Energy Spending Priorities: Investors and Consumers — House of Commons, 2016-07-04
Topic: Energy
Antoinette Geraldine Sherratt (Sandbach) (Conservative, Centre-right): I rise to echo the Select Committee Chair’s thanks not only to the Committee staff but to the numerous witnesses who have taken a lot of time and trouble to contribute evidence to the three inquiries we are discussing today I want to look briefly at the macro background to those inquiries, which is really one of climate change. We know that climate change is one of the most serious threats the world is facing. We know we need to decarbonise our energy sector and we know that that has to be done in a way whereby UK consumers feel they benefit from the change rather than lose out. All too often, the perception has been that green policies cost them. That is a real danger in the current climate, in particular after the decision last week. I have already received correspondence from constituents who are concerned that the UK may abandon its environmental targets The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change went to Paris and played a part in negotiating very ambitious climate change targets. That matters in relation to these reports, because the investor confidence report deals with the delivery of those targets, and energy is absolutely key in delivering those targets—not just the electricity that powers our homes, but the heat and transport sectors, too. It was in those circumstances and against that backdrop that the inquiries were conducted It is a concern that the Committee report found there has been a drop in investor confidence since May 2015, something to which the Chair alluded. In May this year, the UK had fallen from eighth place to thirteenth place in the investor confidence index. I appreciate that some of the fall may have been around the uncertainty over the referendum and that companies may have been holding back investment decisions to see the result, but it is clear that there now needs to be a real signal sent out to the investor community that deals with some of the issues raised in the report. In particular, what startled—if I can put it that way; one thinks of a horse that has been startled away—the investment community were a number of really sudden and quite unexpected policy announcements by the Secretary of State last summer. I understand—I alluded to this in an intervention—that there was a need to look at, for example, solar feed-in tariffs. Some of them gave very high rates of return. Let us not forget that it is the poorest consumers who are paying for the levy control framework in their bills, so it was right for the Government to look at that and assess how effective it was. Nevertheless, there was a very strong theme coming through the evidence we had about the lack of an overall Government strategy on energy The Secretary of State speaks very powerfully about the energy trilemma, but the investor community does not feel that a clear direction has been set to say this is where we are going and why. The Secretary of State explained that she wishes to remain technology-neutral. However, to look ahead and take advantage of some of the very best technologies that may come forward and deliver the best results for climate change and reducing the impacts of carbon emissions, there may well need to be some incentivisation, much as we have seen in the onshore wind sector. The Chair rightly referred to the change in Government policy in relation to the onshore wind sector and the switch to offshore. That has led to a decline in investor confidence in onshore wind farm investment, although we have not seen the same results in the offshore sector.