Finance Bill

It would not have deterred me because I had a different starting point. However, if asked to determine whether that made economic sense in the short term, I have to say that the answer would be no. All those with whom I work in the microgeneration industry and all those households that are desperately keen to be part of the process wring their hands in despair at the muddle into which we appear to have got ourselves in the low-carbon buildings programme. I understand that the programme was underfunded to begin with, and that there was a danger we would run out of funding for it within the first couple of months of the financial year. Trying to ration it out on a monthly basis has meant that, unless someone is on the phone in the first hour of the first day of each month, their prospects of getting into the programme are next to none. There is clearly a level of public interest in the programme, but that does not make the programme adequate. It ought, however, to give the House an indication of how hungry society is to be part of such a change, and it ought to give the Treasury an indication of why it is so important that it should give a lead on the reporting of the fiscal effectiveness of the measures that it puts in place in the Budget to support that kind of shift. If what we are doing is right in principle, but the scale of intervention is simply inadequate, Parliament needs to be big enough to acknowledge and understand that, and to do something about it. We also need to acknowledge that, in every Budget that has been presented since 2002, there have been measures to address energy efficiency in the home and to address microgeneration and the shift to sustainable and renewable energies. Having said that, it would be hard to say that those measures had been anything other than piecemeal, so far as the Treasury is concerned. So far, they have been restricted to changes in the rate of VAT and exemptions from VAT. They have also been supplemented by fiscal measures relating to capital exemptions. Those provisions are to be welcomed, but they do not, in themselves, make for a coherent programme. There needs to be a new range of fiscal measures if we are to make our programmes coherent. I am happy for the House to have an argument about what those measures should be. At other stages, we have debated the case for attaching a reduction in the rate of stamp duty to the introduction of microgeneration systems in the home. The coherence of that argument is that it would be at the point of transfer of a property that people would look most closely at the financial savings that could be made if they had introduced microgeneration systems, or if they did so within six months, in which case they could get a rebate. That is a perfectly coherent case for fiscal intervention at a point where families and households make those decisions about change. An alternative would be to consider fiscal intervention measures that could be applied in an ongoing way to address annual savings in household expenditure. That could take us into the arena of entitlements to council tax rebates or of the introduction of feed-in tariff systems. Such systems have now been introduced in 19 other countries across the expanded European Union; Britain is one of the few exceptions. It would be perfectly possible for the Treasury to put in place fiscal measures that would promote such a shift to feed-in tariffs. That would afford households the long-term security to work out what savings could be made by taking on a substantial capital investment in the short term that could be set against substantial cash savings that could be planned over a number of years. I am somewhat agnostic as to which of the measures makes the most sense. I would be happy for us to adopt any of them, or any combination of them. They will not happen, however, unless the Treasury puts itself at the centre of the reporting process. There is a further option in which the Treasury might be interested. Only a few months ago, the Government announced that they wanted a lead from a number of core cities to promote energy services companies. They asked for ideas on how cities could lead that initiative—