12:48 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)

I turn briefly to areas in which we would have liked the Government go further, and I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on these issues. The first is net zero. Labour has been clear that while this is framework legislation, it should not be an empty vessel. The Government should have used the opportunity of an independent subsidy policy to design a regime that supported their wider industrial policy and our national priorities. We were also disappointed that the Subsidy Control Bill was not published alongside a subsidy strategy. Net zero is a good example of this. The climate crisis is the greatest long-term threat facing our country and the world, and we need urgent action to drive down emissions. That is why, in Committee, we called on the Government to support our amendment to hardwire net zero into the principles that public authorities have to consider when awarding any subsidy or designing any scheme. There was cross-party and cross-Bench support in the other place for a similar amendment.

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13:15 Deidre Brock (Wokingham) (Con)

The shadow Minister extensively addressed net zero. Granting authorities are required to consider the environmental and net zero impacts of energy-related subsidies, but that is not what net zero is about. This is not the only time we will be thinking about how to reduce our impact on climate change. If a granting authority decides to give a significant amount of money to a bus company, for example, it does not have to consider the climate impact. If it decides to scrap all the buses and replace them with diesel taxis, it does not have to consider the net zero impact, because it is not an energy-related subsidy. I am massively concerned that net zero is included only in schedule 2 and not in schedule 1. If the Government are serious about tackling climate change, they need to be looking at every piece of legislation that comes through this place and ensuring that it does not have a negative impact on our ability to meet net zero; and if it does, they should be ensuring that that is then balanced by further, more dramatic actions in order that we can meet net zero.

In summation, the Bill is better than it was, but it still falls far short. I am still concerned about transparency and massively concerned about agriculture. I am hugely concerned about the lack of importance this Government are giving to net zero—that should go through everything we do.

Net zero has been mentioned. Schedule 2 contains a lot of common-sense principles already, which support the UK’s priorities on net zero and protecting the environment. They require subsidies in relation to energy and the environment to meet one of the specified aims, such as increasing the level of environmental protection, and to ensure that subsidies do not undermine the polluter pays principle. We talked about the tax subsidies and the timings. Clearly, within the timings of the tax subsidies a longer period is still necessitated, because of the fact that tax returns and such things take longer to go through the process—as opposed to having the immediacy of sponsorship through a subsidy or more immediate cash assistance.

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