Renewable Transport Fuel Obligations (Amendment) Order 2011

I thank the noble Lord for that, but there are some people in the north-east who are very good at making the most of the difficulties that we have in the economy. It does not do us any good to overplay our hand. There is a very large plant, which I know. It was engineered in large part by somebody with whom I used to work, and it is extremely well engineered. The company that was going to operate it went out of business. It is now owned, and, to a certain extent—I do not know quite how much—operated by Harvest, which is one of the suppliers of biofuels. It was designed to process rapeseed oil. My information is that it is not processing any rapeseed at all. I really question the whole future of the United Kingdom’s own production from the standard feedstock in temperate climates, which is rapeseed. I do not know what the position is. It is notable that in the instrument and the impact assessments there is hardly a mention of rapeseed, and no references are made to United Kingdom production from rapeseed. Of course, rapeseed is a food; you can buy rapeseed oil in any supermarket, and it is very good for cooking. However, so is soya bean. The three principle feedstocks for biofuels—two for diesel—are soya bean, palm oil, and of course, rapeseed. The soya bean is responsible for 50 per cent of the world’s supplies of vegetable oil. How will you determine whether a particular lot of soya comes from a sustainable source? I should declare a past interest: an organisation I was involved with used to grow soya beans in Zambia. We grew about 40 per cent of Zambia’s vegetable oil supplies in that area of the country—it was a very big operation. I have also been a palm oil grower. As for bioethanol, I have also been a sugar cane grower. I could volunteer to be a verifier; I would know what I was looking at. I have seen all sorts of land transferred, for example, from growing coconut trees to oil palms—but what was the land before coconuts were grown on it? My goodness, it was forest until somebody thought, ““We need some food””. So they cleared the land and grew coconuts. Then the coconut industry became unremunerative and the coconut trees were replaced by oil palms. The story is the same for palm oil. Nobody will be able to be sure that they are getting their palm oil from a sustainable place. There is absolutely no way they can be sure because certificates do not come with soya beans stating that they come from a particular field in Brazil that has just been cleared of either primary or secondary forest. The soya bean industry is enormous. Of course the growers will say that the beans come from a place where soya beans have been grown for the past 20 years. On biodiesel, are we going to adhere to the sustainability criteria for rapeseed grown in the United Kingdom, or apply them just to overseas countries? Is this a DfID and Foreign Office matter, or does Defra come into it somewhere? There are issues around the extension of arable land in United Kingdom. There were big issues at the beginning of the Second World War. All sorts of secondary land was ploughed up that would have been better left—but we needed the food production. On the question of ethanol, sugar cane and sugar beet are the principal sources of the bioethanol that comes here from Brazil, for example. We do not import much corn-made ethanol from the United States, but some corn-oil ethanol is imported from the United States. Sugar is a food. What about food supplies? Nothing in the European system deals with the threat to food supplies, which it is said will be quite serious by 2050. I make this point about the principal agricultural feedstocks. It is neither possible nor equitable to insist that fuel companies are accurate in their information and should otherwise pay penalties of up to £50,000 or 10 per cent of their turnover if they are not accurate. Since the department is not at all confident about its own accuracy—as it states clearly in the impact assessment—why should anybody else have their feet held to this fire? Secondly, all the principal agricultural feedstocks for biofuels are also food crops. That must be taken into careful consideration. Therefore, the European system is faulty. It is not fit for purpose and should be rethought and rewritten. On the question of mandatory sustainability criteria, the papers in front of us state that we do not have them yet. Although we are bringing in this instrument because we might worry about infraction if we did not, we are still working on what the mandatory guidelines should be and we are not at all sure when we will have them worked out. It would be best if this instrument were taken away and thought through again. We should have serious discussions with the Commission and come to a different position in six months’ or a year's time. It is no surprise that we are looking at 3.5 per cent of fuel coming from bioenergy; we are miles away from 10 per cent and nobody wants to get there.