Community energy has many benefits not only for the energy system but also for wider community resilience as set out in the Green Alliance’s Community Energy Manifesto.

The Government already does value communities in the energy system. The Rural Community Energy Fund, which will reopen shortly, allows communities to identify and develop schemes in which they can invest and from which they can derive significant local benefits. This programme will now include community officers in each of the five local energy hubs in England.

I am also proud of the way communities support and adopt innovation not just in technology but in business planning, in financing of projects and in engaging with the local communities they represent. As a Government we support this approach and as part of our ‘Prospering from the Energy Revolution’ programme, £40m has been allocated to 4 local future systems demonstrators and I am pleased that communities like the Low Carbon Hub in Oxford at the heart of those schemes.

As the Manifesto itself points out, 5 out of 6 current BEIS Local Retrofit Supply Chain pilot projects are led by community groups. We are also supporting Community Energy England with the essential work they do to share best practice and celebrate success, and I attended their conference in Bristol in October, as part of Green Great Britain Week, to see this work in action.

I am really impressed by the work community groups up and down the United Kingdom are already doing to help their wider communities decarbonise and get involved in this transition.

In the Clean Growth Strategy, I announced the creation of a Local Energy Contact Group and a Local Energy Programme. The Contact group made up of communities, local authorities and local enterprise partnerships and provides local insight for policy teams across BEIS.

The Local Energy Programme has funded Local Energy Strategies in every Local Enterprise Partnership. These strategies will feed into the newly developed Local Energy Hubs, also funded by BEIS to create capacity and capability to help Local Authorities deliver low carbon energy projects at scale.

I have brought the Rural Community Energy Fund into my department to allow it to integrate better with the other work we are doing on heat and local ownership. Together with the Local Energy Programme, that will be almost £20m committed by this Government to support local energy in the last three years. Alongside this we have launched Prospering from the Energy Revolution, a £100m innovation fund designed to support local areas demonstrate future integrated energy systems.

This funding will unlock commercial investment in our local energy system and following a successful national Local Green finance event in Leeds in January, we will be supporting five regional events this summer to bring investors and local projects together.

The Government has a clear vision for an energy system which fairly rewards flexibility for the value it provides to the system.

We have set out in our The Smart Systems & Flexibility Plan, and in the Progress Update in October 2018, a number of actions to open up markets to distribution-connected flexibility, including community energy groups. We are also consulting on a range of changes to the energy market which offer communities a chance to have their say, and ensuring consumers are at the heart of the future energy system.