My Views

Green Economy Bill

A number of constituents have written to me about the Energy Security and Green Economy Bill and so I wanted to make my position on the Bill as clear and available as possible.

The Bill has three principal objectives: to tackle barriers to investment in energy efficiency, enhance energy security, and enable investment in low carbon energy.

The Bill will provide for the Green Deal, which finances fixed energy efficiency improvements to properties. It will be supplemented with a new Energy Company Obligation, focussing on households that could not save money without support on top of the Green Deal finance. The Bill will also allow tenants who rent privately to ask for reasonable energy efficiency improvements to be made to their homes, and crucially will allow local authorities to insist that landlords improve the worst performing homes.

With significant challenges ahead for the energy sector, all action taken over the next decade and beyond must be closely aligned. My colleagues and I have launched a consultation on electricity market reform, which will include an Emissions Performance Standard (EPS) that new power stations will be required to meet. We have already committed to an EPS and made it clear that coal-fired power stations could not meet an EPS without sufficient carbon capture and storage.

The UK will still be dependent on oil and gas for many years as we make the transition to a lower carbon energy world. Therefore, we must either produce oil and gas in UK waters, where we have one of the most robust safety and regulatory regimes in the world or buy oil and gas from elsewhere. The new Bill will allow us to make the most of our substantial resources as well as boosting our economy.

Ministers have pledged to make this the greenest Government ever, and I wholeheartedly support their efforts towards achieving this goal.

Animal Welfare

In our programme for Government, the Coalition made clear its firm support for better protecting animal welfare, stating unambiguously that:

“We will promote high standards of farm animal welfare. We will end the testing of household products on animals and work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research. We will promote responsible pet ownership by introducing effective codes of practice under the Animal Welfare Act…”

I fully support this agenda, and am very pleased that the Government is already undertaking work to define what products will be affected by a change in the rules. I can assure you that this is a space that I will be watching with interest.

I am also concerned by the upward trend in the use of animals in scientific procedures and support replacing animals in research with non-animal alternatives where that is possible. We must reduce the number of animals in experiments and refine procedures to minimise suffering.

It is essential that we ensure the highest standards of animal protection possible in the UK, and I am committed to working with my colleagues to ensure that this goal is achieved.