Energy Security

Indeed. I should declare an interest as listed in the Register of Members' Interests and say that I drive a biofuel car. I want to make two brief points. The first concerns biofuel, which has not been much discussed during this interesting and constructive debate. For Members who are not aware of it, a biofuel car can run both on petrol and on E85, which is a mixture of 15 per cent. petrol and biofuel and is sometimes called flex-fuel. There are only 19 biofuel stations in the country, one of which is at Morrisons in Wellingborough. It seems strange that the Government are not encouraging more people to use biofuel to power their cars. I remember the former Deputy Prime Minister saying that he intended to reduce the number of miles that were travelled by car, but unfortunately the Government have failed in that regard. In 1997, motor vehicle traffic stood at 450.3 billion vehicle kilometres, whereas in 2006 the figure was 506.4 billion vehicle kilometres—an increase of 12.5 per cent. If we could reduce the amount of carbon that cars emitted, it would be far better for the country. We know that biofuel does that, but there is a problem with a biofuel car, as I can testify—it can run quite happily on petrol, when it has the same mileage per gallon as a normal car, but when it runs on biofuel, its efficiency is significantly reduced, so one has to use a third more to get the same number of miles.