I have been selected to sit on the Energy Bill Committee. This is a committee of cross-party MPs selected to scrutinise the Government’s proposed Energy Bill, before it returns to the House of Commons to be debated and voted on. You can read more about the role of a Bill Committee here.
The Energy Bill is a long awaited piece of legislation brought forward by the Government to (1) leverage private investment in clean technologies (2) reform the energy system so it’s fit for the future, and (3) ensure the safety, security and resilience of the UK’s energy system. You can read more about the Energy Bill here.
We have long called for the Government to bring forward the first Energy Bill since 2015, so I welcome its arrival. But given the urgency of the cost of living and climate crises we need an all out sprint for zero carbon power, a proper plan to spread the benefits from this cheap power to lower and middle income families, and an industrial policy to create good quality, green jobs. This Bill lacks the ambition required to deliver on any of these.
During the Lords stage, Labour secured 5 important amendments on: moving the hydrogen levy away from customer bills; banning new coal mines; introducing a local electricity bill; mandating reporting on EPC standards for homes; and establishing a Net Zero duty for Ofgem (which the Government have now conceded on and accepted!). These were important and very welcome wins, helping improve the ambition of the Bill.
Over the next 5 weeks I will be scrutinising this Bill line by line, trying to amend the weakest parts of it and fighting to keep as many of the above Lords amendments as possible.
Below is a rolling summary of speeches and interventions I have made during the Committee Stage.
If you would like to get in touch to tell me about a particular issue you would like me to raise, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Carbon Capture
Below is a transcript of my speech.
Thank you, Mr Gray. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test. Having spoken to researchers at the University of Sheffield, and understanding that carbon capture and storage is more complicated than just the big carbon capture and storage programmes, I think his amendment is crucial. Modular and small carbon capture is really important, but where the captured CO2 then goes is really important too. Having a CO2 hub provider in this space is important for the circular economy of products, which, although not within the Bill’s exact remit, is fundamental to reducing carbon in the environment.
That is the sense in which this part of the chain needs to be expanded in the Bill, so that use is fully considered and the use of new forms of CO2 is reduced, and so that we get a circular economy. It is important that the Bill tackles that. I hope the Minister will outline why that has been missing so far and will be supportive of the shadow Minister’s amendments, which I hope will plug a gap and eventually lead us to think about these issues from the perspective not just of energy but of products, which contribute hugely to the challenge we face in reducing CO2 emissions. By enabling more circularity, the Bill would give us a better opportunity to join up things that are external to the energy sector, and also through carbon. I hope the Minister will accept that and address my points in his reply.
Scrapping the hydrogen levy on energy bills
Below is a transcript of my speech. You can listen to the full debate here.
I rise to defend the amendments made in the Lords and to speak against Government amendment 12, predominantly because of the aims of the Bill that the Secretary of State outlined when it was brought forward. Those aims were about security, but also about tackling fuel poverty. The facts about fuel poverty in the UK at the moment are very telling. I will cite the End Fuel Poverty Coalition’s numbers: 1,000 people died in 2022 as a result of living in cold, damp homes, unable to heat them because of costs. We also know that 7 million people in the UK last winter were living in fuel poverty. Taken together, those are staggering numbers, and it is important that they are at the forefront of our minds when we discuss the levy.
It is telling that there seem to be unified voices against the policy. The figure of £118 that the shadow Minister mentioned came from Onward, which is a Conservative think-tank. The discussion is also about who has the broadest shoulders to help with the changes that desperately need to be made to our energy system. I completely agree with the shadow Minister that the Bill gives the public all the risk and potentially none of the benefits.
There are 37 independently published reports that set out that they do not believe that the UK will move fully to hydrogen for home heating. Obviously there are massive benefits for steel—Sheffield is the city of steel—that could be unlocked through hydrogen, and there are many benefits for industry, but it seems wrong for Government amendment 12 to remove the protections given in the other place to the levy to prevent that cost from falling so dramatically on households. As the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell set out, it is really important that we bring the public with us.
Government amendment 12 is almost a wrecking motion for net zero, because the opposition to this will be huge. I ask the Minister to think hard about whether the Government want to champion such a burden on households when it is not clear whether the benefit will ever fall on households. We do not yet know the questions about hydrogen, let alone the answers, or what the benefits to home heating will be, if that is the path we go down as a nation when there are many alternatives growing at speed, as we have discussed. I think the Government’s amendment is very challenging. I urge them to think again for the benefit of all those who struggle to pay their energy bills now and for those who may struggle in future if the levy comes in.
Smart Meters and the Stannington Incident
Below is a transcript of my speech. You can read the full debate here.
The amendment is eminently sensible. I speak with the experience in my constituency before Christmas of what is now referred to as the great gas flood of Stannington. Hundreds of millions of litres of water entered the gas system, causing 3,000 properties to have water ingress, in some cases it was so harsh that water was coming through gas appliances and hitting the ceiling with force, or wrecking the whole interior of people’s properties. I mention that because almost every property involved in the crisis had to have its meter replaced. To the exasperation of some of my constituents, their smart meters had to be replaced with refurbished meters. We had issues with the second-hand meters that were put in.
I am still carrying out conversations with the energy companies because there were differences in the units of some of the meters. Some measure cubic metres and some measure cubic feet, which means that some people are getting a very good deal at the moment on their energy, because their energy company does not know that they changed the unit, and some people are getting awfully ripped off. It is very complicated, but because Cadent, which did a fantastic job during the crisis to make people’s homes safe and to ensure that the faulty gas meters were immediately replaced—I have no problem with that—did not have any agency providing smart meters, there was a missed opportunity to upgrade or keep them.
We have actually seen a decline in the number of smart meters in my constituency because of that major incident. We know that such incidents will probably become increasingly likely and with climate change there are likely to be more problems with water ingress—although hopefully not at the scale we had in my constituency, which left constituents without hot water and gas for many weeks during a very cold snap when there was snow on the ground.
The amendment, and especially proposed new subsections 6(b) and (c), would have helped my constituents not only to have their smart meters resolved at the right time by the right people—that is, the distribution network operators—but to not have the issues they are having to grapple with now as they try to tackle bills of £5,000, which some people have received as a result of what happened. Given the way things unfolded, it all fell to Cadent to sort out the problem and the suppliers were nowhere near the situation. If we have another situation in which 3,000-plus properties get affected in some way, the same thing will happen, and not in a way that is helpful to consumers.
I hope that has given the Committee food for thought as to why this might be a useful amendment to support, given that it is, in its very nature, difficult when we have such a complicated system with suppliers. We have quite a simple system of distribution network operators, as my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test has outlined, so that approach would be useful. The phasing out is just another obvious step that we should look at. In my experience, it is simply not good enough if there are warehouses full of meters that are not fit for purpose that are going to be used in an emergency. That is one of the last things that should be learned from the significant incident that affected many people in my constituency.
Stopping aviation companies green-washing fossil fuel waste
Below is a transcript of my speech. You can read the full debate here.
I have a few concerns about clause 117, which would, as the Minister outlined, allow fossil fuel waste to be reclassified as renewable energy in the form of fuels for policies including the proposed sustainable aviation fuel mandate, which is currently being consulted by the Department for Transport. It seems the Department would like to be able to include recycled carbon fuels, including unrecyclable plastic, as eligible fuels under the sustainable aviation fuel mandate. That is why the Bill will permit recycled carbon fuel to be treated as renewable, to help us to meet our sustainability targets.
I hope that the Minister knows where I am going with this. There is one quite significant problem: recycled carbon fuel, especially from plastics, is not necessarily sustainable. Research from the US suggests that the process of converting plastics into fuel can create highly carcinogenic air pollution, and that we might approach the technology with caution—exactly the opposite of what is proposed in the Bill. It is obvious that we are taking carbon that is fixed in plastic and burning it to release the carbon. The idea that that is a decarbonisation mechanism for our atmosphere is quite incredible.
The UK Government has targets to phase out wastes generally, especially unrecyclable plastics. There is a huge public push for that, with the reduction of single-use plastics. By creating a new market for that waste, there is a real risk of creating disincentives to achieve carbon reduction in products and plastics, to achieve waste avoidance. This could be used as a mechanism to prevent further progress in that space.
More broadly, as we all know, there is an urgent need to reduce the current level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. This proposal would instead convert waste fossil fuels into a liquid form that allows carbon to be rereleased as CO2 into the atmosphere, together with non-CO2 impacts generated from aviation. We cannot simply go about changing definitions and hoping that that will lead to more decarbonisation. Allowing the aviation sector to make misleading or simply wrong claims about sustainability would be deeply unhelpful in meeting the target for net zero for aviation by 2050.
There are many ways in which we can make synthetic aviation fuel that are truly about carbon capture, and there is a lot of work on that, but simply changing the label on what unrecyclable plastics are is deeply unhelpful. The Minister should think deeply about the unforeseen consequences of allowing that business to thrive. We really want to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Net zero is what it says on the tin—it is about net zero—but we also have to make efforts to reduce our usage of carbon products from fossil fuels. This is a difficult point for me to get my head around, and I would like to understand the Minister’s reason for embracing a measure that seems quite anti-progress in terms of reducing our use of plastics, and how it is compatible with the future of net zero.
Support for small businesses
Below is a transcript of my speech. You can read the full debate here.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Nokes. I rise to support the amendment, because this is a fundamental issue. The Minister talked about households only, but will the offer that he outlined be available to businesses? That is important, because businesses have different energy needs, even in residential areas.
It is important that we take people with us. They must have the option to say no to such trials and get low-carbon heating by another means. That is all I wanted to say on the amendment.
Trade Union rights of core fuel sector workers
Below is a transcript of my speech. You can read the full debate here.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I should say that I am a member of the GMB union. I rise to support the amendment, which is very reasonable and is an attempt to help the Minister. I am sure he will stand up and say that the Secretary of State would never knowingly try to give directions in contradiction to the measure that we have tabled, but the point of the amendment is to get that on the statute book and make it clear to the industry, and those who are employed in it, that that safety net would be there, because “anything” is a very broad word, as outlined by the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test.
There have been great relationships within the industry for many years, and as it is such a critical industry when it comes to health and safety, the working rights of those employed in it are critical to maintaining that safety. I hope the Minister will look on the amendment kindly and understand the reasons for it.
Stopping regression in environmental protections
Below is a transcript of my speech. You can listen to the full debate here.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship again, Mr Gray. I declare an interest, given that we are now talking about renewables: my husband is a company secretary of an organisation called Sheffield Renewables, which is a community benefit society that funds, develops, owns and operates renewable energy systems in Sheffield. Although I hope that Sheffield will not become the coastline—if we do everything right so that vast swathes of east Yorkshire, including Selby, are not under water—I thought that it would be prudent for me to declare that interest at this stage.
As a former shadow Minister for nature, this part of the Bill strikes a chord with me. There are things to welcome in the clauses, but I share some of the concerns that have been outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test. In fact, I agree with the words of an Environment Audit Committee report in relation to the development of offshore wind: we should “be extremely sensitive to biodiversity considerations given the obvious risks of disrupting important habitats”.
That is important because the Bill represents an attempt to tackle not only the carbon crisis, but the nature crisis. What is bad for one is bad for the other, so it is important that we bear biodiversity in mind with every step we take through the Bill, not least because nature is a massive carbon sink. The UK already faces massive nature depletion—we have has some of the worst nature depletion in Europe—so it is right that we debate how the Bill takes such considerations into account.
I fear that clause 248 provides wide powers to ignore habitat regulations, marine Acts and general duties around assessment, which is problematic. There is also something of a misalignment between some of the wording in the Bill and that in the Environment Act 2021. When that Act seeks to alter habitat regulations, there are a lot of caveats, and it might be worth the Minister considering whether it would be right to have those caveats in the Bill, given that both measures represent Government policy and strategy.
I hope that the Bill does not conflict with 13 by 2030, which we have had a conversation about, and the protection of marine areas. I also hope that we will discuss protections. I particularly support our amendments 166 and 167, because it is important to have that switch-off or death switch, I suppose—I am trying to think of a way of phrasing it. We need to keep those protections in place where we can. If we allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that the impact on the environment off-sea will not affect us, we are really missing the point. It would have been nice if there had been a reference to blue carbon in the Bill. Obviously, that has not materialised—I understand why, because the Bill is predominantly to do with energy—but we are missing measures in that space as well
It is incredibly important that the Minister considers amendment 165, particularly as it outlines some of my concerns about the Bill’s alignment with the Environment Act. It is quite clear that the Bill could do more to ensure that environmental protections exist and that we are not cutting our nose off to spite our face with some of our activity.
Home Insulation and Energy Efficiency
Below is a transcript of my speech. You can listen to the full debate here.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Nokes. I rise to speak in defence of clause 204, and I agree with the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test, that the Government have suggested an interesting tactic.
Our housing stock has been described as the least energy-efficient in Europe. That means we are the least prepared to absorb future price hikes, like those experienced in recent years, and to address future temperature changes. In England alone, more than 13 million homes—59% of them—are below a C rating on the energy performance certificate standard. As a result, housing is one of the main sources of carbon emissions in the UK, accounting for around 20% of total emissions.
We should be making massive efforts and strides to improve in this policy area, yet energy efficiency programmes have been cut and home insulation rates have plummeted over the past decade. In 2013, the coalition cut energy efficiency programmes, after which insulation rates fell by 92%. The number of energy efficiency insulations peaked at 2.3 million in 2012, yet fewer than 100,000 upgrades were installed in 2021. That is rather pathetic, it has to be said.
The Bill and clause 204 in particular provide a golden opportunity to put in place the financial structures and programme to give the necessary upgrades to the 19 million homes in our country that are below band C on the EPC scale. Clearly, that is what a Labour Government would do.
In recent years a number of Government schemes have either failed because they have not had the workforce to deliver them, or experienced challenges because people have been drawn into other roles, particularly in the Toggle showing location ofColumn 259building sector and in relation to cladding issues and so on. That is exactly why the Opposition would be very pleased if the clause were protected. We need that action plan. Delivery is only worth something when it happens. We cannot just have targets that we repeatedly continue to miss. It would be exceedingly challenging to argue to the public that we should not prioritise getting their bills down by £1,000 a year or come up with an action plan to deliver that.
I am not alone in my concerns about delivery in this space. In January, the Environmental Audit Committee rightly said that we need a national war mobilisation to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon. The public are crying out for action to address fuel poverty and household emissions: 80% of respondents to National Energy Action’s polling supported funding retrofits for those on low incomes and, according to the New Economics Foundation, 64% of Conservative voters and 65% of people in the north support a national retrofitting taskforce.
Without the clause, the Bill will be another missed opportunity to tackle the cost of living crisis, to bring forward the emergency energy efficiency measures we need, and to start a national 10-year mission for home insulation. Delivery is important, and without an action plan I am not clear how those millions of homes, and the millions of people living in them, will benefit from better energy efficiency. We need to get on top of our carbon emissions and we need to ensure that housing is not forgotten, given its vast contribution to emissions.
It would be a mistake for the Government to remove the clause. All it is asking for is a warmer homes and a business action plan to set out how His Majesty’s Government intend to deliver energy efficiency. It is important to keep that clear ask in the Bill. I will be deeply regretful if the Government do not support the clause, because it will be another missed opportunity.
Update:
During the Energy Bill Committee, we forced a number of Government U-turns on important issues, including to give Ofgem Net-Zero remit. The Government have also signed that they are going to scrap their nonsensical Hydrogen Levy.
I also tabled an amendment calling for more Government support for community renewable energy projects. Local renewable energy will play an important part in our transition to net-zero, providing good quality jobs and economic growth to our local communities – yet the Government has continually failed to support these projects.