Planning and Energy Bill
10:09 am
John Battle (Leeds West, Labour) Link to this | Hansard source
It is customary to congratulate the Member who wins the ballot. I have always wondered why we do that-I would rather have won the ballot myself-but I do congratulate the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) on choosing this topic. I was happy to lend my name to this brief, modest and reasonable Bill.
The Bill calls for a bit of reverse engineering in our approach to tackling the challenge of climate change, rather than leaving everything to top-down targets without thinking about the mechanisms that are needed on the ground floor. The very first word-"enable"-is probably the most important. The Bill is intended not to tell, not to spend, not to force, but to enable. It contains another word that I hesitate to mention, the word "reasonable". I know that we can spend hours, weeks and years in this place debating what it means to be reasonable, and I hope we will not get into the semantics now, but I think that the intention in this instance is more than clear.
We sometimes underestimate the hugeness of the challenge of climate change to our politics, our public institutions, to private business and to our personal behaviour. It covers the waterfront. Ipsos MORI recently published a review of the year which I think was sent to Members, although I was not able to lay hands on it yesterday. One of the centre-spreads featured attitudes to climate change. The general conclusion was that people in Britain now accept that there is a problem and accept that human behaviour is making a difference, which was not the case five or 10 years ago. When it comes to dealing with the problem, however, a gulf emerges. The survey exposed the fact that apart from doing a little bit of, dare I say, recycling-perhaps changing light bulbs-most of us are "armchair environmentalists". We demand that the Government do something rather than doing anything ourselves, while issuing the caveat that whatever the Government propose we will oppose, and thus we make no progress whatever. The purpose of the Bill is not to focus on the great big problem and leave it nebulous, or to ask the Government to do everything, but to concentrate on what local government can do and enable it to build in the capacity to meet its targets.
I approved of what the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) said in his intervention. We ought to acknowledge that local authorities are getting ahead of the Government on this issue, and engage in a stronger dialogue with them about what they can achieve at ground-floor and local-community level. The aim of the Merton rule, which has been widely known and accepted for more than four years and has been copied by over 100 local authorities, is to persuade developers to obtain at least 10 per cent. of any new building energy from renewable sources.
I know about the BedZED project, but there are quite a few other projects scattered across Britain. There are combined-heat-and-power and energy-efficiency projects, and experimental schemes initiated by architects going all the way back to Susan Rolfe's experimental house with solar panels in Oxford. Such development is patchy, however. The Bill is intended to achieve some co-ordination so that best practice can be shared, and authorities can learn about what is going on elsewhere and proceed in a positive fashion.
Tom Brake (Carshalton & Wallington, Liberal Democrat) Link to this | Hansard source
The Bill also allows for much more trials. Even in the case of BedZED, things often do not work quite as one would like because they have not been tried before.
John Battle (Leeds West, Labour) Link to this | Hansard source
I jotted down a phrase that the hon. Gentleman used earlier. He said that what was needed was more imagination, political and practical. We also need to take more cognisance of developments in science and technology, and experiment a bit more. It might mean failing some of the time, but we might also achieve our aims more quickly. The 10 per cent. target will be hard to achieve without co-ordinated action on the part of all local authorities.
The Bill's purpose is to enable all local authorities to set renewable and low-energy targets for new developments. That could apply not just to individual buildings, but to complexes. Without the Bill, I can envisage the game being played in the opposite way. Without a mandate to get on with meeting the 10 per cent. target, it could be challenged by people who would say "We will hold up the planning process because you are trying to suggest that we do something that we know we do not have to do." The whole process could be stalled and blocked by authorities pulling us in the opposite direction from the best-practice councils gathered around Merton.
Let me pursue the point made by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) about imagination. When I was Minister for Energy and Industry between 1997 and 1999, we published a report on renewable energy. It did not quite catch the zeitgeist-I am pleased that we have moved on in the past 10 years-but at the time I went to Northumberland to see a project on a council estate consisting of about 3,000 houses. The developers had adopted almost a traditional village-green approach: using brilliant engineering and science, they had managed to blend in a complex of renewable microgeneration in the centre of the estate, using energy from waste, wind power and biomass. Rather than depending on a wind farm, which would produce nothing when the wind did not blow, they were able to "cross-reference" energy sources.
That approach has not been considered more widely. In general, people are opting for single-issue solutions. Given that there is no single source of energy that could be described as perfectly pure and green, why not blend sources together and create new possibilities like the developers of that estate in Northumberland, which was kept warm by a complex of renewable energy sources?
Hospital waste cannot be buried. I had a furious row with some "deep greens" who said "We cannot burn hospital waste." Well, hospital waste must be burnt, but why not install a combined-heat-and-power station in the hospital and use energy from the waste to heat it? That has already been done at St James's University hospital in my city. We need more imaginative application at local level if we are to get anywhere near our targets.
It has been said that the Bill is about individual buildings. I think back to that community in the north-east, because in my view the Bill should be about communities. The hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) mentioned cost. In Leeds there are still rows and rows of terraced houses-classic terraced streets with washing hanging across them-but their ownership is mixed. A terraced house there could be owner-occupied, owned by a landlord, or a council miscellaneous property. In the past, if new roofs were needed it was not a case of putting a roof on one house, leaving a gap because a roof could not be afforded for the next house, putting on another roof, leaving another couple of gaps, putting on another roof and so on all along the terrace. There was a scheme enabling the whole terrace to be repaired-roofs, doors and windows. It was called "enveloping".
The same system could be applied to renewable energy, including solar energy for heating water. I know that January has not been a brilliant month for sunshine, but although most people do not realise it, what is needed for solar energy is not bright sunshine but light in general. We could improve whole communities and rebuild neighbourhoods: we could build renewable energy into neighbourhoods.
I am still thinking in terms of imagination. A report published by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and Ofgem suggests that we should view the distribution of energy in Britain very differently. We should not think of the system as a grid, although it is one at present. How can we build microgeneration into it? We might not need buried cables and power lines stretching across the country in future; instead, the system could function at micro level. The Government have already made good progress, after great argument, to enable the electricity that is generated but not needed in a local community to be passed back to others through the grid.
Gregory Barker (Bexhill & Battle, Conservative) Link to this | Hansard source
The right hon. Gentleman is talking a great deal of sense and he will find a lot of support for what he is saying from Conservative Members. His comments are all the more important because he speaks from experience as a former Minister. Has he had the opportunity to read "Power to the People", the Conservative policy document on microgeneration, which encapsulates much of what he says and puts some flesh on the bones of how we might achieve our aims?
John Battle (Leeds West, Labour) Link to this | Hansard source
I will be delighted to read anything that the Conservatives publish. I cannot say that I have read the document but if the hon. Gentleman sends me a copy, I assure him that I will read it. It is amazing to hear the Conservatives speaking of "Power to the People". I sat on the Opposition Benches for 10 years and usually heard the opposite. However, this is not the occasion to become deeply divided politically about who is and who is not on the side of the people.
Christopher Huhne (Eastleigh, Liberal Democrat) Link to this | Hansard source
To support the right hon. Gentleman's point about microgeneration, does he agree that the more we decentralise and devolve sources of energy, the more resilient we are likely to be in coping both with natural disasters of the sort that we saw in his county of Yorkshire last summer and with terrorist outrages? We would have a portfolio of different energy sources, none of which we would be reliant on in the totality.
John Battle (Leeds West, Labour) Link to this | Hansard source
I agree but perhaps the hon. Gentleman's background motive-this also applies to the response I gave to the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker)-relates to the fact that the term "Power to the People" means engaging people so that they can be involved in formulating, building and owning the solutions to their problems. They therefore take some form of ownership. What do I mean by that? I mean that people and communities become personally engaged in microgeneration. I do not want them to do that because they fear that supplies through the gas pipeline may be cut off by the Russians; I want microgeneration to be seen as part of community building. Energy generation and waste management will have to take place in local communities and we will have to take more personal and community responsibility in the future.
One of the hallmarks of our culture is that we all watch "Neighbours" in our homes with the door shut. We know everything about Ramsay street in Australia, but no one here has a clue who lives in the flat above them or in the street alongside. What we do in neighbourhoods may play a part in rebuilding and refabricating new communities, and the energy and waste management issues will be key to that. However, let us look at that in the positive terms of building relationships and new systems rather than through acting out of fear.
On that note, I congratulate the Government on introducing eco-communities. I do not know whether the concept of eco-communities appears in the Conservative's pamphlet, but that notion could be radically deepened and expanded. We should have a debate and engage people in this issue; otherwise they will be left only with the fantastic targets. They hear about Kyoto and Bali and they think big numbers, but then they ask themselves what they can do. They think that it is laudable that the Government are setting targets for the reduction of carbon emissions that are miles ahead of those set by everyone else, and we are about to build those targets into law through the Climate Change Bill. We are miles ahead of the rest of Europe, which is quite positive on this issue, and we have managed to get the Americans to catch up a little, but I fear that those big figures, including the one that says that we should not increase the warming of the planet by 2°C, only lead people to ask what they can do about managing the whole planet. There is a disconnection between what a person can do and the targets we are setting.
The target that all homes should be carbon zero by 2016 is laudable, and I say to the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) that I am pretty sure-perhaps the Minister can confirm this-that the Home Builders Federation is signed up to the zero-carbon targets. I do not want to set house builders against the microgenerators; I do not think that they are at odds. A conversation is going on and a consensus is building that could be useful. However, even if we have the target of zero-carbon homes by 2016, people at the ground floor level will ask what they can do about it. They need to be part of the conversation in a practical way. That is why the Bill reverse engineers the whole process. Rather than setting targets that are left there hanging nebulously, let us try to build the targets into the buildings in the new communities and address the problem through the planning system and local authorities.
I welcome the Bill and applaud the hon. Member for Stevenage for the work that he has put in. [ Interruption. ] Did I get the constituency of the hon. Member for Sevenoaks wrong? What did I say? [Hon. Members: " Stevenage."] I do apologise; Stevenage is the new town. I also applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Mr. Caton), who has insisted that we rightly keep this issue in the forefront of our minds. Eventually, we will get there. In that spirit, I suggest that this is a modest and reasonable little Bill, and I will be surprised if the Minister says that it is not necessary and that it is all done. We have much more to do. In response to all the contributions I have heard today, I simply say that this matter will not go away. Whether the Bill does or does not go through, we have a lot of work to do to embed its spirit and intention within our communities.