Mike Watson: ...does not represent sound policy for the country as a whole and we are therefore clear that the additional capacity that is required to meet the 2020 target must not be met entirely from large-scale onshore wind farms. I very much welcome the Executive's stated commitment "to develop a wide and diverse spread of renewable energy sources." We say in the report that "the first element of an...
Gregory Barker: I find myself very much in agreement with the hon. Gentleman that if onshore wind is discredited the whole renewables agenda will suffer. Is not that the very reason that we must avoid forcing onshore wind into totally inappropriate sites, as the Government are trying to do, such as—to return to it again—Romney marsh?
Robert Walter: ...disagreement between Members of Parliament and local councils. When I referred to the hon. Member for Lewes, I was making the point that only one Liberal Democrat Member had actually supported an onshore wind farm scheme in his constituency. I then drew a contrast with the experience in my constituency in respect of the Liberal Democrat councillors. Luckily for the local residents, the...
Malcolm Moss: The Minister's remarks are extremely helpful. It would be helpful to establish the Government's intention on remote gambling. Is it to encourage as many of those businesses as possible to register onshore in the United Kingdom so that we have some control—albeit immeasurable, because it depends on how many develop over the next few years—and so that such businesses can be regulated? Do...
Ian Cawsey: ...made in renewable energy sources that are not related to wind, the best that we can hope for by 2010 is a third of our target being met by those technologies and another third being provided by onshore or offshore wind. I thought of those points at the weekend following the climate change conference in Argentina at which the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo), who leads for the...
Lord Willoughby de Broke: .... On the one hand, how to replace our present mix of energy sources as they become exhausted, as with North Sea gas, or are withdrawn from production, as with nuclear. On the other hand, they must find how to reconcile that with our commitment to meeting our Kyoto targets. If these targets seem an expensive way of achieving little in terms of reducing global warming, Kyoto is none the less...
Shiona Baird: Phil Gallie is missing all the points that I will now raise. Our opposition to nuclear energy is based on science and economics. An open mind would find out that no one has yet worked out what to do with nuclear waste—managing it over the next 40 years will set the taxpayer back some £83 billion. An open mind would see the problems of nuclear proliferation, the terrorist threat and the...
Mr Simon Thomas: ...mix and the need to invest in wave, solar and other forms of renewable technology, but it is impossible to talk seriously about achieving the 20 per cent. renewable target without including both onshore and offshore wind power. I also have to say that there have been no significant wind farm proposals for Wales that the Liberal Democrats—whether a parliamentary candidate in my own...
Anne Begg: ...at random and target sectors and businesses that are notorious for low pay, such as restaurants, whose workers may be unwilling or unlikely to complain. However, enforcement officers will often find that failure to pay the minimum wage is not the whole story. The employer who keeps his workers on illegal poverty wages is highly unlikely to be fulfilling the provisions of the working time...
Graham Stuart: ...lifeboats in the service of this country and its people, they are unpaid. Many medal winners for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution have served and worked at that point. We have the largest onshore gas storage centre at Atwick. Indeed, at Aldbrough, we will have a larger still gas storage centre. I was interested—I hope non-controversially—to find when I went there just how low...
Lord Oxburgh: ...goes on, the returns of the ROCs scheme will decline and the incentives for the new, more costly schemes will progressively diminish. Offshore wind installations cost about twice as much as those onshore, which is rather more than originally thought. At this point, I have to declare an interest as chairman of the Shell Transport and Trading Company; the Shell Group is involved in many wind...
Elliot Morley: ...wind farms are not sustainable. I commend the recent Sustainable Development Commission report to him. The commission examined the whole question of wind generation and reached the conclusion that onshore wind generation is currently the cheapest form of energy generation and that it has increasingly become more efficient and effective. Of course there are questions about the landscape and...
Malcolm Chisholm: ...the 2020 Target - Future Generation Group Report 2005, a copy of which is available in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 36765). FREDS confirmed that the development of onshore wind has an important role to play in providing the economic justification for the development of Scotland’s grid, which in turn could also substantially benefit other renewable technologies...
John Swinney: ...-fuel heating systems is unaffordable because wood-fuel systems are more expensive than conventional, oil-fired heating systems. That is a classic example of the need within the public sector to find a way of bridging the gap between having a conventional heating system that will undoubtedly contribute to damage to the environment and having a wood-fuel heating system that, although more...
Jim Murphy: ...fair criticisms of many official websites, saying that they were too wordy and too boring. I know many young people say that about many Government services, whether online or not, but we must find a way for Government websites to reflect the ease of access of some private providers and search engines. One of the ways in which that lesson has been learned is the creation of Directgov, for...
Baroness O'Cathain: ...gas supplied from the Middle East and Russia. Those are not exactly areas that produce a comfort-zone feeling. Of course, we are all aware of the great drive towards renewables—wind turbines, onshore and offshore; photovoltaics; and wave power, to mention but a few. Again, I fear, I do not get much of a comfort-zone feeling from that list. In answer to a Written Question by my noble...
Mr Mark Ruskell: ...key baseload demand. How we meet that will be the big question as we move towards phasing out nuclear and coal energy. Alongside ambitious energy efficiency measures and some of the larger-scale onshore and offshore renewable energies, micro-renewables can allow us to start to formulate a strong energy strategy and to meet some of our energy demand. The Executive's green jobs strategy...
Richard Lochhead: ... again that there is no gain without pain. Well, Scotland's fishing communities have suffered plenty of pain in recent years, and now—this month—it is time to get some of the gains. We must find out what the other states that fish the same waters as Scotland's fleets fish have achieved on effort reduction. I wrote to the European commissioner for fisheries, who was unable to tell me...
Robert Smith: ...agricultural policy and the way in which we support our rural economies by providing new outlets for what we can grow and new ways of supporting the forestry industry when forest thinnings are not finding a good market. That makes a big difference. The private Member's Bill of the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) could create the power for Ministers to use...
John Reid: ...need will be challenging. Change is sometimes challenging and painful, but the one thing that would be much more painful than not changing in a changing world would be to refuse to change, and to find that redundancy and irrelevance had overtaken the product. While we may look overseas to meet some requirements, we will need to ensure that we in this country maintain military freedom of...