite only in 2050. It will bite immediately both on local authorities and on government by offering the possibility of a different framework from very early on. One hopes that it will be cumulative to 2050. The Minister has dealt with daylight saving. I shall say in passing that I was a partial supporter of daylight saving for the entirely different reason of road safety. I failed to convince my colleagues then, and I think that the evidence on energy is at best equivocal, as the Minister has pointed out. In any case, it is beyond the scope of the Bill. One or two other matters were raised by other noble Lords. My noble friend Lord Judd rightly said that if we were going to tackle climate change, it would be through the aggregate of a lot of small innovations and changes in the way in which we behave. That has aesthetic and social implications that have to be taken into account when determining the distribution of the cost of adopting new technologies. He was also right to say that energy efficiency and the technology for energy efficiency had sadly been neglected in the engineering and other sectors. We must think seriously about addressing it, because it can have economic advantages by making us competitive and putting us at the cutting edge of the industry, as well has contributing to climate change. He and other noble Lords referred to particular technologies that were slightly beyond the scope of the Bill, except tidal power technologies, lagoons and geothermal power, which are indirectly related to it. Some of them apply to microgeneration, but again they are partly beyond the scope of the Bill. My noble friend Lord Hunt rightly referred to the need for information in a simple form to which consumers and small businesses can relate. That, of course, could well be part of the obligation that the Bill places on local authorities and part of the measures that the Government’s Statement will require from local authorities. The role of local authorities was rightly emphasised by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and others. Indeed, the importance of more local activity, right down to the level of parish councils, is an important dimension of the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, also referred to the cost to the individual consumer or small business of introducing microgeneration. That is undoubtedly true; we cannot provide for subsidies directly with this Bill—it is a Private Member’s Bill—but we are trying to remove the unnecessary costs of planning and regulatory burdens. The noble Lord also asked why there was an option for the Secretary of State to set an actual target in Clause 4. That is partly because microgeneration is still a technology which needs to be tested. There is therefore an objective assessment that the Secretary of State needs to make before the terms of a target can be set and we decide what technology will be defined by it. The noble Lord also referred to a wide range of technologies, which are all important in the bigger picture of tackling climate change. On Clause 13, my noble friend was right: the objective of Part L of the building regulations, only recently introduced, could be deeply frustrated were the resources and ability of building regulations inspectorates to be tied down to acting as soon as the building was completed. Many aspects of insulation may not be immediately apparent, but, once they have been discovered, there is a reasonable time limit, and the process is not draconian; it fits in with many other ways in which local authorities enforce building and other regulations. We have had a wide-ranging and positive debate. I hope to see that reflected in the Bill’s subsequent stages. Clearly, some things are outside the scope of the Bill, and it probably is not appropriate to add whole new sections, but I hope that we can have some useful discussions on its detail. In terms of the very big picture, to which my noble friend Lord Judd and other noble Lords referred, this is one aspect of what ought to be addressed by the energy review. If the energy review is going to adopt processes for large power stations, whether nuclear, gas-fired or whatever, that is only one part of our energy strategy; the other part must be to encourage energy efficiency, greener forms of energy and to get the whole of the community fully involved in a push to combat and mitigate climate change. On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.