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Energy Bill

I am happy to follow the hon. Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping), the acting Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, who speaks with a long-held interest in energy issues. The hon. Gentleman ended where I begin: by contrasting the Bill before us with the great task that begins today across the North sea in Copenhagen. Earlier, I put it to the Secretary of State—he responded positively—that Copenhagen requires the United Kingdom and the European Union to be ambitious, bold and brave in reaching for the best possible permanent deal. That is obvious. We could also have had an ambitious energy Bill being debated in this country at the same time but, to repeat the word used by the hon. Member for Sherwood, this is a very modest Bill indeed. Having been in the House throughout the period, my analysis is that, after nearly 13 years in government, Labour's energy policy is perceived by many of my constituents and those of many colleagues as having left millions of the British public out in the cold. They feel worse off, not better off, as a result of the energy policies of the past 12 and a half years—and they are worse off. Energy is costing them more and the future is less certain. The number of people who spend more than 10p in the pound on their fuel bills has gone up, not down, and that situation is likely to get worse, not better, given the price increases in oil and gas that they know they are to expect. If the Government had been really bold and determined, they could have said, "This is the opportunity to try to put high fuel bills that people cannot afford behind us once and for all."—in other words, to do the sort of social justice legislating that I thought Labour came to power to deliver. It is therefore sad that, on the first day of the Copenhagen conference, when people are calling for radical action abroad, we are not seeing extensive and radical proposals at home. Over the past 12 and a half years, the response to variations in fuel costs has been a system that, although welcome when delivered, is very much one in which Labour makes people dependent on themselves. The winter fuel payment, which is a better system than the benefits system if people do not claim the benefits, has been given irregularly, spasmodically and unpredictably. There has not been a built-in subsidy for poor people, or a guaranteed, legislated-for provision so that people know they will be able to afford their bills. That is in the Bill—we are now seeing it for the first time ever—but it has taken 12 and a half years for a Labour Government to realise that without guarantees in law, people often end up paying much too high a price. As we have heard, there are three issues before us. Many of us wish that there were many more and that this was legislation in which the Government nailed their colours to the mast of continuing to support and to develop support for the renewables sector, which is growing, but from a terribly lame and slow start. Of course, in some respects there is a difference between my colleagues and I and both the Government and the Conservatives. We do not think that the future lies in nuclear power, which is always expensive, always delivered late and always risky because of the fuel that we import and the failure to find ways to store, let alone to dispose of properly, the waste that is created. Nothing that has recently come to light suggests that nuclear power will become any more safe or secure in future, as the climate change crisis affects Britain and we get more floods, more storms and more risk of disruption, with the same things happening around the world. For this country, which is so well placed with our wind, wave and tidal power, renewables are a far safer and saner route forward, and that is the way we should go.