Greater London Authority Bill

I shall do better than answer the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Byford; I shall suggest a better way of drafting the amendment, should the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, wish to retable it on Report. To define ““clean or green”” in legal terms would be very difficult. I suggest that she uses the words ““low carbon””. I am showing her the hand of solidarity. That did not come from my speech but from the notes headed ““purpose and effect””, which I always find more useful than the speech itself. I think that we are all on the same side here; we want clarity. I shall certainly not nitpick, and did not intend to do so in the previous debate. I know what it is like trying to table probing amendments when one is in opposition. This is a serious issue. We need to get the ““clean or green”” concept across to the public and make sure that they are not hoodwinked by people claiming that things are clean and green when they are not. An amendment including the term ““low carbon”” would be appropriate. However, I resist the amendment that is before us for the following reasons. The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, referred to getting energy from waste. There is enormous potential for doing that. Some 6 million tonnes of wood go to landfill every year which could be chipped and made into biomass. All that is needed is to make the waste regulations more sensible. Some of that wood is coated or glued or contains resins and is not necessarily natural; in other words, it is mixed. Therefore, it falls foul of the regulations. But I assure the Committee that people around the country are working on this very issue of how to get money, gold and energy out of waste. The word ““waste”” should be banned because it implies something that has no use whereas there is a use for everything. Half the food that we buy is wasted; it is not used. There is enormous capacity for getting energy from waste. The noble Baroness is quite right; Germany has 3,000 anaerobic digestion plants on farms. It is not true to say that there are none in this country; there certainly are some. Bedfordia has a huge plant in Bedford. In fact, there is more than one such plant. A huge plant was based initially on pig slurry waste, but to make it work—anaerobic digestion requires other ingredients—huge amounts of food waste from supermarkets or pet food manufacturers are being used. The Greenfinch site at Ludlow is an experimental plant, which I think runs at a capacity of about 5,000 tonnes a year. It is purely an experimental plant funded by the RDA and Defra. It uses food waste and green waste from the local authority. People are trying to assess the optimum capacity of such fairly small plants. I was told when I visited that they reckoned on the early evidence that plants of around 15,000 tonnes would be more viable. Both plants were pumping huge amounts of electricity back into the grid from the process of anaerobic digestion from the waste, and, what is more, getting a product at the end of the day that could be put back on the land. That is the benefit. There is a lot of work going on in getting energy from what would be formally called waste. Woodchip is a good example. It is always a pleasure to give Harper Adams agricultural college a plug, because it is such a well-run, successful college. It does an enormous amount of work on getting the right method of creating the pellets and the chips from waste wood to create energy. A huge amount is going on that is both clean and green, whichever way one wants to look at it. Nevertheless, the noble Baroness is right to raise the issue. Proposed new Section 361B states that the London climate change mitigation and energy strategy ““must include”” the Mayor’s proposals relating to ““supporting innovation”” and ““encouraging investment””. We have included this in the list of areas that the Mayor must cover in his strategy because London is potentially very influential in encouraging technological developments and innovative energy. Many energy companies are based here, as are many of the investors who could support the development of new energy technologies. The amendment would ensure that the Mayor would be required to support only the development of clean or green energy technologies, and I fully support the spirit of that. However, ensuring the development and deployment of new low-carbon technologies is critical for the long-term emissions target, and it is a key objective if we are going to decarbonise energy supply in the long term. We expect the Mayor to focus on this part of his strategy for low-carbon technologies. We fully expect that to happen. We want to take account of the fact that the strategy is designed to consider wider goals of energy policy, including maintaining security of energy supply and reducing fuel poverty. The development and uptake of energy technologies is likely to be very important in these areas. Usually there will be synergies between the development of low-carbon technologies and support for energy security, low carbon and fuel poverty goals. For example, the development and deployment of renewables will bring about security benefits. That is self-evident. The development of energy efficiency technologies will hopefully address fuel poverty. In some cases, we need to recognise in the short term—many of these are medium to long-term goals that we are talking about—that investment will be needed in traditional technology. One example of such technology is the objective to maximise the exploitation of UK oil and gas reserves. That would reduce our reliance on imported oil and gas supplies in the short to medium term. Increasingly, the companies working on the UK continental shelf are smaller and the oil and gas finds are much harder to access, making appropriate encouragement and support for the development of new technologies important. On the other hand, those reserves are there, although they are more difficult to exploit and get out. There is no reason why we should not try to maximise the use of our assets. They are on our doorstep; we are not vulnerable. As anyone knows who reads about the background of this, most of the gas seems to be in the most unstable countries. It used to be the case that it could always be said that the Soviet Union, or Russia, never reneged on a gas contract. There have been a few problems in thepast couple of years that have woken people up. In20 years’ time, when people flick a switch, they want their lights to go on. What we do now in terms of energy supply is absolutely crucial but there is no single factor or magic bullet. It is very important to exploit our existing reserves, although they cannot be extracted in the waythey have been for the past two or three decades. Using technology to exploit those reserves is not inconsistent with delivering transition to a low carbon economy in the long term because it is obviously helping us with security of supply in the short term. Effective exploitation of UK oil and gas reserves is an example but, of course, someone might say, ““That is not low carbon; that is not clean and green””. We would not want anyone to get the wrong message from being so prescriptive, which is the effect of the amendment, whichever way around it is drafted. We want to ensure that the Mayor has to consider support for technologies which support the full range of energy policy goals. The full range is the point. He does not have to support them all, but he can support the full range. We would not want the provision to be prescriptive. We hope that it will remain as currently drafted with the Mayor required to consider energy technologies consistent with the overall objectives of the strategy to contribute to wider energy policies, as set out in the new section as well as the climate change mitigation goals. We can return to this. The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, raised a point about waste. I realise that creating energy from waste on a grand scale is debated in other forums. However, we have not had any serious in-depth debates about that, even in the department. In the past few months I have asked questions about anaerobic digestion as I saw my first examples of that on my last day as Minister in Northern Ireland. I saw three or four pieces of anaerobic digestion equipment, which were quite modest. Nevertheless, it is a good form of clean renewable energy. In Defra we asked ourselves: Do we need a policy on anaerobic digestion? Sometimes with new technologies governments write policies that snuff out enterprise because it is new and does not conform to existing custom and practice, which is why we have been very careful. The Minister for climate change, Ian Pearson, and I have taken a close interest in this so the department has been proactive. Enormous numbers of people, groups and companies around the country are looking at ways of getting energy from what hitherto would have been put into landfill. That is fully consistent with the requirements we have placed on the Mayor. Therefore, I hope the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment. I have no doubt that we will return to the matter on Report. However, if I see the term ““low carbon””, I want to claim credit for the authorship of the amendment.