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Energy Bill

My Lords, without commenting on that last observation, I will simply congratulate the noble Lord on an interesting and reflective speech—the sort of speech we should hear more of in our deliberations in the second Chamber. Perhaps I may tempt him to take his thinking a little further. I frequently find myself considering how far we are prisoners of an assumption that we must have energy at our disposal, and how far we may have to move into an age in which much of our original thinking, policy-making, research and the rest will concentrate far more on how we do not need energy in the way that we have taken for granted in the past. Perhaps, over a beer or a coffee together, the noble Lord and I might have an interesting discussion about these things. I firmly welcome the Bill. I will not be alone in saying that it is good to see my noble friend at the helm on these matters. Why do I welcome it? I will summarise what seems to be glaringly obvious. The Bill will provide better protection for consumers. It will ensure environmental benefits. It will assist in achieving sustainable economic development. It strengthens the provisions for meeting the social challenges of fuel poverty. It faces up to the challenge of the opportunity given to generators for exploitation and making excessive profits at the expense of the consumer—an opportunity resulting from insufficient transmission arrangements. As my noble friend rightly emphasised in his introduction, it recognises that long-term solutions will not be found by constraints alone: increased transmission capacity will be essential. I declare an interest—this is not the first time that I have had to do this—as a vice-president for the Campaign for National Parks, president of the Friends of the Lake District and also, happily, a resident of the Lake District National Park. I am deeply impressed by the way in which Ofgem has welcomed its role of social responsibility in protecting both the environment and the interests and well-being of consumers, not least the vulnerable. Evidently, it takes pride in making this a core aspect of its work—one has only to look at the observations that it recently sent us on the Bill. This leads me to ask my noble friend how the Bill will provide for the protection of consumers during the upgrading of the transmission system. What will be Ofgem's responsibility to protect consumers from the adverse impacts that upgrading the infrastructure and lines will inevitably have? This must be seen in the context of the inevitable upheaval involved in the construction of the huge necessary infrastructure, and the power stations themselves, involved in our renewed commitment to nuclear energy. Does my noble friend not agree that the Bill could be further strengthened by the addition of clauses spelling out that the costs to consumers and society must be viewed in more than just market-orientated financial terms, and that the precious and priceless character and value of our countryside and scenic inheritance should also be central to Ofgem's duties? In the absence of such clauses, what convincing reassurances can my noble friend give in this respect? As I have argued recently in the Moses Room, my anxiety about the society in which we live is—in the words of the old adage—that we know more and more about the price of everything, and less and less about the value of the things that really matter. For a decent society, we need energy, although I temper that by saying that it is high time we started to think more about how we reduce our dependency on energy generation. We live in very stressful, pressured times; life becomes faster and faster and more and more hectic. For our health and well-being as a society, we desperately need contrast, space and beautiful things to make our society worth living in. To have a beautiful society we need energy, but we also need the countryside that will provide opportunities for spiritual uplift. It would be a major tragedy—I do not apologise for repeating the arguments I used recently in the Moses Room—if in this new commitment to the next generation of energy, we were to commit the mistakes made in the first Industrial Revolution. It is not that we did not need the first Industrial Revolution, but with more thought and care, it could have been done without raping and destroying our countryside, including some of the most beautiful valleys in the nation. If we do that again, we shall never be forgiven. People will say, "How foolish they were; with the evidence of the last Industrial Revolution in front of them and with their preoccupation with how the worst scars should be removed, they did it all again". From that standpoint, it seems to me that the challenge for all of us, not least for my noble friend, who is always very good when I challenge him—he is a very civilised man and I always think he sympathises with the points I am making—is not to drift into a mindset of either energy or a commitment to our rich inheritance of scenic beauty and so on. The challenge is how we fulfil our obligations to both and how we get our act together. I know that some will say—my noble friend has said to me before in debate—"Hang on a moment, I accept a lot of the strength of that argument, but we also have to consider the economic advantages that come from a new lease of life for energy production and energy provision, which will be advantageous to a lot of people". However, these issues are not simply the preserve of the precious, privileged middle-class or of those who enjoy large estates; they can be much more direct. On the west coast of Cumbria where I live, the paradox is that, against the setting of the unrivalled beauty of the national park, we have some very deprived communities. We have some traditional working-class villages which have nothing to be said for them in aesthetic terms. I have heard people say, "At least we used to have the Solway Firth, the hills of Dumfries beyond and the peninsula out to the far west of Scotland but now we have windmills whirring around, screening the beauty of the view". As the Bill proceeds, we should all face this very big challenge, which I hope we take seriously.