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Planning and Energy Bill

I jotted down a phrase that the hon. Gentleman used earlier. He said that what was needed was more imagination, political and practical. We also need to take more cognisance of developments in science and technology, and experiment a bit more. It might mean failing some of the time, but we might also achieve our aims more quickly. The 10 per cent. target will be hard to achieve without co-ordinated action on the part of all local authorities. The Bill's purpose is to enable all local authorities to set renewable and low-energy targets for new developments. That could apply not just to individual buildings, but to complexes. Without the Bill, I can envisage the game being played in the opposite way. Without a mandate to get on with meeting the 10 per cent. target, it could be challenged by people who would say ““We will hold up the planning process because you are trying to suggest that we do something that we know we do not have to do.”” The whole process could be stalled and blocked by authorities pulling us in the opposite direction from the best-practice councils gathered around Merton. Let me pursue the point made by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) about imagination. When I was Minister for Energy and Industry between 1997 and 1999, we published a report on renewable energy. It did not quite catch the zeitgeist—I am pleased that we have moved on in the past 10 years—but at the time I went to Northumberland to see a project on a council estate consisting of about 3,000 houses. The developers had adopted almost a traditional village-green approach: using brilliant engineering and science, they had managed to blend in a complex of renewable microgeneration in the centre of the estate, using energy from waste, wind power and biomass. Rather than depending on a wind farm, which would produce nothing when the wind did not blow, they were able to ““cross-reference”” energy sources. That approach has not been considered more widely. In general, people are opting for single-issue solutions. Given that there is no single source of energy that could be described as perfectly pure and green, why not blend sources together and create new possibilities like the developers of that estate in Northumberland, which was kept warm by a complex of renewable energy sources? Hospital waste cannot be buried. I had a furious row with some ““deep greens”” who said ““We cannot burn hospital waste.”” Well, hospital waste must be burnt, but why not install a combined-heat-and-power station in the hospital and use energy from the waste to heat it? That has already been done at St James's University hospital in my city. We need more imaginative application at local level if we are to get anywhere near our targets. It has been said that the Bill is about individual buildings. I think back to that community in the north-east, because in my view the Bill should be about communities. The hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) mentioned cost. In Leeds there are still rows and rows of terraced houses—classic terraced streets with washing hanging across them—but their ownership is mixed. A terraced house there could be owner-occupied, owned by a landlord, or a council miscellaneous property. In the past, if new roofs were needed it was not a case of putting a roof on one house, leaving a gap because a roof could not be afforded for the next house, putting on another roof, leaving another couple of gaps, putting on another roof and so on all along the terrace. There was a scheme enabling the whole terrace to be repaired—roofs, doors and windows. It was called ““enveloping””. The same system could be applied to renewable energy, including solar energy for heating water. I know that January has not been a brilliant month for sunshine, but although most people do not realise it, what is needed for solar energy is not bright sunshine but light in general. We could improve whole communities and rebuild neighbourhoods: we could build renewable energy into neighbourhoods. I am still thinking in terms of imagination. A report published by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and Ofgem suggests that we should view the distribution of energy in Britain very differently. We should not think of the system as a grid, although it is one at present. How can we build microgeneration into it? We might not need buried cables and power lines stretching across the country in future; instead, the system could function at micro level. The Government have already made good progress, after great argument, to enable the electricity that is generated but not needed in a local community to be passed back to others through the grid.