Finance Bill

In the course of saying farewell to the Economic Secretary before he is elevated onwards and upwards to higher things, I forgot to mention that this is the Chancellor’s last full day. I intend principally to discuss amendments Nos. 34 and 36, and I shall begin by marking that point. This afternoon gives the Chancellor a final chance to act on the emerging consensus in this House that the Treasury should take a clear departmental lead on the environment in relation to microgeneration and energy efficiency. Hon. Members will recall that at this stage of last year’s Finance Bill, the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson), who is in his place, tabled an amendment to make the Treasury issue an annual report on fiscal measures to assist with microgeneration, energy efficiency and small-scale energy generation. Hon. Members will also recall that we supported that amendment in the Lobby along with the Liberal Democrats when it was pressed to a vote. We tabled the same amendment in this year’s Committee of the whole House, when we were supported by the Liberal Democrats. The hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy) agreed with me in the closing moments of that debate that it was worth returning to the matter, and amendments Nos. 34 and 36 are that return to the matter. Following a slight adjustment, the amendments propose that the Treasury report annually to the Commons on the effectiveness of the tax reliefs in clauses 20 and 21. In the debate in the Committee of the whole House, which was somewhat compressed, I tried to sum up the emerging consensus on microgeneration in a sentence:"““The Red Book only takes us so far.””—[Official Report, 1 May 2007; Vol. 459, c. 1477.]" I said that the information on page 177 of the Red Book does not tell us how effective the Treasury expects clauses 20 and 21 to be or how many microgeneration systems the Treasury expects to be installed by how many people over what period of time. In that respect, this debate has an eerie resemblance to the debate that has just taken place. In Committee of the whole House, the hon. Member for Nottingham, South pointed out that responsibilities for reporting on microgeneration and energy efficiency are spread across several Departments—the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—and that the Treasury is not currently one of them. He stated that Finance Ministries in other European countries have a more enhanced role and that the lack of that role here leaves"““a glaring gap in the coherence of our approach to climate change policies””.—[Official Report, 1 May 2007; Vol. 459, c. 1477.]" In response to that debate, which was necessarily truncated, I thought that the Chief Secretary went through the motions. He said that the new clause was"““not necessary, because there is already a requirement to produce information on those subjects.””—[Official Report, 1 May 2007; Vol. 459, c. 1480.]" There is such a requirement, but it does not apply to the Treasury outside the Red Book and the Green Book, to which the Chief Secretary referred the House. However, it is hard to see how those documents give the House what it needs, because they provide less detail than other Departments. Sections 7.42 and 7.43 on page 177 of this year’s Red Book cover microgeneration. They contain a slightly more detailed explanation of the two clauses than that provided by the Chancellor in his Budget speech. They do not answer the questions that I asked a few moments ago, such as how many extra microgeneration systems the Government expect to see installed as a result of those measures and what the overall effectiveness of the Government’s strategy has been to date. In short, the emerging consensus in the House wants a continuing assessment from the Treasury of how effective the Chancellor's microgeneration measures are, and not merely a description of what those measures entail. It is not, after all, as though the background to clauses 20 and 21 is completely encouraging. We welcome the direction of travel outlined in last year’s microgeneration strategy, but if one compares our record with that of some of our international competitors, we are not setting the pace. By the end of 2004, 200,000 Japanese homes had fitted photovoltaic cells; 300,000 micro-renewable systems have been installed in Germany; more than 10 per cent. of homes in Sweden already use micro-renewable technology to heat their homes; German companies are already generating half the entire turnover of the global wind industry; Japanese firms are at the forefront of fuel cell and hybrid engine technologies; and American companies are leading the way in bringing affordable renewable technologies to the market. We clearly have some way to go to catch up. The amendments, which, as I have said, are supported by an emerging consensus across the House, will not automatically improve our position, but the case for them—that the Treasury should publish an estimate of how successful it expects those measures to be—is surely unanswerable. I hope that the Minister will accept the principal amendments, Nos. 34 and 36, but in the event that he does not, may I ask him directly, as I did not get a chance to do so in Committee of the whole House, how many schemes the Treasury expects to be brought into effect by these provisions and over what period of time?