Energy Bill

There may, for the hon. Gentleman, be a delicious historic point. In 1987 I was the Conservative candidate for Barnsley, West and Penistone, and I gloriously increased a 10,000 Labour majority to a 14,000 Labour majority and still made it look like a success. The real lesson, I would say to the hon. Gentleman and some of his parliamentary colleagues who sit on the same Bench, is that we must look forward and stop looking back. We cannot just look back and say what was. We have to look forward and work out what we can do for the good of the country in the future. We recognise that companies are being asked to make investments that will last for a generation or more, and they need to know that their politicians are taking the issues seriously and, I would say again to the hon. Gentleman, are working together. We should acknowledge the great interest that the subject has generated outside the House, and we should thank those who have sent all of us the submissions that we need to study today in order to reach our conclusions on the Bill and on the issue. Greenpeace, for instance, says that nuclear is a distraction from focusing our real energies on renewables. I do not entirely agree, but it is a legitimate view. WWF says that we should not build any more fossil fuel installations without carbon capture technology. Friends of the Earth champions our support of feed-in tariffs. Energywatch says that we need to ensure that energy companies offer social tariffs for those trapped in fuel poverty. The Energy Saving Trust and the Energy Retail Association both support our call for mandating smart meters to improve energy efficiency. The Renewable Energy Association makes a range of submissions to strengthen the Bill's incentives for renewables, including developing a sustainability remit for Ofgem. No doubt all those will be debated in Committee in a sensible and open-minded way. The Bill first addresses the storage of gas. The recent shift in the UK's status from producer to net importer of gas means that our need for storage facilities has become a very high priority. Because gas is piped and not shipped, it is either on or off. Ships can be redirected, but pipelines cannot. Being exposed to this on/off decision leaves us vulnerable. If we can store gas, that represents a significant antidote to energy vulnerability. If the proposals enable energy companies to buy in the summer and sell in the winter, and pass on to consumers the financial advantages of doing so, it is a no-brainer. Given that some people have perfectly rational fear about the security of long-term import dependency, the Government should be committing themselves to developing more capacity for strategic reserves, ready to be called upon in a national or international emergency. The Bill also establishes the regulatory framework to explore the potential of carbon capture and storage. We strongly welcome the fact that the Government are finally beginning to take real action on CCS in the UK. We are already seeing the exciting results of such experiments in Norway and the United States. With our large offshore oil and gas presence, the UK is uniquely equipped to take the lead with this technology and cut our own emissions while providing an industrial base for CCS manufacturing and design. Regrettably, as the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie) said, the dithering over the past three years has set back our ability to deploy CCS in the UK by up to even a decade, I would argue. We were warning the Government for months that the lack of an adequate regulatory and financial framework risked derailing BP and Scottish and Southern's joint venture at Peterhead. Only an hour after the 2007 White Paper was published, as we predicted, the project collapsed. Had CCS qualified for the renewables obligation, the plant would undoubtedly have been able to go ahead, but as the former Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, now the Chancellor, informed me after the publication of that White Paper, CCS is not included in the renewables obligation because it is not renewable. Maybe not, but it does capture carbon, which fulfils the same objective. We still have concerns. If, for instance, 90 per cent. of carbon is captured, will the emissions count as zero or is there a proper formula for making a calculation? Perhaps the Secretary of State or the Minister can point me towards a proper explanation, amid the Government's various tranches of energy policy statements, of what would happen to the economics of the operating company if CCS were successful.