13:44 Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)

According to Government figures, energy prices for the average business consumer have more than doubled since 2004. Those figures also show that in 2011, almost one fifth of a medium-sized business user’s bills were due to climate change policies. Britain is going it alone with many of those policies, for example by introducing a carbon floor. That unilateralism is rendering parts of our manufacturing industry increasingly uncompetitive, and we are exporting jobs in manufacturing right now.

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13:56 Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)

For example, such uncertainty is why investment in renewable energy—the Chancellor mentioned green investment—halved between 2009 and 2011. That is a conscious, clear effect of chaos in Government policy and the narrow interests of Conservatives and Liberal Democrat Back Benchers. For all those reasons, unnecessary damage has been done to investment in our economy.

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14:34 Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)

The next area in which we need to help is promoting more industry and commerce to deal with the net trade deficit. I am glad that that Chancellor has recognised in his speech that one of the big drawbacks to doing business in Britain now is expensive energy pricing. This is something that we share with the European continent, compared with the American continent. The United States of America is playing a blinder with its very cheap gas and much cheaper energy generally. I welcome the idea that certain businesses and industries will be taken out of the climate change levy altogether.

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14:48 John Healey (Labour)

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood). He has become something of a regular fixture on the first day of the Budget debates during the years I have been in the House. I shall start by agreeing with him about the importance of certain exemptions from the climate change levy. I have the honour of representing a steel area in Rotherham. Steel is one of this country’s strategic industries, and the Chancellor’s announcement today will be very welcome in my constituency. It will help to secure the industry for the future, and I hope that it will also help to secure extra investment from Tata Steel.

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15:00 Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. There is, perhaps, a tension in the coalition Government between the Chancellor and the Department for Energy and Climate Change, and, if we are honest, within the Department itself, when it comes to whether sustainable growth from green technologies is desirable. I emphatically believe that it is desirable, and I want investment in wind farms in particular to go ahead. We said at the time of the 2010 general election that we wanted to rebalance the economy, and green growth is certainly one of the things that we had in mind.

We want to rebalance the economy, away from the south-east and to our city regions, and also—as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert)—to decarbonise the economy. I want to raise an issue that has not been the subject of much comment, but which I know is tucked away among the Budget details. I think that we should consider how we can provide further incentives for the setting up of social enterprises around the country in order to produce sustainable micro-growth in all our communities, and devise innovative ways of bringing people into business on a not-for-profit basis. That would contribute to a fairer society as well, but the biggest contribution to a fairer society that any Government can make is putting more money into people’s own pockets and purses, so that they can decide for themselves how to spend the money for which they have worked so hard.

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15:27 David Davis (Conservative)

Another item that was raised earlier—the hon. Member for East Antrim raised it with respect to Northern Ireland alone—was the question of carbon tax and carbon floors. In the next month or so, the changes that are being introduced will give us a disadvantage of £10 a tonne, and not against China or India, but against Germany, Holland and France. We will see a transfer of heavy industry from this country to Europe. There will now be an exemption for ceramics, but frankly there are many other businesses—they employ about 600,000 people—in the energy-intensive industries. We need to address that. The previous Government were very happy to deliver golden rules of one sort or another. I would like to suggest a rule for us on environmental and energy policy: we should not introduce any environmental policy that is not matched by our European colleagues. That would ensure that we do not do ourselves huge harm.

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16:44 Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)

I welcome the Chancellor’s measures on housing, but they are all about owner-occupiers. The big need at present is to provide houses for the two fifths of our population who cannot afford to buy them and to whom the banks will not lend. The mortgages are not forthcoming in any case, but those people are so impoverished that they need public housing to rent. That is what we need to build primarily. Why not have a massive housing programme—300,000 houses over two years? We are already building 100,000 houses fewer than this community needs, and it is those who cannot afford to buy, and who particularly need housing, who are suffering the pain of the housing crisis and the present housing shortage. Borrow, spend, build houses, invest in the future, invest in green energy, which like ICT in the ’80s is the coming future; borrow and spend, stimulate and grow—that is the only way out, but the Chancellor proposed none of that and that is why the Budget is such a failure.

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17:11 Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)

I hugely welcome the announcements on shale gas. It is disappointing that in the time it has taken Cuadrilla to get one exploratory rig up and going in Lancashire, 72 have been got going in Argentina. I know that the excellent Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), who is on the Front Bench, understands that and will drive the policy forward with the passion for which he is well known and well regarded across the House.

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18:00 Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)

If we look abroad at the great emerging economies that are hurtling forward as we are bobbling along at the bottom, we see that Brazil is investing $5.3 billion in biotech and renewable energy. We see a much bigger amount coming from China’s development bank. That is because China is bigger, but again this is patient money being rewarded in economic growth and economic success. The case is the same for public sector research and development in the United States. When we do the analysis of where the global players will come, we find that they will come to clusters of research and development and skills. I am glad that the European Investment Bank is investing in a second campus in Swansea to bring investment there. I hope that the Government will invest in super-connectivity for Swansea, and a lot of businesses have written to the Chancellor about that.

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18:29 Barry Gardiner (Labour)

This Chancellor’s old mantra was cut, tax and grow, so what if he has changed it for Heseltine’s grow, tax and spend? If he has not learned that growth must be sustainable, it will all end up in the same mess. In a world of 7 billion people, growth can be sustainable only if it is predicated on advances that bring increased productivity and greater efficiency in the use of resource. For the world to continue to achieve a 3% per annum growth target and to maintain a trajectory that keeps carbon emissions below the 2° threshold, we must increase our productivity per tonne of carbon emitted 15 times over, yet this is the Chancellor who has fought tooth and nail to stop us having a decarbonisation target in the Energy Bill.

The Chancellor is oblivious to the argument, regardless of who makes it—friend or foe, politician or industry. Two weeks ago, six of the largest multinational investors in the UK infrastructure wrote to him. Mitsubishi, Alstom, Doosan, Gamesa, Vestas and Areva have interests that span gas, clean coal, carbon capture and storage, nuclear and renewables. They told the Chancellor of their strong support for the early introduction of the 2030 decarbonisation target and warned:

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