Queen’s Speech

My Lords, the Minister made a pretty good fist of imposing a degree of coherence on this debate, but the reality is that we have a rag-bag of Bills being discussed today and a rag-bag of departments represented; therefore, we can all choose what we want to talk about. I will not cause the Government too many problems tonight. I could have talked about local government, in which case I would have found myself largely in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Tope, or I could have talked about agriculture, in which case I would have approved of most of what the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, said. Even on transport, I would have to agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, on the third runway, rather than my noble friend Lord Soley. However, I will focus on climate change, and maybe a bit about housing. Even in those capacities, I must declare a few interests: my chairmanship of Consumer Focus, my interest in the energy field, and as a board member of the Environment Agency. In that capacity I also welcome the long-awaited marine Bill. I may not agree with every aspect, but I support it. I think that I will also probably be able to support the floods and water Bill, although parts will need clarifying. On the role of energy in climate change, I have welcomed the creation of the new department that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, represents, among other departments that he represents in this House. I welcome the initial statements, including the speech yesterday by the Secretary of State Ed Miliband. I also welcome the recent Ofgem probe, in which it recognises for the first time that there are a few problems in the market, particularly for the less well-off and more exposed portion of consumers. At this stage, energy prices should be coming down. They went up very rapidly last year, and have come down quite rapidly in the wholesale market. In the retail market, however, ““coming down”” seems to be lagging a lot more than ““going up””. I am equally concerned about the structure of the tariffs that people pay for their energy. The tariff structure should not mean that the poor pay more, but they do. It should not mean that you pay less for every additional unit that you consume rather than more. The present structure is both environmentally daft and socially regressive. It behoves the Government and the regulator to take more seriously a root-and-branch review of the tariff structure. I hope that the new Secretary of State has that in his sights. Despite the current fall in wholesale prices, it is also almost certainly true that the medium to long-term trend of energy prices will be upwards. Incidentally, the same is probably also true of food prices, which went up and down over the past 12 months, partly for the reasons indicated by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard. It is also true that carbon-based energy prices going up should be a government policy objective, in order to drive behavioural change in businesses and individuals. However, we must reconcile a better deal for consumers with the environmental imperatives of reducing the carbon content of our energy and the use of energy as a whole. None of the present government interventions, whether through the trading scheme, where the actual price of carbon has gone down from €30 to about €16, or through the interventions in ROCs and CERTs and other incentives for renewable energy that give different implied prices of carbon, is high enough or sustained enough to drive serious change in the use of energy. If we accept that the average price of carbon-based energy should go up as part of the climate change policy, we must also ensure that the cost does not fall unduly on the poorest. Currently, as the Ofgem study indicated, people who use pre-payment meters, who are off the gas network, who operate on standard credit—as most pensioners do—or who are small users of energy pay significantly more per unit than larger users. We must offset a medium-term trend of a rise in energy prices through a robust commitment to a proper social tariff, so that the social tariff really is the lowest price that each company offers. We must enhance our energy efficiency measures and ensure that we have a coherent move to a lower-carbon energy base. In this context, unlike some in the environmental movement, I support the reinstatement of a commitment to nuclear power and welcome the imminent renewable energy strategy, which we will no doubt debate in this House. I also support some of the concessions that the Minister made during the passage of the Energy Bill on the feed-in tariff for distributed energy. I hope that the concession on heat strategy also bears fruit for low-carbon and low-cost energy. We must redouble our efforts to improve the energy efficiency of buildings—all buildings, including the government estate—and particularly housing. This is true of both retrofitting existing housing and ensuring that building standards are of the highest quality for future energy efficiency, and any refurbishment in the successor to the decent homes programme in social housing. My only other point is that we are now faced with a situation in which all housing sectors are deeply dysfunctional, whether we are talking about social housing; private rented housing; shared ownership schemes, which have not really got off the ground; owner-occupied housing, where the mortgage market is clearly in serious difficulty; or various proposals for mixed tenure. None of the housing markets is really working and there is insufficient flexibility both within and between the sectors to reflect the demographic changes in our society. Obviously, we need a greater supply of housing, but even if we have better energy efficiency standards, new build of any sort is slow in coming through. That is partly because the fall in house prices makes people reluctant to sell and partly because developers of new housing stock are extremely reluctant to put properties on the market which looked attractive a year ago but which are no longer likely to give them a return. The cutbacks in social housing that have occurred over the past 15 years are not easily reversed and therefore not many projects can be brought forward. As a result, the real cost of social and private rented housing is rising because the pressure on those sectors is growing. There are empty new build flats in London while across the country 4 million people are on the housing list. Therefore, the housing policy needs special attention. I am glad that my former boss, Margaret Beckett, is taking on that task. I hope that she will take a root-and-branch look at all aspects of the housing market. We need to ensure that the costs of adapting to climate change, particularly energy costs, do not fall most heavily on those least able to meet them. That is part of a wider problem. Green taxes can be just as regressive as non-green taxes. We need to offset any impacts of regressive green taxes through other measures. An interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian suggested that people are unaware of the inequalities in our society. Those on low incomes are not aware of the high incomes being paid in the companies they work for and those on higher incomes do not know what the average income is. That is why I strongly support the measure in the equality Bill which will make it more difficult to hide inequalities within companies. If the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, wishes to press for that measure to be extended to companies which have been found to have practised gender discrimination, I will support her. The equality Bill is principally about race, gender and disability but it is also concerned with wider inequalities in our society. I hope that our very good policies on climate change do not aggravate those inequalities and that we are prepared to implement measures to offset any such impact. If the cost of meeting climate change challenges can be regressive nationally, it is even more so internationally. We need to avoid both consequences.