Energy Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, and it is one that I plan to come on to. The Secretary of State said that if a company went to the wall, the money for decommissioning would be ring-fenced. However, I presume that all the money would not have to be put up on day one, and that further contributions to the decommissioning pot would be made as profits came in from the generation of nuclear power. What will happen if a company goes bankrupt before that pot of money has reached the necessary level? Who, I wonder, will make up the shortfall? I think that we all know the answer to that question. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management has been mentioned already, and its chairman, Professor Gordon McKerron, has said of the Government's strategy that"““we have an apparent government commitment to the essential role of nuclear””," but that there"““is a real risk we may get the worst of both worlds, where nuclear investment stalls under a risky investment climate while markets hold back from other investment in the expectation that nuclear is just around the corner. Then we really might have a capacity gap and an even bigger risk of the lights going out””." That is one Government adviser describing how investment in nuclear could crowd out other investment, but Sir Jonathan Porritt of the Sustainable Development Commission, who was put in place by the Government to look into these matters, has said: ““What is disturbing is that the Government is failing to understand the more urgent that dealing with climate change becomes, the less relevant…nuclear power is.”” Nuclear power is presented as the friend of climate change, but the chairman of the SDC has said that it is the opposite. He added:"““Solutions have to be found on waste, cost, and decommissioning. They have not been found on any of those issues. It reveals how poor is the understanding by government of the importance of climate change””." The Bill would have been very different if it had come from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I hope that energy will be handled by that Department one day, rather than by the Department with responsibility for the utilities and heavy industry. Finally, I want to touch on a few things that should have been included in the Bill. Earlier, I mentioned home energy efficiency and conservation. We are told that in a decade all new homes will be zero carbon, yet three quarters of the houses that we will be living in in 2050 have been built already. The Bill was a chance to do something about energy efficiency, but what real action in that regard does it promote? A quarter of our country's CO2 emissions come from housing. The figure for Sweden is 5 per cent., yet that country is a lot colder than ours. Why are we in this situation? It is because these things have been neglected time and time again by the energy Department, which is not the environment Department. A second important omission from the Bill is anything on fuel poverty and social tariffs. One of the most shameful things that the Government have done is not only failing to meet their targets on fuel poverty, but going in the wrong direction, with fuel poverty soaring. The Bill could have made sure that energy companies provided social tariffs to low-income customers. The energy companies say that tracking down all the poor customers is very expensive, but the Government have a big computer, and they know who they are. Why do the Government not give a certificate of entitlement to the people who receive key benefits so that they can send that to their fuel supplier to qualify for a social tariff? Rather than British Gas trying to guess which of its consumers are on pension credit, why do the Government not simply give benefit recipients an entitlement to social tariffs? Such a system would be a much more efficient way of tackling fuel poverty, so why does the Bill not provide for it? Instead, poor people are presumably supposed to surf the net to compare all the companies' tariffs, which change all the time anyway, and judge the best tariff for them. With the best will in the world, the evidence shows that low-income households, lone parents and unemployed people are much less likely to switch tariffs than anyone else, yet they account for many of the people who are most likely to need social tariffs. Leaving this to be dealt with by the market and, as I said in response to the statement the other day, through quiet chats with the energy companies, is simply not delivering, as the fuel poverty statistics demonstrate. We have heard from the Conservatives about smart metering. While there is a bit in the Bill about metering, there is practically nothing about smart metering. Given that we will eventually replace every meter in the country, at a cost of billions, we need a framework to get on with that. However, yet again we have missed the opportunity to use the Bill to do that. There is nothing in the Bill about decentralised energy and combined heat and power, either. There are many aspects to this. We need a diverse strategy, yet the Bill is trapped in an old way of thinking. There has been mention of Ofgem and its remit. I cannot put it better than the Sustainable Development Commission, which said:"““We would like to see””—" as would the Liberal Democrats—"““Ofgem's primary duty changed so that its central focus is on creating a sustainable system that costs as little as possible, rather than making a low cost system as sustainable as possible.””" The opportunity to change the priorities of the regulator has been missed. There can be a forward-looking and diverse energy policy of the sort that I have described, but, regrettably, it is not in the Bill.