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Green Energy (Definition and Promotion) Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I certainly exonerate him from any suggestion that he is gung-ho about installing microgeneration anywhere at any time; of course, he has been extremely responsible, as are the Government. I am merely saying that we should continue to balance possible conflicting interests to ensure that we stay on the right side of the public and maintain their support. The limit that he mentioned is indeed the Government's thinking in terms of the permitted development right for wind turbines and air source heat pumps. A further reassurance that he did not mention—I will do so in order to join him in saying how responsible his attitude is—is that the whole thing will be reviewed after two years to ensure that it is attracting public support and that there are no areas that need any extra attention. We are all doing the best we can to ensure that this is an entirely positive experience for people. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey agreed that the strategy for England, which will be the second one, gives confidence, and stressed the importance of that confidence to the public at large. That is an important subject as we try to attract more and more people's attention towards considering microgeneration. I join him in that view and add the importance of giving confidence to those in the supply chain that provides microgeneration technology, be they manufacturers, sellers or installers. I am keen that we have a healthy supply chain with the confidence to invest in its business, its equipment and the skills of its work force because it knows that a lasting and sensible strategy is in place. The hon. Gentleman is pleased that there are dates and deadlines. I suppose that as a Minister I should not be so pleased, but I assure him that I am determined to keep to them. I look forward to meeting them in future. He mentioned the loss of the definition of "green jobs" from the Bill and described the conceptual difficulty that people have with the term. I attended the launch yesterday of a document jointly produced by British Gas and the GMB trade union called "Green Collar Britain". That is a good way of looking at jobs in the environmental industry, as people can identify with the idea of green-collar jobs. We already have more than 800,000 jobs that exist because of trade in green goods and services, which is worth more than £107 billion a year to this country. As a country and as a Government, we want to capitalise on that success and create more jobs and more wealth in environmental industries. The hon. Gentleman made a point about the capacity limits in the Bill. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle reminded us that there had been a teeny bit of confusion at one point in Committee about how the different definitions in the Energy Act 2004, earlier electricity legislation, and the Bill would mesh together. As he said, however, we have now established that they are perfectly compatible and mostly desirable. In an ideal world for the Government, we would try to leave specific capacity limits out of primary legislation, because we never know how things will turn out in future. However, they started to appear in primary legislation back in the 1980s, and there were some in the 2004 Act, so we are where we are. I am pleased that we have established the relationship between the definition of green energy, the limits for future feed-in tariffs and what is meant by microgeneration, and we can all work with the limits that we have for the time being. I noticed the touchiness on the Liberal Democrat Benches about nuclear power, but for today we will pass quickly over that. I agree with the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey about the language of fuel poverty. I am the Minister for tackling fuel poverty, and I am charged with a target of eradicating it in this country by 2016, which is an immense responsibility. I agree that the public might be more engaged with the debate if we talked more about warm homes. As a member of the all-party warm homes group I am familiar with that term, which is a positive one to engage people in dialogue about. I am with him on the importance of using that language. I understand why hon. Members were disappointed to lose the points about council tax and non-domestic rates from the Bill. In Committee, my ministerial colleague gave a detailed explanation of why each was unattractive to the Government, and I have nothing to add to that. The hon. Gentleman asked me about fiscal measures, and I was also asked about future consultations on such measures. I am certainly willing to say that the Government keep all fiscal measures under review, and consultations are planned quite soon on feed-in tariffs, for example. There will be further discussions, and who knows, perhaps when I meet him and the hon. Member for East Surrey we can touch on that subject. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle stressed the importance of energy efficiency. We all agree about that, which is why it is important that it appear in the Bill, as it does in the Government's thinking about how to improve our energy security and tackle fuel poverty. Like myself, he stresses the importance of giving people confidence to invest in the technologies in question, which is why long-term strategies and firm regulation that gives the market clear signals are very important for the future. Like him, I am pleased that we are making good headway on the subject of heat. He is right that although we have begun the march towards getting much more of our electricity from renewable energy, it will be a much longer march to decarbonise heat. That is an important priority for us. The hon. Gentleman was keen to stress that we should make much more use of permitted development rights. That is a good point, subject to the warning from my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras that we should be considerate of our neighbours in this matter, as in every other, and that we should be wary of losing public support by going too far too quickly. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle also asked me to confirm that we will consult on fiscal measures. I have given the example that there would soon be consultation on feed-in tariffs, and I am sure that each step of the way as we consider other fiscal measures, we will want to consult hon. Members and all the organisations that he mentioned. I turn to my own contribution to the debate. Met Office projections demonstrate that changes that sound small, such as a 2° C global temperature rise, will actually have serious impacts on the whole world through rising sea levels and extreme events such as droughts, hurricanes and floods, leading to disruption—[Interruption.] Hon. Members really should pay attention. This is very serious stuff. It will lead to disruption to natural and man-made habitats. Many communities across the UK will struggle to cope with the effects of warmer summers and wetter winters. The resulting disruption to their homes and lives will be the physical consequences of doing nothing now, and of failing to get an international agreement at Copenhagen. In the absence of effective international effort, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow rapidly over the coming decades. On current projections, that will result in warming of between 1.7° C and 4° C by 2100. Rising temperatures will cause a range of stresses to our planet, causing radical changes to rainfall patterns; water shortages; loss of glaciers; loss of agricultural land; and extreme weather events of increasing frequency. We have seen in the dramatic flooding in the UK in recent times, which caused social upheaval and severe economic effects in flooded towns all over the country, how easily such weather events cause chaos. We have also seen how much it costs to tackle and remedy them. Stern was undoubtedly right about the costs of not acting. Those are some of the reasons why the Government and Parliament have committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent. by 2050. We are not suggesting that reaching that target will be easy. It will require radical action, and we will need to roll out cost-effective quick wins such as insulation. We will also need to decarbonise the supply of electricity and heat, which we cannot live without. The challenge is clear when we consider, for example, that space heating accounts for 47 per cent. of our overall carbon emissions. In that context, it is critical to encourage renewable heat technologies. As hon. Members know, microgeneration technologies are varied. They can deliver both renewable electricity, through micro-wind, photovoltaics and micro-hydro generation, and renewable heat through heat pumps, biomass and hopefully in future micro fuel cells. Microgeneration can help us contribute towards our 2050 target of reducing our emissions by 80 per cent. It can also help communities and householders work together to tackle the damaging effects of climate change, and it has the potential to increase the diversity as well as the security of UK energy supplies. In many cases, fitting microgeneration will help us to be aware that we must use energy more efficiently. In the shorter term, those technologies, some of which are mature already and some of which are still developing, have the potential to help us meet our EU 2020 targets on renewable energy. We all know that those are challenging targets, which require a significant increase in renewable generating capacity. Indeed, we will need no less than a tenfold increase in renewables, which is a very daunting prospect. Our recent domestic supplies of gas and oil have come from domestic sources, putting our starting point for renewables behind that of many other EU countries. That is one more reason for supporting the Bill, which represents a second push towards reaching the microgeneration levels that will make a serious contribution to our 2020 targets. We have already put in place an energy strategy to generate a baseload from technologies such as nuclear power, and to develop carbon capture and storage. Last year, the Energy Act 2008 set the framework for moving forward to ensure that the market is capable of delivering the changes that we need now and in the future. However, it is important that householders, communities and businesses can also play their part effectively. We are therefore working on a smaller community and householder scale strategy, too. When we talk about energy saving, we must fully consider the fact that about 80 per cent. of the housing that we see around us today will still be standing in 2050. Those buildings include many millions of homes that are today highly energy inefficient. Problems can range from the cost and difficulty of double-glazing old windows to the lack of flues in houses that were built for gas central heating. It is deeply unfortunate that much of the most energy inefficient housing is in the most deprived areas of Britain. However, with a need to ensure that everyone can heat their homes when it matters, initiatives like Warm Front will continue to be important. Hon. Members may be pleased to learn that yesterday I signed the new regulations on Warm Front, which will permit some installation of microgeneration technologies through Warm Front grants for properties that are off the national gas grid. The Government's forthcoming heat and energy saving strategy will try to tackle many of those issues. It will aim to support and encourage everyone—individuals, communities and the Government—to work together and make the changes needed in the fairest way possible. We all know that homes and buildings currently use a lot of energy inefficiently. Wasting electricity on inefficient appliances and losing heat through poorly insulated walls and ceilings could cost the average household more than £300 a year. We are therefore looking at new delivery models and packages to provide whole house, house-by-house and street-by-street approaches, targeted particularly at the poorest communities. We are also considering ways of linking financial support to the property, rather than to the householder, so that subsequent house owners take on the overall costs, as they save money on their own energy bills. We will examine new measures to stimulate community-scale generation. Pilots of pay-as-you-save may be an important driver of the wider take-up of microgeneration technologies. It is a sobering thought that about a quarter of all UK emissions come from the domestic homes sector. To meet our target of reducing emissions by 80 per cent. by 2050, we will have to eliminate emissions almost completely from households. That sounds like a tough ask, but when we consider how difficult it will be to hit those targets in other sectors, there is little option. There are two separate but complementary ways of radically reducing domestic carbon emissions. The first is radically improving energy efficiency and the second includes looking at ways of generating energy more sustainably. That means that we need real growth in small-scale, low carbon and renewable energy technologies. Microgeneration will definitely have a key role to play, if we are to get where we want to be by 2020. By brigading the concept of energy efficiency with renewable and low carbon sources under the broad definition of "green energy", the Bill enables us to promote their use at that smaller scale. We recognise that, to tackle climate change, each and every person needs to play their part. We need to make it easier for individual householders and businesses to install microgeneration equipment and increase the amount of green energy generated. That is exactly what permitted development rights do—they grant planning permission at a national level and remove the financial and administrative burden of submitting a planning application. The Government have already made progress on that and granted householders permitted development rights for technologies such as solar panels and ground source heat pumps. However, we also know that that we need to go further. Micro wind turbines and air source heat pumps have a big role to play in contributing to the generation of green energy. The Bill recognises the Government's commitment to those technologies by ensuring that we will grant permitted development rights for them in a domestic setting in six months of the Act's coming into force. However, home owners are not the only ones who can help. The potential for green energy generation on land occupied by farms and premises used for commercial purposes, such as offices, is huge. Our job is to grant permitted development rights that allow developments in the right place without adverse impacts on neighbours. Let us not pretend that that is easy—what is acceptable to one person is a nuisance to someone else. It is important to get the balance and the pace of change right. The Bill commits us to consider introducing permitted development rights in a non-domestic setting in six months of the Act's coming into force. We have already started work on proposals, and we will produce a consultation paper later this summer. Of course, those are not the Government's first steps on promoting microgeneration. I mentioned earlier that we have already had one microgeneration strategy, which was published in March 2006, and had the objective of creating the conditions for the technologies to become a realistic alternative or supplementary source of energy generation. Of the 25 actions that the strategy contained to tackle the barriers to widespread uptake of microgeneration, 21 were completed and three were closed. The only outstanding action was in relation to "deeming" under the renewables obligation. That is now covered by provisions in the Energy Act 2008 to introduce a feed-in tariff for small-scale electricity generators. Work on the microgeneration strategy allowed us to benefit from a greater insight into how the market for microgeneration works and to understand better its potential as we move towards creating a low carbon economy. As I have already mentioned, relaxed planning from permitted developments, for example, will help communicate to a wider audience the real need to act on climate change now. By facilitating an easier process for installing microgeneration, it is to be hoped that schools will take a more active role in developing renewable and low carbon microgeneration projects, allowing children to gain valuable, practical knowledge about what they can do as contributors in a lifelong effort against dangerous climate change. The Building Schools for the Future programme gives immense scope for acting sooner rather than later in both primary and secondary schools. While it is vital to engage readily with home owners, small businesses and community actors, we must ensure that future generations will be keen to act, able to judge what it is possible to deliver in homes and communities, and equipped with skills to use that knowledge positively. Another key achievement of the microgeneration strategy was the introduction of the microgeneration certification scheme—MCS. I am pleased to say that it is making good progress, in terms of product and installer certification, with more than 310 installer companies certified. To bring down costs, we opened up the scheme to 14 new certification bodies, five of which—BRE, NAPIT, British Board of Agrément, NICEIC and Action Renewables—have already achieved accreditation from the United Kingdom Accreditation Service for MCS. In the next few weeks, they will be joined by EC Certification and TUV NEL. That is an excellent opportunity to build on what BRE has achieved, and a new microgeneration strategy will ensure that we continue to push forward with a robust certification process. MCS will not only provide consumers with impartial certification of installer companies and products but offer enhanced consumer protection and a means to register complaints. Through MCS, consumers can have confidence that complaints will be dealt with effectively and faults corrected. The scheme will also ensure that consumers get accurate estimates of the likely performance of the largely unfamiliar energy technologies before they sign up to them.