---

Energy: White Paper

My Lords, I join previous speakers in welcoming the Minister to the Dispatch Box and congratulate him on his excellent maiden speech. His qualifications in the real world of business, rather than in politics, are formidable, and I intend to draw on them during the course of my intervention today. I hope that his appointment signals a real change in the new Administration’s approach to changes in climate and, in particular, to a related subject in which I can declare an interest; namely, daylight saving. I am the founder chairman of LEAP, the Lighter Evenings All-Party Group, which will, incidentally, meet again on Monday 16 July. All noble Lords are of course cordially invited. I hope also that Her Majesty’s Opposition and the Liberal Democrats will take the opportunity provided by the change in administration to look again at their own response to daylight saving as a means of ““meeting the energy challenge””, which is the title of this debate, as well at the other benefits that it will bring to our society. However, before I embark on the energy-saving aspect of the debate, it should be worth while my questioning what statistics the Government and the opposition parties have to back up their continued insistence on GMT for the winter months. Where is the data to demonstrate that this policy makes any contribution towards meeting the country’s energy challenge? I have been fortunate enough to have had sight of a detailed study in draft of Dr Elizabeth Garnsey and Brendan Cronin from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Technology Management in the Department of Engineering and Judge Business School. It is entitled, Re-evaluating Daylight Saving in the United Kingdom. Their considered conclusions recognise the differences of opinion on the relative advantages and disadvantages of darker mornings or darker evenings, when the total hours of daylight are constrained. However, no factual evidence in favour of a return to GMT in Scotland or elsewhere in the United Kingdom is to be found anywhere in the study. In fact, research estimates show that a greater loss of life and a greater number of casualties occur as a result of the annual return to GMT on the last Sunday of October throughout the UK, including Scotland. It is clear that since 1971, at least 5,000 deaths have occurred on the road that are directly attributable to switching to GMT during the winter months. I shall come to saving energy in a moment, but I first want to hear from the Government and the opposition Front Benches statistics which can justify the current situation. I want to hear also statistics showing that maintaining GMT, with darker afternoons and evenings during the winter months, can be of benefit to the tourist industry, with which I believe the Minister is well acquainted. Was he not until a few days ago the chairman of Tourism Alliance, which represents most, if not all, of our tourist businesses? Was he not also a director of VisitBritain? Therefore, how can he justify his Government’s apparent continued resistance to changing the time-scale for the winter months, which is seriously damaging all businesses connected with the tourist industry and about which we have received many representations during the past two years? Will he not take advantage of his new position and influence and use his specialised knowledge to change the situation regarding GMT, or has he been given new statistics, unbeknown to us, which can justify the status quo? If so, perhaps he will be good enough to let us have them. I have referred to the position paper from Cambridge University on electricity generation. Can the Minister show what economies in electricity consumption are brought about by returning to GMT for the winter months? Does he dispute the facts recently given by the National Grid Company, which stated that shifting from GMT+1 in summer to GMT in winter has caused an average increase in electricity consumption of 1.2 per cent during the past six years? This is the equivalent of putting an additional 47,000 cars on the road in terms of carbon emissions. Furthermore, is the Minister aware that the increased peaking of electricity usage during the week after the autumn clock change to GMT on the last Sunday of October increased the cost of electricity generation by an average of £18 million during 2004-06? I can find no mention of daylight saving in the Stern review, which is 576 pages long, or in the Economics of Climate Change, volumes 1 and 2, which is 393 pages long, or in the draft Climate Change Bill, which is a mere 63 pages long, or in the White Paper before us today, Meeting the Energy Challenge, which is 342 pages long. That is a total of 1,374 pages of printed matter, weighing just over six kilograms on my scales, and there is not a squeak on the subject. That is strange. If the Government and the opposition parties do not support daylight saving, they must surely have a good reason for maintaining GMT during the winter months. If so, what is it? By their omitting to mention it in the glut of government papers referred to, one is given an uncomfortable impression that something fishy may be going on, such as a political stitch-up between the parties. I hope that I am wrong. I will therefore, if I am permitted to do so, bring before the House another Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill, but with one big difference from the original. Instead of switching to GMT+2 during summer months, under the new Bill the country would remain on GMT+1—summer time—throughout the year. My reason for this is that new evidence has been put before me which has convinced me that the existing switchover from summer time to GMT, quite apart from wasting electricity, puts an unnecessarily large strain on the country's present generating capacity. The extra load is currently taken up by the ageing peak stand-by generators, and, as the old nuclear power stations are shut down, as noble Lords have mentioned, this problem will be further aggravated in the years ahead. Daylight saving by maintaining GMT+1 throughout the year would greatly reduce this problem and deliver lighter afternoons and evenings throughout the winter month, which should satisfy the interests most critical of the status quo. The only advantage it would not deliver is to harmonise the United Kingdom's time-scale with Central European Time. However, I wonder if this change of heart might persuade the doubters on the Conservative Benches to look again with more enthusiasm at a new Bill on the subject. The question I must put to the Minister in the sphere of this debate is: where are his department's statistics to justify the maintenance of GMT during the winter months? None has been forthcoming from his predecessors, or the Opposition Benches to date, in spite of the passage of the Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill through this House, which was without their help; while the Energy Saving (Daylight) Bill, introduced by Tim Yeo MP, chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee in the other place was disgracefully filibustered out of time by the Government with the connivance of the opposition parties. The Minister must surely be aware that the United States, Australia and Canada have recently introduced daylight saving procedures, in spite of the different time zones within their countries, in order to save energy and carbon emission Therefore, can he give any reason why there is a delay in this country in following suit? The US Department of Transportation claims that energy use across the country has been cut by 1 per cent each day of daylight saving time. Has the Minister's department produced any figures, which could either prove or disprove benefits occurring here if British Summer Time, GMT+1, was maintained throughout the year, thus requiring no clock change on the last Sunday of October? Hardly a week goes by when members of my All-Party Group do not receive representations on lighter evenings from varying interests, such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, the tourism industries, school teachers and sporting and leisure organisations to ask what is happening about daylight saving. Therefore, I looked with hope, but without success, at the forthcoming Bills in the Queen's Speech, released by the Prime Minister yesterday, to see if the Government have changed their mind on the subject. I have also looked through again before this debate at the plethora of papers which surround the subject of climate change to see if I had overlooked mention of this important subject. Again I had no luck in finding anything. Will the Minister, with his long experience with the CBI, comment on the desirability of the United Kingdom harmonising its time-scale with Europe, a provision which could be added at some other time? The only surveys I can recall seemed to indicate certain ambivalence by the CBI in this area. I have no objection to Dr Stern's review, which advocates the alchemy of taxation combined with lucrative carbon set-off procedures to transmute carbon emissions into gold for the government agencies involved with climate change. The plethora of Government agencies and advisers can have a field day with the amount of additional paper they can generate as a result of the Stern review. The argument I put on daylight saving is entirely based on energy efficiency and a reduction of pollution. The question of atmospheric carbon is another question altogether, which I will come to when I have a few moments. I want to take noble Lords back 30 years. I tabled an Unstarred Question on atmospheric changes and weather patterns as long ago as 30 November 1978. It is a perfectly respectable speech which is relevant today. Absolutely nothing has happened for the past 30 years in gripping this problem. I said: "““In conclusion, my Question raises the far wider issues of communication between the scientific community, Government agencies and the general public. Scientists work within an entirely different framework from that of us in Parliament. Their statements have to be more restrained and are based on proven scientific fact, and often because of that their conclusions are not necessarily unanimous. That is particularly the case with questions of weather and climate””.—[Official Report, 30/11/78; col. 1447.]" I said that 30 years ago. It is absolutely relevant today. The jury is still out about atmospheric carbon. I am sure that the Minister has stacks of papers on the subject. Will he say that carbon and methane emissions occur after the increase in global temperature? The ice cores clearly show that they do. Therefore, if they come after, how on Earth can we reduce global warming by reducing atmospheric carbon or methane? I am not a scientist; I am reliant on the distinguished scientist Dr Michael Cole for making some of these things simple for me. This situation must be addressed by the scientists. They have not made it clear and are still arguing about it. There is a further question on methane. There has been a lot of talk of biodiesel. In each of the past 20 years, I have spent two months in the Far East. I have driven from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur on the highway. When I first went there it was wall-to-wall rainforest. I drove along it last year and it was wall-to-wall palm oil. Perfectly good forest areas have been cut down. Forest peoples have been displaced, as in Sarawak and Borneo. Indeed, rice plains are being replaced with palm oil plantations. It is very simple to grow, requires little maintenance and offers high profitability. Indeed, Europe gives grants for it. I met a man who told me that if he was given six men with six cans of diesel, he could clear 1,000 hectares of rainforest in 30 days. He was paid to do this by the plantation company. The more Europe buys biodiesel from the Far East, the more forests will be destroyed and the more people will be displaced from their houses, and now the greater encroachment will be that people will be tempted to sell their land which at the moment produces rice. This is absolutely crazy and totally unnecessary. I also question the doubt expressed by one speaker that oil reserves will last only five years. I have no doubt that that is completely wrong and that they will last a good 40 years. I am left with a slight bewilderment. Everyone has been talking about the same thing for 30 years, very little has happened, no nuclear power has come about and we are still doing nothing. That is the problem with a democratic government of which we are all part, one way or the other. No one can make long-term decisions without them being changed. The situation has been set out by a whole number of Peers so far. It has to stop. We all have to get together and come to a considered conclusion with the help of the scientists to do something sensible about meeting the energy challenge.