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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

I do, but I also have strong views on smart metering. The energy sector is desperately keen to get smart metering entitlements, simply to allow it to bill us more effectively. The really smart meters on which we ought to be insisting are the kind that would empower the Royle family. I am not talking about the royal family down the road, but the Jim Royle family, in which people barely get out of their armchairs except to get a cup of tea. Such people would look at the meter clicking away on the wall and shout to the rest of the family, ““What are you doing? Have you left the doors open again? Are you drying your tights with the hairdryer? Am I made of money? Switch that thing off!”” In a sense, the meters must inform and empower the public rather than just empower the energy companies to bill us more effectively. I agree with the imperative, but the House needs to make an important decision about the function of those meters and about whom they make smart. That takes me on to the built environment. I welcome the commitments on building zero-carbon homes by 2016. At best, however, that might involve 200,000 houses a year, which prompts the question of what we will do with the 25 million homes that we have already. Unless the same standards and requirements are applied to the upgrading of existing stock, a new build programme will not address the fact that 25 per cent. of carbon emissions come from existing homes. To do that, we need to enhance some of the measures already in place and introduce new ones. As part of our legislative commitment to eradicate fuel poverty by 2016, the Government introduced the Warm Front initiative along with the energy industry’s complementary energy efficiency commitment. The difficulty with the funding of those two programmes is that, according to current assessments, in 2016—by which time fuel poverty should have been completely eradicated from UK housing—there will still be 2 million fuel-poor households. The only way to address that is to bring Warm Front and the energy efficiency commitment and its increments into a single coherent programme, delivered through, or under the auspices of, local authorities. Such a concerted and co-ordinated programme would upgrade all our housing stock to a standard assessment procedure rating of 65—the threshold set for modern, well-insulated housing—and dramatically reduce carbon emissions. It is not enough, however, to give local authorities additional money to deliver the programme; we must give them additional powers. We cannot just set higher standards in building regulations for the materials used. There must be a conceptual shift in our thinking about the built environment. We must move to the notion of our houses being not just consumers but generators of energy, as has happened dramatically in Germany. To do that, we need to give local authorities unrestricted powers to set sustainability standards for every part of the built environment, including planning and building regulation requirements to incorporate energy generation in every upgrading of a property and in every development of new properties. That must apply to the domestic, commercial and industrial sector. We should learn from other parts of Europe and consider the recycling of water—which will also be a part of the climate change crisis that will affect our lands, irrespective of how desperately it affects those in other lands—as well as energy. Those issues ought to be part of the regulatory framework in which we plan for a more sustainable environment for the 21st century. What can the Chancellor do to enhance that? First, people who have properties with a minimum SAP rating of 65 should be exempt from 50 per cent. of the stamp duty that they would normally pay on property transfers. Secondly, properties that have incorporated energy regeneration and water recycling as well as the SAP rating of 65 could be offered 100 per cent. exemption from stamp duty. That would transform the way in which people thought about the nature of their property transfers. To cover the most vulnerable sector of our housing environment, we must also address what would happen to properties that are currently let with the poorest of insulation. We must give local authorities the power to set precisely the same standards and requirements as a condition of the right to let. If we do not set those standards, we will retreat into an era of Rachmanism. That is not to oppose people’s right to acquire properties to let, but to say that in a civilised society people should not have a right to let properties that are in a state of squalor to those who are too poor to exercise any other housing choices. We must set standards of sustainability in the built environment that will make homes fit for people to live in today, and fit for our children to occupy and acquire tomorrow. Those are the ways in which we can transform one part of the built environment; but even in the commercial and industrial sectors, each business occupies its own part of that environment. One of the conditions that should attach to access to the array of tax incentives and allowances that the Chancellor has made available today and in previous years is acceptance by businesses, whatever their nature or size, of the duty to play their part in meeting the Stern report’s requirement of a 1 per cent. contribution of turnover to climate change mitigation measures. They too must adhere to the Government’s national target of a 5 per cent. reduction in carbon emissions year on year between now and 2020. They do not have to do that, but they should not expect to receive any tax subsidy or allowance if they choose not to, because if they choose not to, someone else will have to step in to clear up the mess that they have created. Allowances must be made conditional on a different ethical contract between business and society, between commerce and society, and between domestic development and society: commitment to an agenda that will enable our children to survive, rather than be left scrambling in the wake of climate chaos. As for transport, there are a number of things that the Government can and should now do, in every Budget. The basic starting point is to set a self-denying ordinance: the amount of capital invested in private transport infrastructure should never be greater than the amount invested in public transport infrastructure. The starting point should be parity. In the context of motoring, however, there is a compelling case for learning one of the lessons from the Conservative Governments that we succeeded. I refer to the introduction of the fuel price escalator. We will not make major differences by changing the rates of road tax on different types of vehicle. What we must do, as motorists, is accept that we will have to pay a price premium for the carbon that our vehicles emit. It is not good enough to drive twice the mileage and produce a net addition to carbon emissions in a vehicle that, although more efficient in theory, ends up doing more damage in practice.