15:57 John Hayes (Conservative)

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; it is good to see that he is on his usual courteous form. He talks about the importance of facing up to the future, but the question is what kind of future it is. Why does this Bill lock us into such a high-carbon future at exactly the time when we need to be shifting towards being able to meet our climate change objectives?

I give way to the hon. Gentleman, who is such a distinguished member of the Energy and Climate Change Committee.

The hon. Gentleman knows, because he is a great expert on these matters—far more expert than I am, I have to acknowledge—today’s new homes save £200 on average on their energy bills compared with homes built before the coalition came to power. He knows that new homes are more energy efficient. I want that energy efficiency to grow, however, so new homes will have net zero-carbon emissions from energy used to heat and light them, and there will be a higher efficiency requirement that may be augmented by on-site renewable energy measures such as solar panels.

The Bill will enable communities to be offered the chance to buy a stake in new, commercial renewable electricity schemes in their local area, so that they can gain a greater share in the associated financial benefit. We would consider using this power only if the voluntary approach to community shared ownership in renewable energy did not bear fruit. A right to buy would give communities the opportunity to have a real stake and sense of ownership in projects happening in their area. The Shared Ownership Taskforce recently launched its voluntary framework, and we brought forward an amendment to the Bill in the other place in order to provide greater certainty on the minimum time scales for this voluntary approach to take effect. We are proposing, too, to allow changes to the renewable heat incentive to provide more flexibility in financing arrangements for renewable heating systems.

Let me come on now to what I described as the exciting part of my speech, which deals with the Wood review. We recognise that increasing renewable energy sources is important, but we realise that a dynamic and flourishing oil and gas industry remains important, too. It can contribute to our energy security and to the economy, supporting around 450,000 jobs and showing record capital expenditure in 2013 of around £14 billion.

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16:45 Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)

The Bill comes nowhere near to meeting the challenges faced by transport, energy and housing, despite all that the Minister has said today. There is cross-party consensus on the importance of infrastructure to our economy. Economic and population growth and the need to decarbonise our economy will all add further strain to an infrastructure that is already creaking. There seem to be different views about that. I imagine that, while we might disagree on a number of aspects of the Bill, hon. Members on both sides of the House will have raised an eyebrow on hearing the leader of UKIP explaining that the problems with infrastructure were all down to immigration, but I guess that that is a matter for him.

I am confused by Labour’s great love of yet more road building. We had a welcome article from Ed Miliband yesterday in which he talked about the importance of climate change. Some 25% of—

I do apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. The right nomenclature momentarily went from my mind, but I am very happy to refer to the Leader of the Opposition—the honourable Leader of the Opposition. [Hon. Members: “Right honourable.”] The right hon. Leader of the Opposition. The point is that what he wrote about climate change is not in harmony with what we are hearing now, which is the Labour party saying that we need more roads. Roads are responsible for more and more CO 2 emissions, which cause climate change.

My hon. Friend is right on that point. As well as being a shadow Minister with responsibility for roads, I have the honour of chairing the all-party motor group. Fortunately, the days of seeing the motor vehicle as an inevitable enemy of environmental protection are long gone. There is a great deal of innovation going on in the automotive industry. Although the hon. Lady has some very serious points to make, she should understand who brought in the Climate Change Act 2008, and who was Energy Secretary when some of the best initiatives on preserving the environment were taken in Britain. That should give her a little more confidence that the Opposition take our environmental responsibilities seriously.

Part 5 sets out a number of provisions on energy. Getting energy policy right is critical to our economy and vital to enable all infrastructure sectors to function. It is therefore a shame that the Bill contains no ambitious commitment or strategy to ensure that the UK will meet growing demand in a sustainable way. The Bill sets out a new community right for a stake in renewable energy schemes—that is fine, although we do not think it goes far enough—and it is good that it implements Wood review proposals for increasing oil and gas extraction, which have cross-party support. However, the issue that I am sure generates the most interest, both inside and outside the House, is in clauses 38 to 43 on underground access to shale and geothermal energy—there have already been questions on that.

Labour is committed to the decarbonisation of the power sector by 2030 and to reducing our carbon emissions in line with the Climate Change Act 2008.

As the Committee on Climate Change has said, within our legally binding carbon targets, gas can have a role to play as part of a balanced energy mix, along with renewables, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage. With 80% of our homes reliant on gas for heating, and in the context of declining North sea oil production, indigenous shale gas production may have a beneficial impact on our energy security. However, only by fully addressing legitimate environmental and safety concerns about fracking, with the kind of robust regulation that I have been talking about, with comprehensive monitoring and strict enforcement, will we give people confidence that the exploration and possible extraction of shale gas is safe and a reliable source that can contribute to the UK’s energy mix. That is why we are seeking to amend the Bill in Committee to ensure that any fracking could happen only under robust safety and environmental standards.

“this House declines to give a second reading to the Infrastructure Bill because, whilst welcoming efforts to further enable necessary infrastructure projects and acknowledging that long-term strategic planning and investment for transport infrastructure is urgently needed, the Bill fails to establish an independent National Infrastructure Commission to set out an evidence-based analysis of future infrastructure priorities in sectors including transport, waste and energy, and to hold governments accountable for delivery, because the Bill creates a new Strategic Highways Company, which could result in an increasingly two-tiered road system when there is no evidence that a new company is needed to deliver a road investment strategy, because the Bill fails to address the deteriorating condition of the local road network due to the cuts in spending since 2010 on local road maintenance, because the Bill does not ensure that unconventional gas extraction could only happen in the context of robust safety and environmental standards, comprehensive monitoring and strict enforcement, because the Bill fails to give communities new powers so that they can build the homes they need locally in the places they want, and because the Bill fails to include Garden City principles to underpin the next generation of New Towns, fails to strike the right balance between communities and developers in the discharge of planning conditions, and fails to properly plan ahead to ensure that building standards address CO2 emissions and climate change.”

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17:24 Charles Hendry (Wealden) (Con)

I wish to focus primarily on the energy issues in part 5. I welcome the changes being made to improve the extraction rates in the North sea. We should pay tribute to Sir Ian Wood for his report and the work he did in identifying the real challenges in optimising the returns from the North sea basin. I also welcome the proposals on the extension of community ownership. It has always been my view that renewable energy projects will stand a greater prospect of being approved and endorsed by their communities if there is a significant proportion of local community ownership. We all hope that that will be done in a voluntary way, but the back-stop approach proposed by the Government is very sensible indeed.

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18:13 Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)

I did not agree with what the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) said about regulation, and I will come to that later, but I did agree with his comments on gas storage. This is an issue that I and other Members of Parliament representing north Staffordshire and the potteries have raised, including with the previous Minister at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon). We have repeatedly raised issues about gas storage, and I can tell the hon. Gentleman that I am sure there would be support for seeing how we can get this addressed. It certainly has long been on the agenda of the British Ceramic Confederation, of which Laura Cohen is chief executive, and it could easily be addressed, if there is a political will to do so, through this Bill. The extractive industries are also an issue.

I want to focus on clauses 38 to 43, which will, if passed, change trespass law to allow companies to frack under homes without notifying the landowner. This move comes at a time when there are a number of very significant unanswered questions about the impact of fracking which have not been addressed by the Government. Broadly, these relate to climate change and the current—inadequate—regulatory framework.

We know that we do not need new fossil fuels; far from it, because in order to avoid a rise of more than 2° C from climate change, only one fifth of existing global fossil fuel reserves, not including UK shale gas, can be burned. Talks are going on in Lima but Government Whips are apparently preventing our energy Minister from going out there to take part in those important discussions.

Shell, Barack Obama and the International Energy Agency have made similar statements. It is therefore unclear why the Government are giving huge incentives to, and deregulating, a new fossil fuel industry that will either add to the stock of unburnable carbon or threaten climate change targets. The former chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Professor David Mackay, wrote last year that without a global climate deal,

greenhouse gas—

“emissions and the risk of climate change.”

We often hear claims that shale gas is low carbon because it will replace coal. Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that the only way in which shale gas could reduce emissions is by replacing coal. However, the best industry estimates state that shale gas will not be online until the 2020s. Meanwhile, the Committee on Climate Change has told us that coal must be offline by the 2020s. So by the time a shale gas industry is up and running in constituencies all around the country, there should be no coal to replace it. However, the International Energy Agency has warned that instead, shale gas

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that shale gas needs to replace coal, but that condition will not be met. It also states that methane leakage from shale gas wells must be “low”. However, there is a growing body of evidence to show that those emissions are not low. In fact, new reports have shown that methane leakage occurs during parts of the process that were not previously thought to be problematic. The IPCC recently revised upwards the global warming potential of methane, which, over a 20-year time frame, is 108 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We therefore risk significantly increasing emissions at exactly the time when they should be rapidly reduced. So, given that fracking will add to unburnable carbon and that it will not meet the two key recommendations from the IPCC on coal and methane, the claims that shale gas can reduce emissions do not stand up to scrutiny.

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18:41 John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)

The Bill contains nothing on green energy, for which there are not only environmental arguments but a fundamental economic argument: we will lose a competitive advantage if other countries have large amounts of green energy and we have little, both in terms of our national accounts and our industry.

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18:55 Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)

Part 4 of the Bill opens with provisions relating to community energy. By and large, we support the efforts to allow communities or community groups to buy a stake in renewable energy facilities in or close offshore to their communities.

I hope that those provisions will lead to more communities taking a stake in such important facilities—indeed, some community organisations are already making efforts to raise funds to invest in local renewable energy—and to greater involvement and acceptance of renewable generation. Should the Bill succeed, I hope it will lead to alternative visions of how we deal with off-gas grid properties, which are so often left out of the thinking on energy costs and energy efficiency.

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19:20 Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)

It does not appear to me, either from this debate or more generally over the past few months, that the Government have listened at all to what our constituents have been saying. The Government seem determined to pursue shale gas extraction whatever the consequences. I am sorry that they have not shown the same enthusiasm in their pursuit of renewable energy goals.

Wrexham has a strong culture of using renewable energy. We have a company, Sharp UK, which in 2004 commenced production of solar cells in the town, and at one stage more than 1,000 people were employed in that. Visitors to Wrexham often observe that a large number of homes in the constituency have solar cells on their roofs, which is a tremendous example of renewable energy in a local community, and that is supported by all parties locally. Unfortunately, this Government’s policy on feed-in tariffs, which contradicts the far-sighted policy introduced by the Leader of the Opposition, undermined the market. As a result, Sharp’s solar cell factory in Wrexham has closed its production line, so those 1,000 jobs have gone, as have the local jobs created in the construction industry for putting the cells on roofs. That renewable energy had an immediate and beneficial impact for our local economy and community.

I am also unconvinced about the local benefits that will accrue to Wrexham as a result of the process. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) that the benefits should attach not to the landowner, but to the local community. Wrexham, as an industrial town, still bears the scars of its industrial past, and not only the memories of events such as the Gresford disaster, but physical scars such as slag heaps, quarries and spoiled land. If fracking can be shown to be a safe process, then before it goes ahead I want to be sure that Wrexham and the local area will benefit. Fracking is not a sustainable energy process, and before the Bill passes into law I need to hear far more about how my community will benefit from the extraction that is taking place locally and causing a great deal of controversy.

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19:35 Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)

“The intention is therefore to set a maximum on-site carbon dioxide emission standard for new homes and for the remainder of the zero carbon target to be met by house builders supporting off-site carbon abatement measures”.

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20:21 Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)

Much of that investment will come—rightly—from the big six, but if the balance of the cost is not to fall on the consumer and taxpayer, much must also come from the small independent players that we must encourage into the marketplace. I know that that is what the Government want to do—it is what the Energy Act 2013 was intended to do—and I say to the Minister here now: do not let the great work of the Act and of the capacity mechanism be unwound by some siren voices in the Department of Energy and Climate Change who would like to see the capacity payments for 15-year contracts discounted to the value of an annual contract, because that will certainly discourage small players from entering the marketplace and entrench the position of the big six.

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20:29 Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)

I would argue, however, that without some fairly radical amendments—above all, to take account of climate change—they will fail on all those aims. That is why I sought—sadly, unsuccessfully—to amend the Bill. What we need are priorities that will put the UK on the path to a prosperous, zero-carbon, jobs-rich economy and will improve resilience to flooding and other climate impacts coming our way.

In an article coinciding with the report’s launch, the head of the OECD as well as the London School of Economics Lord Stern highlighted the choice that the UK and other countries must now make. They explain that if investment in infrastructure over the next 10 to 15 years is high carbon, the world will indeed “lock in” the risk of dangerous climate change. More positively, they write:

“The prize before us is huge. We can build a strong, inclusive and resilient global economy which can also avoid dangerous climate change. But the time for decision is now.”

They could have been talking about the very Infrastructure Bill before us today, and as we enter the second week of global climate talks in Peru, I think it is clear that this Infrastructure Bill is sadly failing to make the right choice.

I could not agree more with him on that. The Leader of the Opposition in The Independent yesterday set out a welcome and impassioned pitch for his ability to offer leadership on climate change, highlighting the increasingly stark science and the economic and social harm caused by dither and delay. Again, I agree. Yet the unswerving support from Labour’s Front-Bench team for the coalition’s new roads, whatever the delivery structure, and for fracking, however well regulated, undermines any such climate credibility. It suggests that they may be a little bit in denial about the inconvenient truth that carbon emissions do not come just from electricity generation. Crucially, for the purposes of this Bill, they come from roads as well.

For me, the bottom line is that an effective response to climate change requires a complete shift to a carbon-neutral energy system within a generation in all the major economies, including Britain. We know how to do that: we have the technology and engineering capacity to do it, and we can afford to do it. All that we need is the political will, because we cannot do it while making ourselves more, not less, dependent on any kind of fossil fuel. According to the United Kingdom’s former top energy and climate diplomat, John Ashton,

The Bill also provides for a duty to maximise the economic recovery of UK oil and gas. That flies in the face of the need for us to leave the vast majority of existing fossil fuel reserves unburnt if we are serious about tackling climate change. There was a growing amount of cross-party consensus on that imperative during last week’s debate on fracking. I hope that the Minister of State followed that debate, and I hope that his views on unburnable fossil fuels—and the financial risks of the carbon bubble—have changed since we debated such matters two years ago, when he maintained that my concerns were

Given that the Governor of the Bank of England is now among those who are agreeing that most existing fossil fuel reserves need to be unburnable and need to stay below ground if we are to keep climate change below 2°C of warming, I hope that the Minister himself has had an opportunity to think again.

Meanwhile, the potential of UK renewables is huge. The sector already supports more than 100,000 jobs. Solar PV, which is just one of many diverse technologies that are at our disposal, could alone support nearly 50,000 jobs by 2030, and could power the equivalent of 18 million homes. A thriving home-grown renewable energy sector should be a top priority for the Bill, but, apart from the references to community energy rights, it is entirely absent. I think that we should replace the duty to maximise oil and gas exploitation with a duty to maximise sustainable energy generation from the UK’s wind, wave, solar, tidal and other renewable sources.

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20:40 Sir Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD)

The problem is that behind that clause lies what appears to be an intention by the Government to introduce something that will not achieve zero-carbon homes in 2016. That will clearly need to be put right in Committee. There is a two-stage process in achieving zero-carbon homes. The first is to set minimum carbon compliance standards for the building itself. That is partly about the fabric of the building—the walls, the insulation and the solid bits of it—and it is partly about whether or not renewable energy generation, such as solar panels on the roof, is installed in the building. That is the on-site provision—the minimum carbon compliance standard. The UK Green Building Council and the Zero Carbon Hub taskforce have made recommendations about how that can be achieved, but it cannot always all be achieved on site. The design, layout and orientation of the site may not make that possible.

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20:50 John McDonnell (Labour)

Having learned that we are burning fossil fuels and bringing about climate change on such a scale that it could destroy our planet, I find it almost insane that we should be bringing forward proposals that would mean our relying on another form of fossil fuel. I totally oppose the development of fracking in this country.

The Minister has not spoiled the party because I have no confidence or trust that this Government will not privatise. Assurances have been given on the Floor of the House about privatisation before and it has gone ahead. This Bill is the first step towards privatisation and towards introducing tolling on our roads—a new form of funding the road network that will be open to profiteering by foreign companies. I warn this House that if it passes this legislation, it will put at risk our road network in the future, our taxpayers and the future environmental policies that might be able to protect us against climate change.

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20:59 Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)

I hope I can persuade my hon. Friend to support the Bill on this basis: as a result of the arguments he and others have made, including the arguments made by Opposition Members during my speech, I will be happy to convene a meeting with Members who have concerns about the community interest in the exploitation of shale. We have debated that in the House and I have spoken about it. I am more than happy to ask the Department of Energy and Climate Change to convene such a meeting. I hope, on that basis, that my hon. Friend will change his mind about supporting the Bill.

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21:25 Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)

As always, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) made an excellent case supporting better climate change measures in the Bill. He also highlighted why we must not weaken the carbon abatement measures that should be in existence.

It appears that the lack of progress on loan guarantees is reflected elsewhere, with too little support for house building, transport and green energy subsidies. Let us remind ourselves of the Bill’s inadequacy with regard to the delivery of much needed infrastructure. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) pointed out so eloquently, there is complete bewilderment about why a top-down reorganisation of the Highways Agency has been proposed. I would have thought that Ministers had learned their lesson about unwanted and unnecessary reorganisations, but perhaps not. If they have, they need to explain why a reorganisation is necessary, when the market clearly wants funding certainty. As my hon. Friend said, the highways measures in the Bill will affect only 2% of roads.

In conclusion, I share the sentiment of many in Parliament and beyond that the Bill could have done much more to enable economic growth and deliver the infrastructure our country so desperately needs to modernise and develop. In government, Labour delivered on infrastructure: £93.7 billion on the road network and £32 billion on the decent homes standard; and we invested heavily in renewable energy. By contrast with this Government, Labour will put measures in place to promote growth, ensure that it is defined by quality and inclusion, and encourage development that will enhance the built and natural environment of the nation. I would like hon. Members to support the reasoned amendment in the name of the Leader of the Opposition.

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21:41 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Stephen Williams)

I thank the Minister for giving way; time is indeed short. In listening to all those concerns, will he ensure that the Bill Committee hears evidence from the Government’s Committee on Climate Change on the impact of the Bill?

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