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Energy: National Policy Statements

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Climate Change Adaptation Advisory Committee, president of the British Trust for Ornithology and a trustee of the Wildlife Trusts. I am also a former chief executive of the RSPB and the Environment Agency, which covers nearly all the bodies that sent me briefings. Casting our minds back to the long nights on the then Planning Bill and the equally long nights on the marine Bill, we all knew that the national policy statements would be pretty crucial in providing a framework for the IPC’s work. We really need to get them as right as possible, and this is our first opportunity. I recognise that re-engineering the energy supply and distribution network of this country quickly to meet the challenges of the Government’s low-carbon transition plan is no easy job, and that the aims must be to remove as many barriers as possible and to stimulate the market to deliver propositions to the IPC. However, we have to be careful that we do not risk throwing the baby out with the bath-water, or steering the IPC into a process that says that meeting climate change challenges is so overwhelmingly important that some other adverse impacts on the environment are completely justifiable. I am therefore absolutely and diametrically opposed to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, here—and will indeed oppose any amendment which he brings forward to give primacy to the climate change challenge. It is increasingly the tendency to say that climate change, if you are not a refusenik on it, is so important that it trumps everything else. I do not believe it is beyond our ingenuity in this country to deliver both on carbon reduction and on other environmental outcomes. Sustainability is becoming a kind of unfashionable word; it used to be in every second sentence in the environment field, but I hardly see it at all now. However, the principles still exist. It should be possible to develop new energy generation distribution systems that will deliver on the challenges of climate change, on economic development, on social welfare and on other environmental outcomes at the same time—without falling into that undesirable trap of seeing it all as a trade-off against each objective, with them all being subservient to climate change. Looking at the national policy statement, I alternate between thinking that it is either an admirably flexible document or a horribly limp document; I have probably come out on the limp side at the moment. However, I want to talk about its limpness not in terms of whether it will deliver carbon reduction sufficiently quickly but whether, in its very limpness, it runs other risks for the natural environment and whether the decarbonisation process that it outlines is insufficiently structured to make sure that the natural environment is protected. I want to raise a number of points. My first, on the issue of spatial explicitness, has already been raised by other noble Lords. The nuclear NPS is rather more of a model in that respect than this overarching national policy statement for energy. It makes an attempt—quite rightly, in view of the controversy surrounding nuclear decisions—to be much more spatially specific. We could learn from that because, in the absence of co-ordination and alignment with spatial plans, we have this real risk. If the IPC and the NPS do not align their work spatially with regional strategies, local development frameworks and marine plans—after all, this process replaces the local and regional government planning process for major energy infrastructure—investment decisions by people promoting developments and IPC decisions will be made in isolation. That would result in sub-optimal outcomes for the natural environment, as well as for energy security and emission reductions. I hope that the Minister can encourage the IPC to work with a process that the DCLG and DECC have undertaken, looking at the strategic capacity assessment regionally to help facilitate regional spatial integration. That would help to deal with the cumulative impacts of a range of proposals on the natural environment. We have heard today about some of the places that will be rather popular for energy generation proposals. Our estuaries will be popular, as will our coasts, particularly in the east, and Cumbria, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Judd. We need to be sure that the IPC is not dealing with proposals piecemeal but is taking a spatial approach to dealing with these in an integrated way. The NPS needs to be much more spatially explicit. It cannot just rest on clarifying existing policies; it ought also to be identifying areas that are or are not suitable for specific types of development of energy generation and distribution. It might even be persuaded to go as far as identifying specific local locations for development, as the nuclear NPS does. The second area where the NPS worries me in its limpness is its tone. The fact that it is technology-blind, needs-blind and very much market-led, not making specific commentaries about favouring technology or identifying the decarbonisation impact of proposals, means that there could be a general woolly admonition to the IPC that reducing carbon needs to happen so quickly, and meeting the challenges of climate change is so pressing, that we will seem to be saying in a kind of woolly, grey-goo fashion that we need lots of new energy developments, lots of different technologies in lots of places—and by the way, we need them now. The risk is, as panic sets in that the low-carbon infrastructure is not being developed quickly enough, that the IPC will not be given sufficient structure through this NPS to make sure that it is not just backing everything everywhere in a way that could have real downsides for other environmental considerations. I shall quote paragraph 4.18.6 from EN-1. I ask noble Lords to listen extremely carefully because there will be examination questions afterwards. It is about the Government’s biodiversity strategy and it says, in giving advice to the IPC about making decisions: ""This aim needs to be viewed in the context of the challenge of climate change: failure to address this challenge will result in significant impact to biodiversity. The policy set out in the following sections recognises the need to protect the most important biodiversity and geological conservation interests. It also acknowledges that the benefits of nationally significant infrastructure development ""may include benefits for biodiversity and geological conservation interests and that these benefits may outweigh harm to these interests"." I hope that noble Lords were listening carefully. I would like to try to summarise that; I think it is saying that climate change will harm biodiversity, and therefore it is okay to harm biodiversity to ensure that climate change does not harm biodiversity—an interesting proposition for the IPC. The real challenge is not that at all. It should be how the IPC can help to drive forward new carbon-reduction developments while safeguarding existing biodiversity interests. I want to remind noble Lords about the huge progress that we have made in the past 20 years in the protection of our important natural resources. When I first entered the environment movement 20 years ago, it was common for there to be demonstrations, sit-ins, marches and protests as major infrastructure projects harmed our most important biodiversity sites—Twyford Down, the Newbury bypass and a variety of propositions that did not go ahead as a result of legitimate protest. It was a common feature that big infrastructure development automatically appeared to go through all the most important wildlife sites in this country. We have moved well away from that now; I can say without any difficulty that I cannot remember any recent cases where that was proposed. We need to find ways of creating development and infrastructure without harming biodiversity interests. Will the Minister assure the Committee that there has been genuine progress and that he wishes to task the IPC with finding ways of promoting carbon-reducing infrastructure without having an adverse effect on our important natural resources and biodiversity? I cannot overstate my concern about the tone, another example of which is the potentially flawed way of thinking that is outlined in paragraph 4.18.13, which talks about local and regional biodiversity sites. I remind noble Lords that local wildlife sites are absolutely vital for the network of biodiversity, for supporting the more common species in this country, and for bringing people right across the country into contact with valuable natural resources and wildlife. These local and regional sites give them contact with the natural world that many city dwellers now lack and are a useful educational resource, so we should not regard them as a second-order proposition; they really are important. The IPC needs to give due consideration to such regional or local designations. However, paragraph 4.18.13 says something different. It says: ""However, given the need for new infrastructure, these designations should not be used in themselves to refuse development consent"." That is admitting defeat before the IPC even starts. We should give it the target of not trading off valuable local natural resources in the interests of carbon reduction. Its task should be to ensure that it does both at the same time. Will the Minister give assurances on these issues? There is no doubt that the NPS, in replacing some of the current national planning policy, needs to incorporate the strength of the national policy guidance that has been developed over the past 20 years and that has given good support to our valuable wildlife. The NPS claims to incorporate the national planning policy, but there are real inconsistencies between the NPS’s treatment of environmental impacts and the current suite of planning policy statements, so, again, will the Minister assure us that the section of the NPS on biodiversity impacts will be strengthened to comply fully with the Government’s current national planning policy? Two other minor but important pieces of process in the NPS need to be highlighted. One is the process of appraising sustainability and the habitat regulation assessments. Both these processes, as used to assess the national policy statement, very narrowly defined reasonably competing alternatives so as to virtually exclude them. Paragraph 4.4.3, for example, gives a strong steer to keep the consideration of alternatives under the habitats directive proportionate. I agree that it needs to be proportionate, but it should not be restrictive. We should not say that alternatives should simply not be on the table because of the overriding importance of decarbonisation. There is a real risk in the way in which the NPS is structured that the IPC is guided to decisions that simply do not meet the requirements of the habitats regulations. Getting the balance right between the need for national infrastructure and local adverse impacts will be extremely important. Local impact reports must be given their proper place. I have not yet caught up with the guidance that has been given to the IPC, so I hope the Minister will confirm that the guidance will ensure that the local impact reports are an important part of its consideration. Your Lordships may have missed a report which the Wildlife and Countryside Link produced recently on the Government’s commitment to halt biodiversity loss by 2010. The report has seven indicators of progress on that 2010 target. Only one of them is green, four are amber and two are amber-red. So we are not yet stopping the decline in biodiversity on which we depend for our future, and on which vital ecosystems depend. We must not allow the process of agreeing infrastructure through the IPC to add to that decline. The transition to a low-carbon economy is imperative for both climate change and energy security reasons. Decision-making for major energy infrastructure must be crisper than the policy statement implies and needs to include a sound understanding of what is needed and where it is needed to maximise benefits and minimise costs. The NPS must make sure that the IPC rises to the challenge of helping to support the transition to a low-carbon economy, but not at the expense of the natural environment, which is equally vital to our survival. I believe that the NPS needs to be strengthened if it is going to deliver for biodiversity.