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Energy Bill

I enthusiastically put my name down in support of the amendment for a number of reasons. First, I see it as all of a piece with the work we did in passing the Climate Change Bill through the House over the past few months. It is hard to imagine a successful Climate Change Bill without this type of movement by the Government. Secondly, the dog that did not bark sufficiently during the passage of the Climate Change Bill was behaviour change. This amendment will have the effect of driving behaviour change in exactly the right direction and in exactly the right way and, hopefully, at the right pace. I support the significant number of my Party’s Back-Benchers in another place who put the amendment down in the first place, and I very enthusiastically support it. I come at it from the communitarian aspect because the opportunity exists here to enthuse and encourage communities to feel less like victims and more like masters of their own energy fate, and I cannot see that as anything other than a very good thing. It allows ordinary citizens to feel that they are not simply at the mercy of this or that massive energy producer. It is sometimes possible in your Lordships’ House to feel as if you live in a parallel universe. In some respects, a lot of the responses to the concept of tariffs feel a little like that. Fortunately, I was encouraged on Monday by a press release put out by my right honourable friend Ed Balls, Secretary of State at the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Some of your Lordships will have seen it, but I want to use it as an example—and on Report I will offer the Government many other examples—of where it is a no-brainer to start looking at what we are doing and feeding this concept into what we are doing, what we are committed to and paying for. Ed Balls said: "““The Government is taking the first steps to making every new school building zero carbon from 2016, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls announced today””." He said, in passing: "““I don’t have time for critics who will carp that this is impossible. I know that current technology makes zero-carbon schools expensive and challenging””—" very challenging— "““to install on many existing school sites. The fact is that we have a clear moral responsibility to future generations to make it happen. We can no longer sit back and wait for the science to catch up with us—it would be a dereliction of duty if we did””." I could not agree more. He went on to make the point that Ministers are already taking significant steps in announcing £110 million specifically to install cutting-edge carbon reduction and renewable energy technology in more than 200 secondary schools that are already undergoing major refurbishment over the next three years, mostly as part of the Building Schools for the Future programme—BSF. That is on top of the £21.9 billion capital investment in schools between 2008 and 2011, including £9.3 billion earmarked for BSF. That is money committed and being spent. I suspect that we might hear from the Government that this is an interesting area, that they would like it to go out to consultation and that maybe in a couple of years’ time they will come around to doing something. By that time we will have spent at least one-third of the money committed to Building Schools for the Future. Not to use the money and the opportunity to turn local schools into, effectively, energy-generating plants, not just for themselves but for their communities, would be close to madness. In what better way could you engage young people in understanding the energy needs of the future? What better way could there be to get this science-starved nation to understand the science of energy than every schoolchild in the country knowing that they were sitting on the energy-generating capacity of their community? I regard allowing this to pass while we sat around consulting and thinking about it as precisely the kind of dereliction of duty that the Secretary of State was referring to. I enthusiastically support this. It would be a major stain on the Government’s reputation were they not to accelerate to make it happen.