My Lords, I declare my interests in various forms of energy as listed in the register. I cannot declare the probably seven-figure annual sum that I do not receive because I do not allow wind turbines on my land in a very windy part of Northumberland. I say that not to elicit the House’s sympathy, obviously, but to emphasise the point that the Government would be right to resist this amendment because it would hit the poorer even harder and reward the rich even more, by encouraging enormously expensive renewable energy, particularly the wind industry, particularly offshore wind. Effectively, this amendment would lock in now the wrong technologies, the ones that we know are inefficient in producing decarbonisation and which are immensely expensive.
We have heard a lot already today about the interests and needs of producers of energy. As I said in Committee, it is much more important that we think about the needs and interests of consumers of energy. We do not build power stations for the people who build them or the people who plan them; we build them for the people who use the electricity that comes from them, and thereby provide jobs with that electricity.
We know three things now that we did not know at the start of the summer when the Bill first arrived in this House. The first is that the public are right royally fed up with rising energy bills and are not going to take kindly to further increases, which is what we are talking about. Secondly, wind in particular—as with a lot of renewables—needs even bigger subsidies than we have been led to expect. We were told that the strike price for offshore wind would come down from around £150 per megawatt-hour to about £100. That target has now been abandoned; it is coming down to £135. That is an extremely expensive product—about three times the price of wholesale electricity at the moment. The third thing we have learnt—and I am going to come on to this at the end of my speech—is that climate change is happening more slowly than expected.
If all three of those points are taken together, it would be completely mad to lock in a target now for 2030. It would also be potentially callous because it would encourage an increase in the price of electricity.