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Energy Security

This is an Opposition Supply day, so it is quite reasonable for me to question the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton about his party's policy. Returning to the point raised by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), the £100 billion figure is the sum total of private sector investment needed to finance this change in our electricity consumption. Yes, it will be paid for, ultimately, by consumers. That is true, and we have set out in the document our baseline assumption about the impact on bills and what it will mean. We will need to do more on energy efficiency and providing further help and support for fuel poverty households—we accept that challenge—but as I am sure the hon. Gentleman understands as a distinguished Select Committee Chairman, there is no way of somehow conjuring up that money out of nowhere, with no consumer ever being affected by it and all of us getting on with the rest of our lives without noticing that £100 billion. We will notice the £100 billion in our bills over the next 10 years. There is simply no other reality for us to address. The challenge for the Government is to mitigate the impact of those rising bills. Again, in our renewable energy strategy, we set out some ways in which, sensibly, we could do that, but we must all keep in mind that simple reality. I want to come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton about feed-in tariffs, because he is right that they have had a significant effect in many other countries in bringing on new technologies, but at significant cost to consumers. Germany, for example, is often cited, as it was today by the hon. Gentleman. He, like the House, will be aware that there are moves to reduce the feed-in tariff because of the impact on consumer bills. At a time of rising energy prices, it is incumbent on us to take into account how we make the transition to a greener power generation system. We must take into account the impact on people's bills, because our constituents will come to us and say, ““Why are my energy bills going up to meet the costs of going green?”” We must have convincing arguments for that.