Graham Stuart
MP for Beverley and Holderness · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I hope and expect that we can move forward in the right way and get the balance right between being overly prescriptive to the banking industry and setting a clear sense of direction to make sure that no one is left behind, as so many Members have set out.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) on securing this debate.”
“Is my hon. Friend as astonished as I am that the Minister—I know she is new to her post—has come here to propose a six-month extension of the movement of costs from bills to the Exchequer and cannot tell the Committee how much money that will cost?”
“The Minister is being most generous again. I did not ask her about protecting consumers from energy price shocks; I asked about a clear, unequivocal manifesto pledge to reduce household energy bills by £300. She, like her predecessors, refuses to address it directly. It was a clear promise.”
“Banking hubs themselves came out of an industry response from the NatWest executive. Does the Minister agree that we must present the information from the Lloyd review to the banking groups, be clear about what we want, and give them the opportunity to respond and provide a solution, as they did with banking hubs, so that we can perhaps a…”
“I am pleased to say that Lloyds listened and, as of this morning, people can deposit cheques at those places. These issues being raised by Members across the House today are important. I trust that given the timing of the Richard Lloyd report, the Minister in her seat will make sure that they are be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.”
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“Does the hon. Gentleman agree on these two things: first, that while we are burning oil and gas, it might as well be our own; and, secondly, that saying we are subsidising oil and gas simply because we tax it slightly less is a false narrative?”
“My right hon. Friend is making an entertaining speech. Offshore wind has a price of around £140 per MWh, but the industry expects to bring that down to around £100 by 2020, and by the time we have any nuclear power stations, it is pretty likely that it will be below the cost of nuclear and falling, whereas the cost of nuclear will be fixed for the entire time.”
“Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty—is dealing with intermittency. One way of dealing with that is to develop storage. Have we had sufficient investment and created a framework that has incentivised enough focus on storage while we were also incentivising investment in things such as wind? The answer has to be no. We must therefore try to ensure that we get a framework that captures all the elements that we need in order to create a rational response, so that even if my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden does not entirely agree, he can see a more rational thread running through the policy in order that we can deliver. The Secretary of State played a leading role in the negotiations in Paris, and Britain was at the table, helping to create a more ambitious deal.”
“If we read the Committee’s fifth carbon report, which was recently published, we see that its whole premise is to try to work out a pathway to get us there at the lowest possible cost. That is one reason why I welcome the reset of the policy by the new Government and our new Ministers. They are not stepping away from the Climate Change Act, although some of my hon. Friends might wish that they were. On the contrary, they are saying that they want to look at how best to make sure we have a policy framework that incentivises activity to meet the outcomes that we all want. I know from discussions with the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), who is nodding in my direction, that one renewables issue we face—this picks up on the point made by my hon.”
“Friend was right to point out that, given the burden sharing throughout Europe, there is an issue about our taking further steps. Would that simply provide greater slack elsewhere? People may or may not share his scepticism about the whole arena, but none of us would want our making progress to mean that someone else slacks as a result. Therefore, having a joined-up approach is a sensible part of delivering what we all want and doing so at the lowest possible cost, and that is worthy of further investigation. Where I do not think my right hon. Friend is right is in suggesting that this is purely an exercise in sadomasochism. After all, the Committee on Climate Change’s brief is to fulfil that which was passed in this House, albeit without his support: an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050.”
“It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) and other colleagues who have spoken today. I do not think any more memorable phrase will come into the debate than the “50 shades of green” used by my right hon. Friend. As so often in this area of debate, people dispute the numbers, as he did with his initial “ 40 shades” effort. The thread of agreement among everyone who has spoken so far, including my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams), my right hon. Friend and others, is that if we are setting out to fulfil the requirements of the Climate Change Act, we must do so in the lowest-cost way. My right hon.”
“Indeed, Austria is my hon. Friend’s favourite bête noire. He points out that the contribution of many countries that like to talk about this topic but not deliver on it is pretty woeful, which goes back to my earlier point about the need for a joined-up approach to ensure that we genuinely deliver collectively the outcomes that we desire. Thanks in part to the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, EU ambitions were raised, but they did not go as far as the UK would have liked. In 2008, with cross-party support, we unilaterally decided on a pathway for this country, which was 80% reductions by 2050.”
“I say to those who are more sceptical on this matter to look at how prices have come down in solar and in onshore wind and how they are coming down in offshore wind. Whatever the current eddies in investor confidence, going forward with these particular Ministers who are committed both to delivering our climate obligations and to doing so at the lowest cost and in the most coherent manner is exactly the right position for us be in. I am delighted to say that I will be supporting this Bill tonight.”
“By June this year, they will legislate on the fifth carbon budget, which covers the distant years of 2028 to 2032. By the end of the year, they will produce a strategy to deliver that, which is welcome. What we need is something much more coherent than the renewables obligation system. We need something that uses auctions, which delivers, as the Secretary of State has said, a market driving out costs in which the Government are out of the way to the maximum extent that they can be. In the meantime, why are we investing in expensive energies such as offshore wind? It is because they would not be viably invested in otherwise. None the less, that investment is driving the costs down.”
“If we can entirely decarbonise the power system and then use that power in other systems, we will start to move towards the ability to eradicate most of our carbon. We still need other ways to change our systems—and we have time to develop these—so that any storage we have offsets the emissions that are not avoidable. There will always be emissions in a developed and industrialised world, but what we can do is net that to zero. It is important to make that point in case any people at home think that we are dealing in science fiction rather than reality. Given the progress in technology that we have seen over recent years, it is credible to believe that we can move to zero emissions. If, given modern science, 1.5° will be achieved, such a rate will be necessary. The Government are doing a reset.”
“My understanding is that onshore wind is currently our cheapest renewable, but there are issues around the back-up that is required. What we need to have is an objective assessment of the cost, so that we can make a proper judgment of the benefits of one form of clean energy versus another—for instance against biomass, which my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty was so keen to champion. Until we have that clarity over the real costs, it is hard to create the framework and the incentives that we need to bring on the cleanest possible transformation at the lowest possible cost. On the issue of zero emissions, I just wanted to follow on from what the right hon. Member for Doncaster North said. He is right. If we are to deliver 2° let alone 1.5°, we will need to move to what sounds like a slightly fantastical idea of zero emissions.”
“In other words, the regulatory and legal framework has been set up across the world, and the GLOBE organisation, of which I am chair and in which I declare an interest, has, I hope, played a part in helping to create those frameworks around the world. Chinese renewables investment last year hit $111 billion, which was an increase of 17%, while the US investment in renewables went up 7.5% to $56 billion. However, to return to the point of my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat), Europe saw the lowest level of investment in renewables last year since 2006. Therefore, while we may be delivering, Europe is not entirely doing what one might hope that it would. On the subject of onshore wind, may I welcome the Government’s commitment to look at the whole system cost of renewables?”
“My hon. Friend is right, but it is important not to exaggerate that, because it will quite rightly be picked up by colleagues, who will point out that something as all-encompassing, as specific and as road-mapped as our Climate Change Act has probably never been passed in another country in the world, and it is coming up for eight years since that Act was passed into law. It is worth saying a little on the context, as we are seeing turning points. It is not correct to say that we are solely, in this sadomasochistic way, inflicting pain on ourselves while others entirely deny themselves these pleasures. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, last year, despite the fall in oil and gas prices, there was record investment in clean power, with an increase to $329 billion.”
“I certainly agree with my hon. Friend on the need to give communities the final say on any wind turbines in their area, but does he agree with me that we need to ensure that wind turbines that do have local support are in no way disadvantaged compared with other forms of energy generation, for example if they need to get involved in the CfD mechanism? They must be on a par with other forms of generation, so long as the local community have a say on whether they are built?”
“I am not saying that there is not a moral responsibility on businesses, but they will usually act in the way that they are incentivised to act, and it is up to us to create frameworks that get them to behave in the right way. The previous Labour Government’s refusal to listen on giving a voice to local communities meant that developers felt there was little point in engaging with and listening to the local community and just went to appeal to get the decision overturned. The then Government’s refusal to listen has led to hostility in many communities, including mine, towards the wind industry.”
“The hon. Gentleman said that the saving would be very small, but the number of turbines affected would also be extraordinarily small, would it not? Should we not keep this in perspective?”
“How does my hon. Friend square his argument? He is in favour of maximising returns from the North sea but cannot see the same argument for maximising gas on land, to keep money here and avoid handing it to a foreign regime.”
“The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) asked where to start. We need to start by getting rid of the most noxious of the current fuels, which is coal. Does my hon. Friend the Minister agree that if other Governments followed our example in replacing coal with gas and then with other technologies as they develop, it would make a bigger contribution than almost anything else?”
“I think what the House will take from the hon. Gentleman’s animated, passionate and, as ever, fluent speech is the fact that he is furious about a typically British evolution in the system of government that blocks his most devout desire, which is, of course, separation for Scotland. This system makes it fair in England. It deals with that grievance and means that his hope for independence disappears. That is why he is so angry.”
“I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the work that he has done for many years in championing the need for EVEL to be introduced. Does he agree that, given that they completely failed to persuade the Scottish people to end the Union, the greatest hope of the nationalists was that such would be the grievance and resentment in England that Scotland could be pushed out? Does he agree that this modest step is a way of alleviating that grievance, and that that is why the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) was quite so angry?”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that the most important single thing we can do is to get building, because it is only by supply outdoing demand that prices will come down, and that all the programmes we had in the Labour years, from key worker housing to all the rest of it, were band aids on a massive wound? It is building that we need. That is what will make housing more affordable and that is how we are going to deliver a true one nation Government.”
“I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on championing this issue. I have been contacted by constituents. They want to know why the FCA is taking so long conducting its inquiry and when they are going to get information about what is going on within it. They want to be confident that the inquiry is being properly conducted and to see a resolution of this unpleasant and long-running saga.”
“Somehow, those in the countryside are expected to put up with less, whether it is poorer connectivity with broadband or mobile signals, the availability of neighbourhood policing, or affordable and convenient transport links. Indeed, in most aspects of Government expenditure, rural areas get a raw deal.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered local government funding for rural areas. I begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for selecting this motion for debate this evening and for rescheduling the debate to a time when more colleagues could attend. I also thank my co-sponsors, the hon. Member for Workington (Sue Hayman) and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). Their support is testament to the fact that this policy area crosses all party divides. In my 10 years in the House, I have raised local government funding of rural areas on many occasions, but it would be fair to say that progress has been slow.”
“So how can it be fair for poorer rural residents to pay higher council taxes than their richer urban cousins while receiving fewer services? This central unfairness is why, in 2012, along with Liberal Democrat and Labour colleagues, I set up the Rural Fair Share campaign. For many years, rural councils have been underfunded by central Government because of historic political choices and the formidable lobbying power of metropolitan authorities.”
“My right hon. Friend is quite right. That is not the main focus of today’s debate, but that is the context in which it takes place. We are here today because the situation I have described is also true in local government, which provides so many of the public services on which our constituents depend. The central facts for the debate are these. Urban residents receive 45% more in central Government grant than their rural counterparts and pay £81 less in council tax per head. One may say, “Well, that’ll be because rural residents are better off. They can afford it. It’s reasonable. Their needs are less”, but the Government’s own average earnings figures show that residents in urban areas enjoy higher earnings than their rural counterparts, whereas those living in areas of significant rurality are the very poorest paid.”
“My right hon. Friend is right. This story can be found in places right across the country, yet this inequity continues year after year. That is why so many colleagues are in their places to talk about it today. In order to meet the shortfall in grant, of course, rural councils had to respond in the only way they could—and that was, in the past, by increasing their council tax rates. That is why the council tax base is much higher in rural areas, and modest homes in the East Riding of Yorkshire in my constituency can pay higher council tax than is paid on a £1 million property in Westminster. Under the Government’s proposed local government settlement, however, those higher taxes are being used to justify a further shift in support from rural to urban.”
“My right hon. Friend is right to say that. Not only are residents in rural areas poorer on average than those in urban areas, but it costs more to deliver services there, they have to pay higher council tax and they are also older, with all the costs that go with it—driving social care. Again and again across government and across our society, we hear about the pressures that will result from having to deal with an ageing population, yet it is rural areas that have the eldest population. However, Government Departments show no recognition of the additional costs of age, as reflected in the demographics of rural areas.”
“This was not damping as in delay, but damping as in totally and utterly removed. That is why our campaign has been calling for the residual amount, which we have calculated to be worth £130 million a year, to be paid in full to rural authorities.”
“The Government have made a welcome pledge to conduct a new needs assessment preceding the new retention of business rates regime that they are introducing. That is great to hear, but colleagues would be wise to temper their optimism about any changes that might arise. After all, in 2012, the Government carried out a needs assessment and a consultation process. Those involved in the campaign were delighted—hurrah—when proposals were made that recognised the additional costs of delivering services in a sparse area, yet the additional funding that the Government had agreed was necessary was, for the most part, “damped” away. Under the mechanism designed to minimise volatility in funding in local areas, 75% of the gains that the Government had said rural areas should receive were not delivered.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Our campaign has argued from the outset that our councils have to bear additional costs because they serve sparsely populated rural areas. Rural councils face higher transportation costs, for instance, when refuse is collected from sparsely populated villages or when children have to be transported into schools—costs that do not have to be faced in an urban setting. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) mentioned, as we move increasingly towards the digitisation of services, we find that there are additional costs of ensuring fair access for rural residents who do not have superfast, let alone ultrafast, broadband on which they can rely.”
“Whenever a Government bring in a new system, they try to minimise volatility, so business rates retention is likely to end up with everyone getting exactly the same money as they get today, which is why it is so important to push for a fair starting place. The danger is that business rates retention will bake in all the old inequities for ever more. There might be the dynamism of being able to retain the growth in business rates, but many of us fear that the ability of rural areas to grow their business rates base and thus make up for any historical inequities is going to be rather less than that of the likes of Westminster to grow its business rates base. I share that with colleagues, and I would be delighted if colleagues have any insights and want to put me right about it.”
“What is going to happen—it would be useful to hear from the Minister and have him put me right if I am getting it wrong—is that instead of the Government taking all business rates from councils and then giving out grants, they will look at where the business rates are retained and will effectively take the money away from anyone who is getting any more money than the current grant gives to others, while anyone who is getting less will be given more. Although we will have a “new system”, what we will get in effect is—unless the Minister tells us otherwise—precisely the same situation as we started with.”
“My hon. Friend is right to mention the rural services delivery grant, to which I shall return later in my speech. The complexities of local government finance make it hard for us to get our heads around it. When we hear that there will be business rates retention, we might assume that we are somehow moving into a whole new world, in which taxes raised locally are kept locally, suggesting that we do not need to worry about the residual historical inequities that we are discussing today. But, no, that will not be the case.”
“I do. As the system comes in, there will be equalisation, and because of the different dynamics at work and despite the righteous principle—on this side of the House—in believing people should be incentivised to do the right thing and then keep the money, there will almost inevitably be a revisiting. If it turns out that someone’s huge shopping centre is going to be closed, the idea of them being left with no money is preposterous; similarly, if a huge bounty comes someone’s way, it is pretty likely that the Government will do what Governments have always done and raid it.”
“They gathered data from councils at short notice, during the month of August. Strangely, there was a shortage of data, and—unsurprisingly—no real conclusions were reached and no appreciable change was delivered. We were told, “We are sorry, but there is nothing to justify any change.” I therefore caution colleagues not to expect jam tomorrow.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a strong point. Returning to my theme of why we should be at least cautiously optimistic about any review promise in future, the Government responded to our campaign in 2014 and promised to conduct research into the additional costs of delivering services in rural areas. They say that they cannot move to recognise it until the evidence is there, and we have long said, “Show me a single service that is cheaper to deliver per head in a sparse rural area than in a concentrated urban one, and we will be delighted to hear it.” I have not heard anything yet. Apparently the current inequities are defensible without any evidence, but any change, even on the most common-sense basis, requires vast amounts of it. Anyway, the Government conducted the promised research.in 2014.”
“On this side of the House, but, I am pleased to say, in all parts of the House. They are here because they want a system that is fair to all. Conservative Members represent rural areas, but we also represent suburban and urban areas. We do not want a system that is reverse-gerrymandered, an unfair mirror image of the previous system. We want a system that is demonstrably and objectively fair to all, as far as such a system can reasonably be delivered.”
“Historically, most of the Labour party’s support has come from the urban heartlands. That may have led it, when in government, always to use concentrated deprivation as an excuse for moving funds to those urban heartlands, at the expense of rural areas. As I said at the outset, it is important to bear in mind that people in rural areas are not part of an idyll. They are not richer; indeed, on average they are poorer.”
“I agree with everything that my right hon. Friend has said, except one thing. We are not just the party of rural England. We are the party of the whole United Kingdom, and what we want, what we have pressed for, and what this campaign has always sought on a cross-party basis, is a system that is fair to all.”
“Absolutely. It is a worry. The distribution of funds becomes more important, not less, during a period of flat or reduced expenditure. It is a bit like when the sea goes out and all the undulations—the inequities—are suddenly exposed. That is what happens during a period of sustained control over public finances, which Conservative Members recognise as being inevitable following the economic wreckage that was left behind by the Labour party.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Withernsea, a town in my constituency, is among the 10% most deprived areas in the country, and I know that similar stories can be told about colleagues’ constituencies throughout England. It is not true that there is no deprivation in rural areas. On average, it is not true. On average, the urban resident receives more. Urban areas do not consist of the most deprived, concentrated communities. They contain some communities of that kind, but on average people in urban areas earn a great deal more than those in rural areas.”
“It is, and where will the pressure fall? It will fall either on services, as it already does, or on the only thing that the council has left, which is council tax. One of the aspects of this settlement—perhaps the most notable aspect—is the turnaround in the approach to council tax. The rural resident, who is already much more highly taxed, will experience compounded council tax increases. If council tax goes up by 4% in April 2016, and then by 4% a year in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, that will mean five years of compounded 4% increases before the 2020 general election. I suggest to Ministers that they may wish to think long and carefully before presenting that result to the electorate in 2020, while suggesting to rural England that it should support us again.”
“Research by the Rural Services Network shows that, while metropolitan authorities will face a cut in Government grant of around 19% during this Parliament, rural authorities will face an average cut of 30% or more.”
“If the Government were saving 11%, every council’s grant was cut by that amount. We argued strongly that that was not fair, because we needed to close the gap rather than allowing it to stay the same. This year, however, the Government are proposing to apply their broadly flat-rate cuts to the core spending power of local authorities. That sounds very reasonable and, indeed, natural, but it includes Government grant and council tax. As a result, the authorities that are already most reliant on council tax will experience a steeper cut in their Government grant, whereas those that are more reliant on Government grant will experience a smaller cut.”
“As I have said, under this year’s provisional settlement, rural councils are being allowed to increase council tax by up to 4%. In order to compensate for the deeper cuts in their central Government grant, many rural councils will be forced to increase council tax by the full amount so that they can provide their statutory services. The impact of that will be that older, poorer residents in rural areas will be faced with an even larger council tax bill, and, more perversely, the gap in the amount of council tax that they and their urban counterparts pay will increase in cash terms. I am also concerned about the mechanism whereby savings are being made in this year’s provisional settlement. At the end of the last Parliament, flat-rate cuts were applied across the central Government grant that every council received.”
“Now is the time for those of us who have been loyally returned by rural areas to make good on our contract with our electors. I stand with colleagues to ask, politely but firmly, for fairness, not favours, from Ministers, and to express our unyielding resolution that that should be delivered.”
“Those of us fortunate enough to represent rural areas know that that is not the case and that sleepy villages can be home to people whose lives are characterised by want every bit as intense, or blighted by strokes of ill fortune or ill health just as devastating, as those who dwell in our towns and cities. Yet this local government settlement would tell them once again, as it has done year after year after year, that they must pay more and make do with less. The rural cause can—must, will—be silent no longer. It is for us in this place to give it a voice. For hon. Friends on my side of the House, I believe that to be especially true. It was rural England that kept the flame of Conservatism alive for a long period—nearly 20 years.”
“Yet at present we presume to discriminate in this way based on the flimsiest of pretexts—the area in which someone chooses to live, to work and to raise their children. The rural voice in British politics in some ways resembles our countryside itself. With a few glorious exceptions, ours is not a land of soaring mountains, plunging valleys and jagged peaks. To conjure up rural England is to convey the patchwork beauty of tended fields, the muted chime of church bells or the majesty of ancient woodland, reflecting man’s presence on the land as it has come down to us through innumerable generations. There is a softness and a neatness to our countryside that can be mistaken for cosseted privilege, all ruddy-cheeked squires and roaring fires.”
“My hon. Friend is right. I remember speaking recently to a North Yorkshire councillor who said, “Given that we have a huge park here, we are specifically barred from development and we are rather restricted in our ability to respond to the incentives that have so generously been put in front of us.” Just as we know all people are created equal and we hold them to be equal under the law, so surely we must insist on equity in the way we impose tax on them and fund the services that support their lives. Beyond imprisonment, taxation represents the supreme expression of the power of the state over the private individual citizen. As Members of this place, we would not accept it if the Government proposed to tax people more and to spend less on them because they were black or white, Christian or Muslim, a man or a woman. There would be uproar.”