My Lords, in rising to support this amendment, I should first declare my interests as a farmer and landowner with renewable schemes on my property which I am involved with financially. I try to encourage others to get involved in such schemes as well. I want to talk in particular about the future of our housing infrastructure. I hope that a lot of new houses are going to be built over the next few years and it is therefore important to think about these issues at this stage. I want to take a particularly narrow line, which I hope the Committee will excuse.
It may be that my remarks would be better targeted at Amendment 95ZBB tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, but I have only just come across it so I am not quite sure what it is all about. The difference between some of the continental housing developments I have seen in recent years and ours is the much greater frequency of community heating schemes in both rural areas and new build housing estates in towns. For some reason our developers seem to shy away from community schemes, preferring individual gas-fired boilers or, in rural areas, oil-fired boilers fitted in each and every house. That must be very inefficient. I know that we have the renewable heat incentive, but clearly it is not quite enough and it tends to be used in community buildings such as churches and village halls, as well as on farms and in factories so that the heating system can be linked to one or two houses. These are quite small schemes. Plugging a new estate of 400 or 500 houses into a community heat source is really quite rare.