Finance Bill

I wish to speak briefly in support of the amendments, which are to clauses that I recall describing in Committee as a ““puny measure””—because of their impact on the revenue, and because they illustrated the Chancellor’s attempts to position the Budget as a green Budget without having any significant impact on take-up of microgeneration. The amendments will therefore highlight and expose for the Government and the public at large the fact that the measure will be meaningless. There are two inconsistencies in the Government’s approach to microgeneration and renewable energy. First, as the Chief Secretary will know if he has read the National Audit Office’s report, the Government have an opportunity to encourage renewable energy in their own building programme. They spend some £3 billion a year, across different agencies, on new buildings and refurbishing existing premises, and they have committed themselves to introducing energy efficiency into those buildings. But when it comes to actual measures—surprise, surprise—they find, as my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) was saying, that the lack of cost-effectiveness is unfortunately prohibitive. In the case of Nottingham prison, it would have cost more than £2 million to install the energy efficiency measures that the prison authorities wanted; they did not have the budget, so none of them was installed. In the public sector, the payback on solar panels is approximately 18 years. Action taken on such measures would be far more effective than the clause under consideration. Secondly, in relation to the low-carbon buildings programme, which, as other Members have highlighted, has been introduced in a shambolic fashion, the companies proliferating around the country trying to help domestic consumers to make such installations have been subject to regulatory overload in the form of the Building Research Establishment. It has now started a system of registration of those installers—a registration process that is adding considerably to the costs and risks of being in business. Most of them have relied on the low-carbon buildings programme grant to encourage customers to take up installations. Not only do they find that those grants are cut from month to month and are unreliable as to availability, but they are now being charged to be registered as installers—£1,800 to get registration, plus an additional £600—