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UK Government's Energy Policy

Thank you, Mr Caton, for allowing me to contribute to this debate. I shall not follow the train of thought of the hon. Member for Monmouth. I wish to concentrate on one issue today: the Government’s policy on the feed-in tariff regime. My hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham shares my great concern about this issue, which impacts on jobs in my constituency and on the potential for creating new jobs for the future in Wales and, indeed, throughout the United Kingdom. I should like to take the Committee back to February 2010, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), then the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and now the leader of my party, announced a feed-in tariff regime, which encouraged businesses, such as Kingspan in Holywell in my constituency and Sharp in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham, to continue to develop the potential for photovoltaic cells to be placed on buildings for the microgeneration of electricity. Electricity supplied using the feed-in tariff procedure provides income for those who generate it. At the time, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), representing the Liberal Democrat party, said: ““This will disappoint anyone looking to do their bit to contribute towards our energy supply. Another opportunity has been squandered...Labour’s plans are too little too late.”” Given those comments, I was very surprised that, on 7 February this year, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change announced in a written ministerial statement that he had ordered a review of the feed-in tariff regime that the Labour Government initiated in February 2010.