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Green Energy (Definition and Promotion) Bill

This has been a high-quality debate on an important Bill, and I welcome the important and significant contributions made by a number of Members. Before turning to the contribution and Bill of the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), let me deal with some of the other contributions. My hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead), who has a strong record in this area and has pushed hard in many ways the issues of feed-in tariffs and a renewable heat incentive, has championed this cause for a long time, as have other Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson), whose knowledge on these issues is also substantial, made some fascinating points about the local generation of gas and the importance of ensuring that we address the local generation of electricity. His point about the benefits that can come from local people owning the generation of their own energy is important, and was also made eloquently by the hon. Members for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) and for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson), all of whom have taken up this issue. The Government recognise the importance of local people becoming stakeholders, and we want that to be developed in the coming decade. The hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) calls himself a recent convert to these issues; we welcome him to the green agenda. He made an important contribution to this debate, and I welcome that. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) spoke about the importance of pulling microgeneration from the fringes of the energy debate and into the mainstream, and I share his wish. That approach builds on the Government's microgeneration strategy and on the great raft of energy, planning and climate change legislation that we took through the House at the end of last year. Much of the microgeneration strategy, which I shall come to in a moment, has been implemented and we now need to ensure that it is revitalised; the Government fully intend to do that. I am conscious of the House's wish to move on to other debates. I suspect that my response will take about 30 minutes, and after the hon. Member for East Surrey has responded, I hope that we can move on—with your consent, Mr. Deputy Speaker—to the Bill that I know my Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham), wants to speak on. The hon. Member for East Surrey has a long track-record in raising green energy issues. That record is highly respected in the House, so when he introduced this Bill, we knew that it needed to be taken very seriously. He does not bring up these issues frivolously or to score points. Indeed, I am sure that he will not mind my repeating that when I asked him whether he wanted just to score some points, or to get a Bill through and do something serious, he was very clear that he wanted the latter. That, indeed, is how he has approached this issue throughout our discussions. I hope that we can support the Bill and ensure that it will enable the Government to build on the work that we and others in all parts of the House have done in recent years to support the development of microgeneration technologies in the United Kingdom. My discussions with the hon. Gentleman have gone well, and the Government have sympathy with many of the points in the Bill and its aspirations. There are some clauses that we do not believe are right, however, and I shall say more about that in a moment. We think that quite a lot of work needs to be done on the Bill's detail, and I hope that—without in any way gutting it, and making sure that its thrust is taken through—we can ensure that we get a Bill that the microgeneration industry regards as positive news, that advances the green agenda, and that makes the important contribution I believe it can make to ensuring that we deal with climate change issues. Of course, significant parts of the hon. Gentleman's Bill are already covered in the Government's programme to support take-up of renewable energy and low-carbon technologies at domestic and community level. We want to ensure that we can create a sustainable market for renewables and low-carbon, on-site energy technologies. There is increased interest in microgeneration technologies, with individuals and communities wanting to play their part in tackling the challenge of climate change. The Government want to encourage that interest and make it easier and more attractive for individuals and communities to contribute. Taking up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South, the key to feed-in tariffs is achieving the necessary degree of vested interest—in the best possible sense—that comes from having a local source of energy from which people benefit and which they can see making a direct contribution to their local community. That may well meet some of the concerns that Opposition Members have expressed about onshore wind, but other types of renewables may be helped by the introduction of feed-in tariffs and, in due course, the renewable heat incentive. Before going into the details of the Bill and our views on the clauses, I shall set out the broad background to the energy agenda and how the Bill fits into it, commenting on feed-in tariffs as I do so. We face challenging targets to increase the use of low-carbon energy, which will require a concerted effort over a long period. Having cross-party support is important to that effort, because we are talking not about a period of one Government, but about decades of change that will be required to deal with climate change. As much as I would like to believe that the Labour Government will continue for decades to come—ambition is important—I suspect that that will not be the case. However, I shall briefly outline our ambitions for the energy picture in the coming decades. First, we need to ensure that electricity in particular is generated in a way that does not damage the environment. We need to ensure that the requirement for massive change and massive investment by large-scale energy companies is fulfilled, and we need a nuclear base load to provide the base on which renewables can be built—that is enormously important. In addition, substantial build-up of renewables is essential. Leaving aside microgeneration for a moment, I am talking not only about very large-scale renewables—the large offshore and onshore wind farms—but about more localised energy generation. In various ways, not through wind alone, such sources will provide renewable energy generation. Renewables generation suffers from the problems of intermittency—energy is not generated predictably all the time—so flexibility is needed in energy generation. Our energy policy must therefore take in coal and gas-fired generation with carbon capture and storage. That fits well with escalating generation, but also key are the growth of community-based energy and ensuring that individuals can see that they can contribute by generating their own energy. Also, because the best energy is the energy that we do not use, as has been said, we must make an enormous effort on energy efficiency. That is the overall picture. Nuclear provides the base load and renewables are the essential component. Flexibility comes from coal and gas-fired power stations with carbon capture and storage, but we also need local and diversified energy generation, as well as individuals, where possible, generating their own energy through microgeneration; and, on top of all that and across the board, we need greater energy efficiency.