Climate Change and Flooding — House of Commons, 2015-12-15
Topic: Environment
Graham Charles Stuart (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, following as it does the excellent news from Paris and the rather more depressing news of recent flooding I have just lost two of my favourite Ministers from the Front Bench—although they are staying for a moment—but I have another still on the Front Bench. I am delighted to have their temporary audience. Like my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I congratulate our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change on her part in helping to deliver a deal in Paris. Colleagues across the Chamber will doubtless debate how important and how effective that deal is and how it contrasts with Copenhagen, from which the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) bears such scars. Despite much of the detail being left for future work, I think we have a framework from Paris which can give us hope for the future. The intended nationally determined contributions provide the building blocks with which we can go forward. We have in place in the agreement the promise of not only a stocktake, but a review and, we hope, a growth in ambition over time Following Paris, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has two things to do. One is to ensure that UK decarbonisation proceeds within the framework provided by the Climate Change Act 2008 and the fourth and fifth carbon budgets—our most current—which have been produced by the Climate Change Committee. We have not always got it all right. For instance, in the case of onshore wind, which is the lowest cost form of renewable energy that we have, there was a misdiagnosis of the problem The diagnosis of the problem, which people like me helped to provide over many years on behalf of our constituents, was that our constituents did not like having onshore wind turbines foisted on them, their local councillors ignored and a distant inspectorate insisting on them being built, resulting in our constituents losing any sense of control over the local environment. What local people wanted was to have control over their local environment. In those areas where there was least opposition, or where the recompense was adequate, onshore wind turbines should be allowed, but where local people were set on not having them, they should not go ahead That was a mistake that Labour made in government. With various Ministers in place I tried to get them to see that we would ultimately end up with more if we went with the grain of local opinion rather than trying to fight against it, but inevitably those whose local environment would be dominated by those constructions and who had had no say on it would find a political voice and eventually bring the scheme to a halt. We would end up with fewer, rather than more, wind turbines. So it has proved The misdiagnosis lay in the fact that my party came to the conclusion that the difficulty was not the planning, but the subsidy, even though it is the lowest subsidy of any form of renewable energy. So we got to the bizarre situation where there is no subsidy for the cheapest form of renewable energy, at the same time as we talk about lowering costs to consumers. We should have removed the right to appeal to the inspectorate and allowed the developers to provide packages which won support in certain parts of the country. Personally, I felt that we would have ended up with more, but somehow we have ended up with the cheapest form of renewable energy in effect receiving no support, which is a bizarre outcome. We do not want to make further such mis-steps On the positive side, in my local area we have offshore wind. By next year we should have 6 GW of offshore wind in this country, more than the rest of the world combined. By 2020 we should have 10 GW and, as the Secretary of State laid out recently, as did the Chancellor in the autumn statement, there is every hope that we will see a doubling of that between 2020 and 2030. So we are making significant progress in offshore wind, and it is only because of the pipeline that we have seen the supply chain and manufacturers able to invest and lower cost The big task for the Secretary of State is to work out how we are going to deliver decarbonisation of the UK economy at the lowest possible cost. It became apparent to me 10 years ago at the Montreal COP—conference of the parties—that we had to get the costs down. Sadly, hand-wringing environmental concern is not widely shared among the general populace of this country, among parliamentarians or across the world. We need to get the costs down so that it becomes more politically acceptable to people to do that which is compatible with tackling the risks suggested by the science My advice to the Secretary of State is that in every decision she makes in this area, she needs to think about creating a framework which encourages that investment. The state is only a relatively small player. Sometimes Ministers of successive Governments in this country talk as if the state is the key driver. The state is not the key driver; it is a small player. We create the framework, then we get the investment. It is that investment in solar by private companies in China and elsewhere, partly driven by the German market, that has led to the massive reduction in costs for solar. It has been the private sector investment, with the help of the Green Investment Bank, which has helped accelerate the cost curve downwards for offshore wind. That is what we must do—create a consistent environment There was a lot of positive rhetoric under the Labour Government about tackling climate change, but remarkably little action. In the end, in 2010, there had not been the progress that we should have seen. In the United States, by comparison, the rhetoric has always been negative but the policy environment for investment has been more positive. That is why there has been a great deal of investment in the United States, as well as more innovation and more jobs created than in this country, even though we, through the Climate Change Act and other things, have tried to be, and appeared to be, world leaders.