Climate Change Select Committee

3 November, 2011

At yesterday’s Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, Chris Huhne was grilled by the Committee Chairman Tim Yeo MP. The Secretary of State was asked about the conference speech in October by Chancellor George Osborne, in which the latter declared:

 

“We know that a decade of environmental laws and regulations are piling costs on the energy bills of households and companies… We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business. So let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe. That’s what I’ve insisted on in the recent carbon budget.”

 

This was seen as a challenge to Chris Huhne’s green policies. Appearing before the committee, Huhne denied there was a conflict and declared that the Prime Minister had made clear there was no shift in policy. Green industries in the UK employ nearly 1 million people, he commented, so they were recognised as essential for beating the recession. Judge politicians by what they do with policies, he suggested, not what they say.

 

Huhne also reported solid progress in persuading other EU states on their CO2 targets and said he was determined not to force out of the country those companies with high electricity costs and the energy intensive industries. Special packages of policies would ensure this.

 

Onshore wind arose, and Huhne said that he had always been in favour of it, as the cheapest renewable technology. He had been booed for this position, and stood by it.

 

Asked about recent changes to subsidies, he said that rebanding was not driven by the Treasury: it is not only the Treasury that worries about consumer costs.

 

He denied that solar subsidies are regressive – benefiting the wealthy who can afford to install solar panels at the expense of the poor who cannot. The overall package of measures was not regressive. Labour MP Barry Gardiner made a heated attack on the repeated changes to the solar subsidies and the damage they did to any degree of certainty in the sector.

 

Huhne declared that in the  long-term he was very optimistic about CCS, while Simon Virley, one of his department’s civil servants, declared his confidence that the new Electricity Market Reform package would succeed in attracting new entrants into the market.

 

For more information on this issue, please contact our director of public affairs Nick Wood-Dow here.