Energy Bill

Having reflected on our consideration of the Bill over the past few months, I find it striking that only a short section of it deals with renewables, although the overwhelming majority of the amendments tabled in Committee and on Report focused on the subject. That demonstrates that the measures on renewables in the Bill do not go far enough. It would have been great if the amendment on feed-in tariffs had been passed today. I strongly suspect that when the Bill emerges from another place we shall see a similar amendment, which we would welcome. Although we have not opposed the banding of the renewables obligation, I think the Minister grossly oversold what has been achieved by that mechanism so far. If it is so wonderful, why has it taken so long for us to reach a point at which we are still so far behind? The Minister said earlier that we were making rapid progress and that we had started from a low base; but we started from a low base 11 years ago, we are still virtually at the bottom of the league table, and the Bill will not enable us to surge up to the place that we ought to occupy. We are witnessing the problem of departmentalitis. I simply cannot understand why an energy Department would not use an Energy Bill to promote energy efficiency. That would have been entirely proper and should have been in the first clause, but there is no mention of the subject in any of the clauses. On Second Reading, we observed that the Bill was about big energy. It was about paying for nuclear clean-up, about offshore gas storage and about carbon capture. We are pleased that we have been able to improve it at the margins, and we welcome the nod in the direction of smart meters, but the Bill does not provide much more than that. It is a case of ““Something will happen at some point, we hope””. We are told that the Government have powers to make something happen within five years. If I have any overall observation about the Bill and the Government's energy policy, it relates to the breathtaking lack of urgency. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), who has now left the Chamber, commented that five years ago the Government had said that the issue of carbon capture was urgent. When chided, the Minister said ““We are on the brink of some demonstration projects””, seeming not to consider that the elapsing of five years mattered particularly. The point is that our climate change targets are not being deferred by five years every time the Government delay for five years. When the Climate Change Bill is enacted, dates will be set, and the delays embodied by the Bill will make it harder and harder for us to hit the targets. Every extra year of the consultation, dither and delay that we are about to see on smart metering, even following the amendment of provisions in the Bill, will make it that much harder to achieve the vital goals that we need to achieve. We discussed the carbon capture provisions at some length. We have no problem with the Government's attempt to introduce post-combustion demonstration projects, but they have scuppered pre-combustion demonstration projects. They have picked a technology, and the history of Governments' picking technologies is not a good one. I cannot bring myself to describe the Bill as a missed opportunity, because it is much worse than that. I think that not only our nation but our planet will rue the day when it missed so many chances to do the right thing.