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Energy Bill

I strongly support the amendment for the reason given, and another in the area of cultural change. In our debates on these subjects, we often come back to the fact that, for all the rhetoric, people leave the lights on or do not understand the practical aspects of daily living that would lead to more efficient use of energy and other resources. My wife is from Denmark, where we have often travelled. That country has a good record for renewable energy, partly through banks of offshore wind turbines but also through ready grid access for microgeneration. It is usual to see a couple of windmills on a Danish farm; it is part of the culture. The same is true of environmental awareness in other areas of Scandinavian life, such as campaigns to reduce the average speed on roads. Ultimately, you must engineer a cultural change in the public awareness for the public to realise that a thing must happen. Anything we do to bring home the need to be sensitive to environmental issues is absolutely right. I keep a few hens in Chester because of distaste with some aspects of factory farming. A school trip was looking around Chester and had tea in the garden. I took some of the young children down to see the hens. One of them had recently laid an egg; there it was, warm. A young girl showed particular interest in it, and I said, ““Take it home for your supper””. She said, ““I couldn’t possibly eat that!””. To her a real egg came in a box from the supermarket; it was not laid by a real hen. That illustrates the reality of living in our society, and how we can get disconnected, as it were. There may be practical issues in the amendment that I have not picked up, but the real merit of it in principle is that it addresses the need for our communities at a local level to take these issues as seriously as possible.