Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-148)
CLLR MICHAEL
HAINES, MR
MIKE PEVERILL
AND MR
RICHARD HURFORD
12 JULY 2006
Q140 Mark Pritchard: Councillor Haines,
how would you have done it?
Cllr Haines: I am afraid I have
not got a model to give you.
Q141 Mark Pritchard: Are you working
on a model?
Cllr Haines: Yes. I have had discussions
about this earlier on, but I will have to ask our officers to
work on a model for you afterwards.
Mark Pritchard: Thank you.
Q142 Chairman: Is there any way in
which you can produce a scheme which will incentivise people to
invest in energy efficiency measures?
Cllr Haines: Yes. At the end of
the day, if you can sell them the facts, the facts are that they
are going to save money in the long-term and if money is available
up front then yes, I am sure there must be a way of doing it.
Q143 Chairman: The evidence is good.
They have been talking about that for over a decade and progress
is horrendously slow. The idea of something like the Braintree
scheme, I think, gives the thing a bit of a boost, but you are
saying that does not work terribly well and you do not think it
is the best way of doing it. When we looked at sustainable housing,
it seemed to us that it was quite urgent to try and encourage
people, to find new ways of exciting them about the possibility
of investing in energy efficiency, but you have not got a view
about what local authorities can do in that respect?
Cllr Haines: No. I am sure we
can provide that in due course, but I am afraid I cannot provide
you with one here and now.
Mr Hurford: I think it is important
to look at the scale of the issue, because there are comparatively
small amounts of money going into local authorities. The very
welcome £20 million which has been put forward and is going
to be worked up through Defra, if you compare that with the increase
in gas and electricity costs to the public over the last two years,
which have been in the orders of hundreds of millions, if not
billions, and if you then look at the extra money which is going
into—I think it is probably ending up with the gas and oil
companies, but looking at the very high profits being made, the
sums of money are just not comparable. Basically, if you are going
to have a real impact, it is not £20 million that is required,
you probably need to add another nought at least. I know we keep
saying it comes back to money, but I think the reason we have
not been seeing this radical change is because fairly small sums
of money are being put in place.
Q144 Chairman: Could the planning
system be used as a way of incentivising developers to invest
in energy efficiency? If you offered a faster track approval for
developments which achieve very high energy efficiency, would
that be a possibility?
Cllr Haines: It is certainly one
you could look at, but I think that again you are going to come
up against fairness with others perceiving it as not being a fair
system and people who might object to something would be concerned
that that is a way of buying a planning permission, which has
always been an issue in the past. Certainly, by all means look
at it, but I would caution against those concerns.
Q145 Mr Chaytor: I just wanted to
make a quick point on the council tax discount. Is it not in the
nature of the council tax discount for energy efficiency purposes
that it would only be short term because if it achieved its objectives
then houses would become better insulated and they would not be
entitled to a discount?
Cllr Haines: I think that is true,
yes.
Q146 Tim Farron: After submissions
such as those of the domestic and transport authorities that it
is very hard to reduce, to what extent do you think central government
needs to make changes to allow local authorities to manage their
carbon emissions better?
Mr Peverill: Is that related to
transport?
Q147 Tim Farron: It is a general
wrap-up question really about the changes central government need
to make in terms of enabling local authorities to manage their
emissions better?
Mr Peverill: Direct emissions
or community emissions?
Q148 Tim Farron: I am talking about
direct emissions. Transport and domestic are examples where emissions
are very hard to manage and you are obviously not operating in
a vacuum, central government?
Mr Peverill: A couple of things
immediately spring to mind. The German government a couple of
years ago introduced a new minimum level of renewable energy tariffs
so that it became much more cost-effective for people to invest
in green energy measures like solar panels, for instance. That
works across the board, so local authorities and private sector
and individual households are now buying many more PV and solar
hot water systems and there is now in existence a sort of solar
league in Germany which is very effective at creating a sense
of competition as to who has got the most solar energy installed.
That works very well at a municipal level because you have cities
like Freiburg which built itself as a solar city because it can
claim to have more solar energy installed than anywhere else in
the country. That is one example. Another example, perhaps, on
traffic is that Nottingham City Council has been considering a
workplace parking levy for the last few years, which would act
as a strong restraining measure on traffic growth, but it is obviously
a highly political thing and the experience in places like Edinburgh,
where they have consulted residents, is that it is not popular.
So if this was to be across the board—
Chairman: We are going to have to go
and vote, I am afraid. Perhaps you could just amplify through
correspondence any further details. I am sorry to interrupt you,
but we have got this division we have got to go to now.
The Committee suspended from 3.41 pm to
3.58 pm for a division in the House.
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