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National Policy Statements (Energy)

I have tabled three amendments to the national policy statements motions—amendment (e) to motion 1, amendment (b) to motion 2, and amendment (a) to motion 3. I have one minute in which to speak to each one, so I will try to get the end of my speech in first. I say to the Minister that, on the arguments about delay, and if he accepts any changes, I understand the need for clarity, which is partly what I am arguing for, and that the industry needs some sort of certainty on the plan. A supposed delay in the national policy statements would not mean that applications could not be made, proceed and be heard. I know that because an application is currently being heard for a huge incinerator in my constituency that would take 750,000 tonnes of non-recycled waste every year and generate 65 MW of electricity. That perversity has come about by default, in the sense that the Minister, having decided that waste should be part of the IPC process, has set a minimum requirement of 50 MW, which has almost invited the industry to come forward with applications for huge developments. The industry has decided that it will have various sub-UK regional units, and has used this opportunity to do exactly that. Nothing has been said about the proximity principle. Local people are trying to decide how best to deal with their own waste locally. Part of the solution might be smaller incineration, and I do not contest that. I contest the scale of the current proposals, which is why I have tabled the amendments. As an hon. Member said earlier, the argument for moving this material into the guidance on fossil fuel is about the fact that it produces a huge amount of carbon. I understand the argument about why methane is better than carbon because it can be captured and used. In fact, the incinerator proposed in my constituency, basically as part of a current open-cast mine, is next to a huge landfill site. So there is a triple alliance. They are capturing the methane from the landfill site and selling it, so to me that is something of a false analysis. The question is whether such activities are green. In the context of the proximity principle, I fail to understand how it is green to drag waste from one end of the country to another without adding carbon into the calculation. I also fail to understand how it could be carbon-neutral to import waste, because my great fear is that the way this guidance is structured means that it will not be about waste policy, but about opportunities for people to speculate on energy generation, ignorant of a waste policy. The receiving stations for the waste will be at ports, to come by rail and road to be burned. The sustainability of these mechanisms is questionable. If we are to move to zero waste the amount of potential fuel supply will reduce—and rightly so—so how sustainable will they be over 25, 35 and 40 years? They might be sustainable if we were to burn the waste generated by the Camorra in Naples and import it into Newport to do that, but heaven forfend that such a thing should take place. Well, not now. The waste hierarchy is not simply about local questions of determination. In the longer term it could go much further, so I invite the Minister to choose, of all the amendments I have tabled, to put this method into the IPC's consideration process. If it is not possible to do it this way, will he please explain how it should be done, because at the moment we have a series of factors that it is apparently not to examine. It seems that the list of what not to examine, including connection and the grid, is more important than the list of things it is to examine. That means that it cannot determine any particular decision in the round, in its proper context—certainly not in relation to energy supply under the waste hierarchy. I say to the Minister that there are security problems here. If we choose to have a smaller number of larger units, that is not secure. We should be looking for a more distributed process. That is what I thought the Assembly in Cardiff was trying to think about. This trumps anything that the Assembly would want to do. It is a policy that applies across England and Wales, yet it denies the Welsh Assembly Government the opportunity to make a real decision. That is why I proposed to take it out of the processes. That would not have stopped wind energy and all the other things, but it would have given them the opportunity to determine that, so I ask the Minister—with very little time now to speak to the amendments properly—to take account—