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Energy: National Policy Statements

My Lords, this has been a long debate. Having heard the Planning Bill mentioned, I am pleased that I was not involved when it went through the House—but some of this area is new to me. What I particularly liked in the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, was his description of this all being a little too late. While not wanting to go through the history, that is an important point. The report shows that through the present management and structures in the industry, we have a 60-gigawatt gap that we have to replace by 2025, which is not that far away in terms of the investment timescales that this industry operates by. It is a short timescale when we think that one of the issues we have is declining gas supplies. We have got through a resource that took some 30 million years to create in about 30 years. What have we got to show for that? If you are a Norwegian, you have a sovereign wealth fund that is worth about £260 billion, or £56,000 per person, which is more than the public sector debt increase per person in the UK this year. It is a big sum, so big that it would pay for the investment of £200 billion that is needed for the capacity mentioned in the recent Ofgem report, plus the investment of £25 billion required, mentioned in the UK low carbon transition plan, for the UK to meet its first three carbon budgets. That is where we are at the moment. The UK energy industry is in a slow train crash, which we are still not convinced will not happen over the next 20 years. As a Liberal Democrat, my position in this debate is quite simple because I do not believe in the Infrastructure Planning Commission, so I could say that this document is completely irrelevant. One of the things that I find interesting is that in local government, which I have become more involved in recently, we thought we were clever because we used to delegate all the not very important planning decisions to appointed people—officers—and they used to decide most of them. However, we thought it important that elected people looked at the important ones. Somehow, we have nationally got ourselves into a position where MPs and Members of this House delegate really important decisions to appointed people. We do not let elected people get involved in them any more. The noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, said that the creation of the IPC is a little strange, given some of the manifestos about localism, as it is rather a move in the opposite direction. However, if we have an IPC, we should have an overarching policy for it to look at. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, that we could probably have such a policy statement without the IPC. We need to have certain things agreed and, even if local government takes decisions, there are certain areas that may be off limits for local decision. We can have one without the other. There are some parts of this document that I particularly like. For instance, on carbon capture and storage, it lays down that new energy stations need to be able to be retrofitted. However, there is surely a much easier way of achieving that through the Energy Bill that is about to come to this House, which may even get to its Second Reading before it goes into the procedures before the general election. This document is a good guide. If you want to understand what the government policy is—and a lot of that policy is good—you may get that from reading this document, which brings out the triangular relationship, the trade-off between energy security, climate change and carbon and the cost of energy to the consumer. Coming new to this, and having read the document all the way through and not disagreed with much of it—only here and there, perhaps—I ask what it actually adds. What does this policy statement actually do? Does it mean that the IPC says yes to everything? If it is not a national park and a planning proposal does not wreck biodiversity, does it say yes? I would be interested to hear from the Minister under what circumstances the IPC, under this document, could say no, apart from those very restricted areas of national parks. I take the point of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool that the one thing that seems to be completely missing is the idea of energy mix. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, that that can be changed by the Government in their policy; maybe that is where it should happen and not at this level. The fact that that energy mix, which is required to meet this overall national energy strategy, is not there, is the elephant that is not in the room. It is in paragraph 3.4.4 to some degree, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, mentioned—but it specifically says that those are not targets, so they are not to be taken into consideration by the IPC when it makes its decisions. Ironically, in terms of the nuclear area, there is a more geographic-specific message in there, and if you have that kind of strategy statement, that is the sort of thing that you need. Otherwise, it is generally completely non-geographic. With energy security, a big issue, alongside declining gas supplies and diversifying supplies, would be port facilities, which I do not see here. Should that be included in our energy strategy overarching document? It seems to me that it should be. I return to energy efficiency. I may be wrong, but I do not see energy efficiency mentioned anywhere in this document, and yet it has to be a major part of energy strategy. It might be the one reason why we say no, because you should be doing something other than increasing your energy capacity—maybe not immediately or not in the first 10 or 15 years, when we will definitely have this gap—but I do not see that as a reason for saying no to future power development. As a democrat, as we all are in this Committee, it always seems to me that there is an inverse relationship between climate crisis and the ability of democracy to work effectively. As we move towards not solving climate change, more and more decisions will have to be taken at the centre and away from our traditional democratic structures. That is one of the reasons why we need to tackle climate change before that crisis comes. If I am honest, I see the IPC as the first part of that greasy pole.