Action on Climate Change and Decarbonisation — House of Commons, 2022-07-05
Topic: Mixed Topics
Richard Quentin Fuller (Conservative, Centre-right): I appreciate my hon. Friend’s example of innovation, which could assist I wish to focus now on the particular issue of decarbonising home heating. We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) in his opening speech that that is essentially a £20,000 cost for a household when it is combined with insulation. He quite rightly made the point that that is beyond almost every household. I think the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), the Chair of the Select Committee, also noted that it is beyond the expectation of the ability of households to pay for it We also know that the economies of scale when it comes to technologies for decarbonising home heat are challenging, because the technology is already established and therefore the production economies of scale are likely to be less than in other areas, and because a large part of the costs are in the service delivery, which is people. People efficiencies are harder to capture than production efficiencies Not only is the up-front cost high for everyone, but it means that, without Government action and direction, we would end up with certain households doing it that might not necessarily be those that make most sense for achieving our goal. I say this as a Conservative who believes in free choice, but if we want to achieve that goal, we have to own up to the fact that relying on individual choices by individual households to achieve the decarbonisation of home heating will mean that the overall cost to society of achieving that goal will be substantially greater than going through a process that has at least a very significant part of a community-based initiative Again, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow was right to point to the issue of social housing. I am eager to see us move forward; we have a Bill coming and I think there is an opportunity to look at neighbourhood plans, which are about planning for our local communities. Maybe there is an opportunity there to put forward some of the suggestions for community decarbonisation of home heating. I hope that hon. Members who are interested in that will let me know, because I am thinking of tabling an amendment that would make that part of the way that we ask local communities, through the planning process, to start thinking about how they achieve the decarbonising of home heat on a community basis I must also urge the Government to come forward and say how they will harness patient capital to solve the economic equation of decarbonising home heat. The equation is that there is a big up-front cost and then the benefits accrue slowly each year, ideally through lower heating bills and certainly through less exposure to the volatility of carbon-based fuels. What are the Government going to do to structure a programme that can attract patient capital to do that? That is the sort of financial profile that pension funds invest in all the time Neighbourhood plans, a community-led approach and attracting patient capital into those community programmes seem to me to be one way in the estimates to try to get an approach to net zero, if I may coin a rather cheap phrase, at net profit to the British economy. Achieving net zero at net profit is a way to get a pragmatic answer to the idealistic but uncosted goals that this Parliament put in train in 2019.