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Energy: Draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation (EN-6)

He raises a very important point. If it were the case that the sole beneficiaries of feed-in tariffs and the renewable heat incentive were well-off people, that would not be right and I would not support it. We do bear that point in mind. I have to say that we are very supportive of schemes that are being developed whereby, for instance, social landlords in a position to get the benefit of the feed-in tariff are thus able to invest in microgeneration, and the tenants receive the benefit of lower bills as a result. I very much understand my noble friend’s point and I refer him to the Energy Bill, now in our House, in which we introduce mandatory social tariffs, which is a very good start. My noble friend is right on the substantive point that we need to be careful to ensure that our interventions do not cause problems for the most vulnerable people in our society. It has taken me some time to get to the issue of the 10 sites. The whole basis of this matter is that, in principle, we believe that new nuclear power should be free to contribute as much as possible to meeting the needs for 25 gigawatts of new capacity. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, started this debate about whether 10 sites are enough. He raised a number of factors which he thought might make it very difficult to reach 25 gigawatts, particularly in the timescale of 2025. Of course, there are uncertainties. There is no certainty that development consent on all sites listed in the NPS will be granted. I return to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that it is wrong for him to assume that the IPC will automatically give consent to each application simply because a site is listed as potentially suitable in the national policy statement. For that reason we felt it necessary to include all 10 sites to ensure that sufficient sites are available for development. It is not possible to predict whether there will be one or more reactors on each of the 10 sites.