I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and to hear that she intends to press amendment 24, a relatively moderate amendment, to a Division. She envisages subsidy for nuclear as long as it is not greater than the subsidy for renewables, but I would prefer a world in which we do not subsidise any energy production. Under this dog’s breakfast of a Bill, we will end up subsidising almost everything.
My worry with nuclear—my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) addressed this—is the length of the contract. I do not go all the way with him on the £1 billion a year cost, or the very large sum grossed up over the period of the contract, but my calculations suggest something in the range of £600 million to £700 million a year just for the new Hinkley stations. That is a huge amount of money. Earlier, the Minister seemed unable to get to grips with the idea that the House might express a view on that. The contract is enormous and could put hundreds of pounds on consumers’ bills, and cost billions of pounds over the length of the contract. It would therefore be highly appropriate for the House to consider the matter, and for hon. Members to vote by positive resolution on whether we believe it is the right thing to do with our constituents’ money.
The key problem with the Bill is that it changes the law and puts very large subsidies to different technologies, which Ministers pick as winners in an opaque process, on a contractual basis that cannot realistically later be unpicked. The Chancellor has told us of an increase in the limit from about £2.4 billion to £9.8 billion per year, which is a quadrupling of the amount spent. That will be added to consumers’ bills for those various technologies, but the Bill implements that into contracts that cannot be unpicked. The nuclear contract could be absolutely enormous. I would like far greater concern for our constituents and the bills they pay for electricity.
We used to have the most competitive energy market in the world. I thought that the Minister believed in free markets, yet essentially what we are doing here is almost the final stage of replacing the freest energy market in the world with one that is rigged against consumers. The cost will be far more than the £9.8 billion figure, which ignores the fact that it is not just through the European Union and its directive that we are planning to close existing coal-fired plant, which are the cheapest at producing electricity. Unilaterally, we are banning the construction of new coal-fired power stations, when Germany has several new coal-fired plants under construction.