I am pleased to join the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) in supporting amendment 11 and voting for it later today.
The Secretary of State is in a bind. His party believes in a 2030 decarbonisation target—it is Lib Dem party policy, after all. His party put the issue in its manifesto. Many of his MPs went further and actually signed a separate pledge in support of a decarbonisation target. Have they not learned the Lady Bracknell rule of politics: to break one pledge may be regarded as a misfortune; to break two looks like contempt for the electorate? The Secretary of State is, however, a decent fellow and he has told me from that Dispatch Box that he favours a 2030 decarbonisation target and would be happy to implement one were it not for the fact that he struck an agreement with the Chancellor. I understand that he refers to this agreement as “the grand bargain”. Hardly: it is more of a Faustian pact.
The Secretary of State was right to negotiate £7.6 billion under the levy control framework to support renewables up until 2020—but bargain this was not. Old coal will be allowed to provide base load beyond 2023; gas will be incentivised to provide base load right the way up until 2045. All pretence of meeting our carbon budgets and emissions targets will be abandoned, and the jobs and growth that leadership in low-carbon industries would generate will be lost. The combined value to the UK economy of all this is worth many times more than the paltry £7.6 billion that the Secretary of State has negotiated up to 2020. A grand bargain? Not since Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage has a worse deal been struck.
Just 10 days ago, the UK’s independent Committee on Climate Change produced its report on the electricity market reform. The report compared and analysed the relative benefits of investing in a portfolio of low-carbon technologies through the 2020s rather than investing in gas-fired generation. The report finds that investment in low carbon would save consumers between £25 billion and £45 billion. If, however, one uses the higher-end estimates of gas and carbon prices, the Climate Change Committee’s estimate then rises to £100 billion.