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UK Government's Energy Policy

Thank you, Mr Caton, for dealing with that point of order. I have enjoyed this morning and this afternoon’s debate. It shows that we have lots of talent within Wales to take forward the new technologies and innovations on renewable energy. I have always said that Wales should be an entrepreneurial country. We are now coming out of recession, during which there are always winners and losers. We must ensure that Wales has more winners than losers. We want to break free from our historical reliance on former nationalised industries and the public sector and ensure that we have lots of private industry thriving and succeeding in Wales. I particularly enjoyed the speech of the hon. Member for Monmouth. I will shortly share a platform with him with the Abergavenny Friends of the Earth, and I was going to demonstrate how closely aligned coalition thinking was on a number of matters, but we might have to tease out a few minor differences in some of our approaches. In the previous Parliament, I was a member of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. At the time, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had more competence in energy than it did later on, when the Department of Energy and Climate Change took over some of its functions. Our Committee conducted a number of inquiries into energy issues. Climate change was the flavour of the month and the flavour of Parliament, and we tried to look at niche issues that other people were not looking at. We conducted an inquiry into what we called the citizens’ charter, which was about how to get private individual and the citizen involved in mitigating climate change and producing renewable energy. We, like the hon. Member for Wrexham, went to Germany. We saw its feed-in tariff system and how it had been successful in not only getting individuals to produce their own energy, but taking forward a number of new technologies. The hon. Member for Wrexham will remember that the Energy Bill, when first introduced, did not include feed-in tariffs. He and other hon. Members across the House believed that that was an omission and campaigned for them to be included. They will be a powerful tool in creating the type of industry that he wants. I understand his anxiety over the review, but I understand that when feed-in tariffs were introduced in other countries—they might not have been introduced at the right rate or given the right budget—they had a damaging effect on industry. There was a huge rush into production and the money ran out; after a few years there was nothing to sustain it.