Clause 36
Energy Bill
9:00 am
Charles Hendry (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Wealden, Conservative)
It is a pleasure. Mr. Amess, to be back under your chairmanship this morning. We finished our previous sitting with an extended, but appropriate, speech by the Minister. Members of the Committee were slightly surprised when I encouraged him to extend it further, but I wanted to prove my alphabetical prowess by noticing that he had missed out a few letters during his journey through the clause.
This part of the Bill will be subject to substantial debate. Some of the issues that we shall discuss this morning were chosen to be debated on Second Reading by many hon. Members. They are the sort of matters that people have focused on particularly in their representations to the Committee.
I shall start by speaking to clause 36 stand part, after which I shall introduce new clause 6 tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay. We believe that most elements of clause 36 are standard and sensible. In general, we support the changes but, as I have said, it is against a background of a significant failure of the Government to encourage take-up of renewable energy in the United Kingdom. The other day I said that we were the second worst for renewable energy in the European Union, but I gather now that we are the third worst. It is not only Malta that is worse than us, but Luxembourg. It is a bit of a league of shame to be 25th out of 27 nations.
The Government should not boast about what they are doing, when the reality is that we have come late to the issue and are now trying to catch up with what other countries have already achieved. We hear the Minister talking about his targets and hopes, while his counterparts in Germany and other European countries can talk about their success in this area. It is that success that we need to emulate.
We are moving away from the targets that the Government had set. They had originally set a target of 10 per cent. of our electricity to come from renewable energy by 2010. When that looked hard to meet, it sort of morphed into a target of 20 per cent. by 2020. We know from the Minister’s written reply to me a few weeks ago that the Government have now downgraded those targets and it may be as low as 8 per cent. of our electricity coming from renewable sources by 2010 and as low as 12 per cent.—not 20 per cent.—by 2020.
That is made particularly clear in respect of microgeneration. In an article in The Guardian a week or so ago, Ashley Seager wrote:
“BERR is set to under spend the paltry £18 million in domestic grants of its low carbon buildings programme by £10 million over the three years to March 2009. This is in spite of strong demand for renewables among the public sector.
How bad is the situation? Well, BERR handed out grants for parts of the cost of fitting solar photovoltaic systems covering only 270 houses last year. The Germans fitted 130,000. We have a total installed capacity (including commercial) of 16 Megawatt peak (Mwp). They have 3,800 Mwp.
But even worse, during the year the pace of grant-giving slowed. Last May BERR simply slashed the grants and made them more difficult to get. The result, entirely predictably, was a collapse.
Throughout much of 2006, for example, it was making 30-40 grants a month for ground source heat pumps. In the last three months of 2007, no such grants were made. There is a similar decline for solar thermal...and micro wind turbines. Not a single grant was allocated for a domestic solar PV system last month, while the Germans installed about 12,000 systems.”
That was quite a lengthy quote, but it makes a clear point that we had not one grant for PV in the United Kingdom last year compared with 12,000 installations in Germany.