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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 88-vii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE Council Chamber, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk
Climate Change: the "Citizen's Agenda"
Wednesday 31 January 2007 DR SIMON GERRARD, DR BRUCE TOFIELD and MR MARCUS ARMES Evidence heard in Public Questions 702 - 742
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on Wednesday 31 January 2007 Members present Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair Mr David Drew Patrick Hall Lynne Jones Daniel Kawczynski David Lepper ________________ Memorandum submitted by Community Carbon Reduction Programme (CRed)
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Simon Gerrard, CRed Project Manager, Dr Bruce Tofield, Innovation and Change, and Mr Marcus Armes, Communications and Policy Officer, gave evidence. Q702 Chairman: I would like to welcome Dr Simon Gerrard, the CRed Project Manager, Dr Bruce Tofield, in charge of innovation and change - that sounds an awfully big responsibility - and Mr Marcus Armes, the Communications and Policy Officer of CRed. May I thank you for being here and also for the written evidence that you have put in. The Energy White Paper in 2003 called for "unprecedented action by local partnerships" so that the Government's targets for CO2 reduction could be achieved. Do you think in that respect the Government has done enough thereafter to support that objective? Dr Gerrard: Probably not. We welcome the fact that community-led organisations are blossoming round the country. I think that CRed is doing its bit to encourage that and it was very pleasing to hear the evidence from this morning that there are even more of those things going on. However, I think that there is a tremendous amount more that government could do, primarily for the reason that the science of climate change is now showing that we need to act faster than we probably thought that we would have to, even when the Energy White Paper was produced. I suspect that when the IPC report is released later this week, we will hear a lot more about the pressing need for urgent action in this area. Q703 Chairman: You were a little tentative when you said, "probably not". That half‑suggested that they had done a bit but not enough. Can you be a little more specific about what you would like to see them do, and where perhaps they have failed to date? Dr Gerrard: At the moment, the situation is that most of the activities happening at ground level rely very heavily on the voluntary enthusiasm of local participants. I do not want to decry that at all, because I think it is extremely important. However, the support around that - essentially from local authorities as well - is lacking at the moment. There are some local authorities who have really understood this and are leading on it; there is a whole range of others who are sitting, waiting in the wings, watching to see what is going on and then deciding whether or not to take action in these kinds of areas. The more I understand the climate science, I think the less we can afford to have people waiting in the wings. Q704 Chairman: Do you think there is a lack of support for whole-community activity? We saw from the evidence this morning that one parish council, as an exemplar, had received over £26,000 for 370 people; we heard about Woking, who have done a remarkable job with their local authority buildings and the estate that they have; but there is not much out there to say that the Government are supporting whole communities, whole boroughs, whole counties, to go out and do some bottom-up stuff. Dr Gerrard: That is right. I applaud the energy and enthusiasm of the people who have managed to find their way through the Defra process to get the money, and it is great that the money is around for those people to make those changes. However, it is not easy, and certainly the CRed programme, which has now been running for three and a half years, has a very complex mosaic of funding, which becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of, manage and continue. So it is not straightforward by any means. Q705 Chairman: I think I am right in saying that in your own evidence you said, and advocated, "the development of a national strategy for enhancing the myriad carbon reduction and energy-saving initiatives, to ensure the sharing of best practice and the avoidance of inefficiency, territoriality and replication". So who should do this job of co-ordinating it? Dr Gerrard: That is a very good question too. There is a role for central government to lead in that area, for sure. I suppose the danger with too much central government involvement in that sort of area is that it appears to be a very top-down initiative rather than the bottom-up initiative, which I think CRed has shown is necessary to get the action at ground level. However, in terms of co-ordinating the information that is being generated by all these different campaigns, the real danger is that we are not learning from them. There is a lot of activity going on out there and, from the evidence we heard this morning, a frustration that it is not simpler and easier to understand in terms of what works and what does not work. There obviously has to be some kind of learning process, and that will take a bit of time; but if there were national co-ordination to support local community activities, to offer advice and support, and to help people understand the priority --- Q706 Chairman: Let us unbundle this a little, because we have the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust. They are both sponsored by government. The Energy Saving Trust, unusually, at a time when demand on them is going up, has had its funding reduced from public sources - from what we can see. Should it be the case that the Government say to those two bodies, "You do the analysis; you pull the message together", or should there be some other body? I am trying to get a clear idea as to what agency, body, or whatever, should take this responsibility which you advocate. Dr Gerrard: The Carbon Trust is obviously working with larger businesses and it has decided to focus on those businesses, for reasons of efficacy in the way it wants to operate. There is then a gap in that market for the smaller companies. We work very closely with the Energy Saving Trust in our region, and that works particularly well at ground level. What I perceive as a bit of a lack at national level, however, is that it is all fragmented, in that they are working very much with the individual householder. What we have heard this morning is that we need to join some of these householders up in a more community-oriented activity, which we believe will have a bigger impact than individuals working alone and feeling a little as if they are working in isolation. Q707 Chairman: You also made another interesting comment, where you argued that citizen engagement in tackling climate change "will only be effective if everyone sees that government is committed in deed as well as action". Where is government failing, to make you say that? Dr Gerrard: We hear all these warm words and there are a lot of people talking about the importance of climate change, but I do not think that is being translated into sufficient action. Q708 Chairman: No doubt Mr Miliband, hearing that criticism - because he has been well‑armed, as every secretary of state will be, or Mr Pearson, the Environment Minister - would trot out a list of initiatives right across government and say, "How can you accuse us of not taking it seriously?". What would your riposte to that be? Dr Gerrard: There just are not enough initiatives, I think, for the scale of the problem that we face. That is what we see and what people see. Q709 Chairman: So you want more initiatives - but you were saying in your earlier answer that we were not learning enough from the ones that we already have. Dr Gerrard: And we need to learn from the ones we have. In fact, it is important to learn from the ones we have, to inform where the new initiatives ought to be. Q710 Chairman: Where should they be? Dr Gerrard: We are learning that at the moment. More community-oriented, bottom-up activity, particularly focusing on making it easier for people to understand the situation they are in; so making it easier for people to get to grips with their carbon emissions and their understanding of their carbon emissions to begin with - which I think is the precursor for taking sensible action thereafter. Q711 Chairman: Dr Tofield, do you want to contribute? Dr Tofield: I was going to add to Simon's comment, in terms of whether the Government are doing enough. They manifestly are not, because our carbon emissions are going up. In 2005, emissions were a provisional 153 million tonnes of carbon; in 2004, 152 million tonnes of carbon; in 1997, ten years ago, 150 million tonnes of carbon. So, by an objective yardstick of our carbon or CO2 emissions, clearly not enough is being done. Q712 Chairman: The Government have this 60 per cent reduction by 2050; you have the same by 2025. Tell me what we have to do to hit the fast-forward button - which responds to our witnesses earlier who were saying, "Can we get on with it, please?"? Dr Tofield: It is a combination of things. We have heard this morning from some remarkable individuals and some remarkable communities. There is absolutely no doubt about that. We are very supportive and are working with some of them. The ambition of villages like Ashton Hayes to become carbon neutral is mirrored in some communities more locally here, and we are hoping to translate and to share expertise. However, the domestic component of CO2 emissions in the UK is around 29 per cent in people's houses - that is excluding transport - which is actually less than CO2 emissions from electricity generation. Okay, some of that 29 per cent is some of the 30 per cent that electricity generation is responsible for; but it is bizarre that, in this day and age, two-thirds of the energy which we consume to provide electricity goes up as hot air, and it is generally produced hundreds of miles away from where it is used. In our submission to you a few months ago, therefore, one of the key points we made was that we will only be able to get significant change, enabling people to make the changes that they want to make rather than forcing them to do them - by legislation saying, "You can't do this or you can't do the other" - by transforming energy supply to become energy service companies. There have been a few examples around the world. This was done in Sacramento, California, in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Obviously it is a huge step beyond the current EEC, Energy Efficiency Commitment, which is essentially asking poachers to be gamekeepers at the same time and is a rather unsatisfactory halfway house. There are many other things by which we can transform the way people think about carbon and energy; for example, through charging for their energy. At the moment, costs go down the more you consume, which seems bizarre if you want to limit cost. You can sort out fuel poverty to a degree by having low costs, which then start to ramp up. Smart metering has been mentioned. If people can visibly see what they are using, then that could helpful. Smart taxes, in places like Richmond, tax the polluters and give that money back to the people who are not polluting. There is, in particular, legislation. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a forum with the CBI, talking to the Foreign Press Association, and the CBI representative pointed out how clean our air and water are these days. The reason for that is because government passed legislation, demanding that that should happen. In 1970, when the Clean Air Act was about to be passed in the United States - which drove the reduction of emissions from automobiles - Iacocco, then the senior executive at Ford, said, "If you pass this legislation, the vehicle industry in the United States will essentially go bankrupt or cease to exist, because it cannot be done". The vehicle industry in the United States is almost going bankrupt, but not for those reasons. In other words, car manufacturers have managed to do that. Sadly, we are seeing today that the EU is proposing 120 grams per kilometre by 2012 for cars, which is far below the voluntary target of 140 grams per kilometre by 2008 - which will be missed by a huge amount. Already we see that that is being opposed by representatives from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders in the UK and by luxury car-makers across the EU who say, "It's going to drive us out of business". It is exactly the same response that Iacocca, Ford and others were making in 1970. The Government, hopefully with the EU - which is actually trying to do good things - have to drive forward the legislative framework which will drive innovation and innovative businesses, such as my ex-employer Johnson Matthey, which has now become a member of the FTSE 100 in response to environmental legislation, and is the world's dominant manufacturer of car exhausts. So a government has to change the ground rules, in a sense: not to tell people what they are not to do, but to make stringent environmental limits for CO2; almost taking it as a health issue, as with water, waste and clean air. Then business can respond; the options for individuals become much clearer and they will be able to respond; and if you do have individual carbon accounts, or any of the alternatives, people will be able to take steps to reduce their carbon emissions. The question was asked, what happens if somebody is poor and fuel poor? How on earth do they cope once you have this mechanism? I think that government has to stand up and deliver and, post‑Stern, it has no excuse not to. Q713 Chairman: Before I pass the questioning on to Lynne Jones, let me ask one question about CRed. You have an impressive product, if I can put it that way, and your annual report attests to good progress; but you seem to make rather better progress outside the United Kingdom with what you are doing. We heard in evidence this morning that China has even bought your system of generating power, but in Norwich you have run into resistance. Why do you do better business with the programme and your solutions outside the UK than inside? Dr Tofield: Do we? I think that we do both. Dr Gerrard: Progress has been made on a number of fronts. The pace of progress is driven in part by the decision-making processes that you face in those different cultures. I think it is fair to say that in a very democratic process the decision-making process for planning takes some time. That is the main reason why things may be speedier in China. Dr Tofield: Remember, CRed exists because of an initiative by the East of England Development Agency. It was therefore a response by regional government. To go back to your first question regarding communities, it is difficult for national government to kick all communities to do something. £26,000 does not go very far, when you put it across 60 million people in the whole of the UK; but, at a regional level, it is where regional authorities could begin to have a significant input, because they can help to link up communities. It is something that is happening here in the east of England. There is an initiative called Regional Cities East. Seven, not megacities, but Norwich, Ipswich, Peterborough and four others, are linking together and are talking to CRed about how to deal with their low carbon initiatives, which we think is very promising and indeed very helpful. Q714 Lynne Jones: We heard this morning from Ashton Hayes about the work they are doing and how they have developed their carbon footprint. Is this an essential part of your pledge scheme? You may have heard me ask questions about the consistency and replicability of carbon pledge, carbon footprint-type schemes. Would you care to comment? If this is an essential component of raising awareness, then getting us to develop the baseline and then monitor our performance in reducing our emissions, we need to have some consistency; we need to collect data. How do you think we should go forward in taking that work beyond the small local initiatives that we heard about this morning? Dr Gerrard: I think that there is a parallel with what is going on with the offsetting at the moment and the guidelines that the Government have produced, because of the range of different offsetting schemes that there are. I can imagine that it would be very sensible to have similar sorts of guidelines to help the carbon footprinting tools as well. The two key points I would make about it are that, whichever tool you use, there ought to be some transparency in there, so that people can assess the kinds of assumptions that have been made. It is not necessarily the case that there will be a single answer to this. I think that there will be choices that people can have about the kinds of assumptions they would like to make, or have made on their behalf, in terms of the footprint tool they use. Transparency is therefore very important. The sort of standardisation idea that you propose would also be very welcome; and perhaps even some sort of accreditation scheme that says, "These are the particular tools that government feels are worthy of some kind of kitemark" - to try to guide people to be using the appropriate tools. Mr Armes: It is really important that this information is fed back into some sort of central data source. Mention has been made of Manchester is Our Planet. Lots of different pledge systems are out there at the moment, and they are doing some very good things. What worries us is that a lot of the data is being lost. That is why it is really important that some agency has some kind of handle on all the different schemes and systems that are out there and that that agency is user-friendly, so that Ashton Hayes, ourselves and others, can feed back data to some central storage system. It will enable government to make more intelligent decisions on, for example, how they will work with the public in order to help them reduce their carbon emissions. If you like, a glorified version of what you are trying to do today: some kind of repository for all this data. There are so many schemes out there, and what concerns me is that valuable data is being lost. Q715 Lynne Jones: Who should do this? Mr Armes: Maybe it is a combination of the Energy Saving Trust and the Carbon Trust - I do not know - if they could get together; but some kind of organisation, perhaps within Defra, would be very welcome. Q716 Lynne Jones: What do you envisage? At Ashton Hayes they were talking about producing a toolkit, which has been funded by Defra. Presumably, at some point, that might be a kitemarked toolkit. How many pledge schemes are there that you are aware of? Mr Armes: I certainly know of five or six different schemes, and I am sure that there are more out there. Q717 Lynne Jones: Are they all going about it in the same way? Is there a need to get some consistency of approach? Mr Armes: Yes, very much so. Q718 Lynne Jones: You are saying that you think the Government should appoint somebody to take on this role, but how would you require people to submit their data? Mr Armes: I think that it would have to be done on some kind of voluntary basis to begin with, but there is no such organisation out there at the moment and so it is very difficult to tell whether people would respond. Really important to this is to continue with a light touch. The Energy Saving Trust and the Carbon Trust do a great job, but they are not responsible for Ashton Hayes; they are not responsible for us. There are other organisations and other groups that are doing good things. It is really important that initiatives are coming up from the grass roots and that they are encouraged. Going back to the Government's original statement, namely meeting their 26 per cent target by 2050, they did not set out a roadmap to do that; so, if you like, CRed and Ashton Hayes are trying to find the roadmap - we are trying to find our own way along that path. I think that we are finding that there are perhaps different paths. Q719 Chairman: Should the Government create a roadmap? Dr Gerrard: I think that is the direction this agglomeration of experiences would create, and the way to incentivise it is - for all of your communities in your constituencies, for example, who may be saying, "We really want to do something here" - would it not be great if there was an organisation centrally that was able to provide advice on how to do this? The deal for providing advice would be that, once you did something, you fed back the information to that central repository. So you get something from government - some support and some guidance, maybe contact with some of the other organisations in your area that are already doing things, some other communities - and, as part of that kind of deal, you would promise to pay back by giving the information about how well you had done, or not, as the case may be. Q720 Lynne Jones: Would you not need some kind of accreditation scheme? They may get the advice, but they may cut corners, fiddle the figures, or whatever. Dr Gerrard: Possibly, yes. Certainly what we have found, in the way that CRed has evolved with its satellites, is that we do not perceive anybody to be fiddling the figures; they just want to use the tools. We have not reached the point yet where we have found people who are trying to cut corners - and we do check. Q721 Lynne Jones: I was very interested that you had a bit of a competition between your university and, I think it was, the University of --- Dr Gerrard: North Carolina. Q722 Lynne Jones: --- North Carolina. Competitions perhaps between communities, between countries, even between parliaments maybe, as to how we could reduce our emissions - but you would need some common means of collecting data and some accreditation. Are you aware whether there are these kinds of initiatives in any other countries? Perhaps they are further developed than we are, or could we lead the world in something like this? Mr Armes: I think that we could lead the world. It is interesting that North Carolina is buying our system, basically. They have some funding from Duke Energy, which is a very big energy supplier in the States, to purchase our system. There is talk at the moment of their spinning that out right across North Carolina. Maybe in terms of public engagement we are ahead of the game. There are great things going on in certain areas in the United States but I think that, generally in terms of public engagement, we are ahead of the States. Dr Tofield: You have commented on the internationalisation of CRed and why that is going faster than is happening in the UK. I am not sure that it is, but it is very exciting. Our colleagues in North Carolina, China, and elsewhere will make their own input to the system and that system will become developed and improved, not just for them but for us as well, and for all our partners in the UK. Whether or not the Government appoint some agency - and, indeed, would people trust it if it was the Government? - I think that the CRed system will develop and will, by default, assume a position where it could do the job you want it to do, always assuming that we keep getting funded to make that happen. Q723 Lynne Jones: Do you do any monitoring of schemes yourself? Could you tell us a little about that? Moving on from this discussion perhaps, how would all this fit in with the idea of Contraction and Convergence? Dr Gerrard: Most of the other schemes we have seen so far have spun out of the awareness‑raising and trying to capitalise on information campaigns to encourage people to act. Some of them simply register an individual's commitment to act, without specifying exactly what it is that person would do. Another is to have maybe a few simple steps that people could take if they wanted to. Not many of those that we have seen, if any, spend any time evaluating, by following up to see whether people really do what they say they will do. There is therefore a kind of a measure in terms of engagement, but not necessarily in terms of action. When we set up CRed, we were very clear that we wanted to try and track exactly what it was that people were doing. We do spend more time than others, therefore, going back to people and saying, "Tell us a bit more about what you have done, and also have you thought about doing some more?". What has happened is that we began with six individual, very simple steps. That has now evolved into many, reasonably complicated pathways which would be a series of steps, and each individual's pathway might begin with something very simple but eventually lead to something much, much more complicated, involving an investment and more technology. Our strategy is to extend those pathways as the science, technology and innovation develop, such that we can add new steps into the existing pathways. For lighting, for example, you could say, "Let's begin with a few low-energy light bulbs. They are readily available and you can even get them free from your supplier". Then maybe you make the commitment to put the energy-efficient light bulbs in the whole of your house; so you then have to go out and buy some. Then maybe, in time, we will be switching people to things like LED lighting, as that becomes more commercially available in the domestic setting. You can begin to see how these pathways start to evolve. We track people as they move along those pathways. We are therefore very keen on the evaluation element of what we do. It is consistent with being based at a university, I think. We want to know how people are doing. Where they do very well, we are able to shout from the rooftops and get others to join in. Where there are barriers, we are able to talk to people like yourselves, to highlight the fact that maybe things are not quite so easy; that people would be willing to do more, but they have come across these kinds of barriers that are frustrating them or stopping them from acting. Q724 Lynne Jones: Is this useful preparatory work towards implementing Contraction and Convergence? Dr Gerrard: Potentially, yes. If you could tie it to the carbon footprint at the outset - and we do provide carbon footprints and tools for people to use, although we do not insist that you have to do that before you start - you could begin to see where people started, the actions they took, and where they are finishing up. If you could tie that, even better, to real measurements of their energy use - which, as smart metering and things come forward, may be possible - then I think you have a position of a much more accurate audit of exactly where individual householders, businesses or schools are, and the steps that they have taken along that way. The answer is that it is possible, but I do not think that it will be easy to do very quickly, because the uptake of the technology around metering, for example, is still very rudimentary. Q725 Lynne Jones: One of the things that you have pointed out is the big increase in engagement from the domestic sector. What do you think has triggered this surge of interest in these kinds of schemes? Dr Gerrard: From the evidence you have heard this morning, I think that people are ready for this. They have moved away from a "Could I be bothered? Should I act?" to "What can I do? How can I do it?". I think it is that simple. It is the amount of information that is generally out there about the implications of climate change - both the threat and the opportunities associated with it - which is driving people towards the idea of saying, "I now know more about this. Now it is time to do something". That would be my guess. Q726 Lynne Jones: Do you think that initial enthusiasm will be maintained, or might it just tail off? How can we ensure it is maintained? Dr Gerrard: I have been working here in the School of Environmental Sciences for nearly 20 years and I have seen lots of blips along that way. I do not think that this will die off. I had a conversation with a very well-known environmental correspondent for one of the broadsheets recently and I asked him the same question, provoking him almost, saying, "When is this all going to die off?"; he said, "No, it won't". There are too many hooks now for stories to be placed round: both the signs of climate change and the profound implications it holds for societies and economies; for us as individuals here in the UK but also around the world. Q727 Chairman: To be specific about CRed, which is what I think underlies the question, for the people who sign up to your approach, how do you keep them up to the mark? Dr Gerrard: Behind the CRed system is effectively a customer relationship management tool, which allows us to keep in touch with people. We can do that either on an individual basis, within groups, or within the whole CRed community. We send messages and contact people. We alert them to various opportunities, maybe tease them a little bit, cajole them, and try to be as enthusiastic and optimistic as we can. Ideally, it would be really good if we could put them in touch with each other more readily. We are looking at the possibility of new communication technologies that would allow people to share their experiences, more real experiences, so that they felt that they really were part of an organisation and a community of like‑minded individuals, all facing the same kinds of frustrations but all managing to make some kind of progress. Q728 Chairman: A sort of "CRed-blog"? Dr Gerrard: In essence, yes. Q729 Lynne Jones: Do you think that we need people appointed to chivvy people, to make sure that they are doing what they have said they will do? There were suggestions from the panels earlier about needing people to do this work. It is all very well in terms of people who are signed up to you, but you will not be able to do that for the whole country. How do we ensure that we have a network of such schemes? Then could you tell us how, as CRed, you have a target that is double the Government's target? How are you progressing personally? Dr Gerrard: The key is, yes, we certainly do need people, but we need the right kind of people. There is a danger that if you get the wrong kind of people or the wrong kind of organisations, this can seem like bullying and it can turn people off, I think. All the evidence I have seen - and earlier the Chairman mentioned levels of esteem, for example - suggests that the information sources that people really trust tend to be more locally based, namely friends and family, people they know down the pub, or whatever, rather than big business, big government and big organisations telling them what to do. It is why we set up CRed in that kind of bottom-up way. That is why the community networking aspect is important, to chivvy people along and to drive them forward. What kind of progress are we making? When we first submitted our evidence to you about four or five months ago, we quoted a figure of 21,000 carbon reduction commitments that had been made across the CRed community. Last week, that went to over 40,000. In the last six months, therefore, the activity level has doubled. In the last year, the average participant has gone from saving half a tonne per year CO2 to over one tonne per year of CO2. It reflects the fact that people are moving along these pathways, doing more and more and wanting to do more and more. How close are we to our target? We are probably just pushing the ten per cent level. There is still a long way to go, but the pace of change is rapid enough that I think we will get there. Within our CRed community, our ambition is that all the people who are joining will have achieved the 60 per cent reduction by 2025. Q730 Chairman: Within the range of knowledge of how to move down the pathways that have been identified, the technologies are known. In other words, we have renewables, microgeneration, better insulation and so on - all the things we know about. When do they run out in terms of effectiveness? If you have to move at the rate you want to go, at what point do we need something different? Dr Gerrard: "Soon", I think is the answer. The pathways generally get harder as you go along, so at the moment we expect people to find it more difficult to get towards the end; but it is no coincidence that this university has just won £5 million to set up a fund, essentially to promote and support the development of low carbon innovations. That is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, in conjunction with the Office of Science and Technology. It is a small investment really, in a nugget of an area, though, which I think is of huge potential for the economy of this country. If we can show that we understand both the behavioural ways of doing this and also have a lead on the technological aspects - and most of the carbon-reduction activities we are dealing with are a combination of technology and behaviour - that is something which can underpin the economy of this country for a very long time, I think. Dr Tofield: You do not have to know the answer to that question to make progress. If you reduce your carbon emissions by 20 per cent a decade from now, you will have achieved the 60 per cent reduction by 2050. If you do 25 per cent a decade, then there is a little bit to spare. We know from work we have done in this university that, in schools, in homes and in businesses, roughly 25 per cent of the energy - which approximates to 25 per cent of the carbon emissions that people use either in their homes or in their businesses - is wasted. In other words, there are pound notes on the floor waiting to be picked up that people do not pick up. Either it is too cheap or people do not know or they do not measure, and if you do not measure these things you never know - which goes back to these conversations about metering. We do not manage energy; therefore we do not manage carbon. One of the reasons why we believe that the Government need to set these more stringent targets and we need to change the way energy is supplied as, if you like, a service - so that there is a stimulus upon the supplier to reduce your energy use rather than increase it - is because you can start to pick up this 25 per cent which is free, and then go beyond that. A low-carbon economy is ultimately a low-waste economy. If we go back to a business analogy, Toyota - which was almost bankrupt in the 1960s and a very tiny car company - realised that if it was to succeed against the huge behemoths of General Motors, Ford and, in those days, Chrysler, it had to invent a totally different way of making cars. It did not have huge volumes; it did not have huge space to make them in. When it started to do that, it did not know exactly how it was going to do it but it knew what it had to do, and it started along that path. Bit by bit, what is now known as 'lean manufacturing' - the Toyota production system - came on board. Now its capital worth is bigger than that of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and Volkswagen combined, and it is about to overtake General Motors as the world's biggest carmaker. Not everyone should aspire to make more cars than anybody else; that is obviously not right. The point is that, once you start thinking carbon, once you start managing energy, once you start innovating, you are looking at the whole range of your activities. You innovate, and then you find more things you can do, which you did not know you could do before. You did not even think about these things when you first started. It is why, when Ashton Hayes, and hopefully some communities more locally, are talking about wanting to become carbon neutral, the outside observer would say, "That's impossible. You can't possibly do that. You can only save so much by this; you can only save so much by the other". Yes, it is impossible today. We cannot see how to do it. However, I also believe, from the history of innovation, that they will make it happen if they really want to. It may be through planting trees. It may be through setting up more sustainable agriculture, which can sequester quite large amounts of carbon in the soil, rather than engaging in intensive agriculture. It may be through setting up global energy supply companies, where they have a few wind turbines and other things, which are generating energy which ends up being cheaper than that from the larger energy companies. There is a whole range of things. We just cannot see how it can possibly be done at the moment. We have to change that whole way of approaching it, and then it will be done. However, before that point, do not ask exactly how it is going to be done because we do not know at the moment - but we will get there. Q731 David Lepper: It is all about changing people's behaviour. A significant aspect of behaviour is persuading them to spend more of their disposable income on energy saving policies, and we have thought about financial incentives to do that. Should the Government also be banning things, or setting more stringent standards in relation to some products than they do at the moment? If so, could you give us some examples of whether you would either want to see the Government banning or setting more taxing standards somehow? Dr Tofield: You have heard some already. You heard from Jason Borthwick this morning, asking why tungsten filament light bulbs are still available, and why do televisions and other devices come without even a switch-off switch. If you do not know how to do it, you do not do it; you have to go to the wall to switch it off. Why is there not legislation mandating that standby power, if you have to have it, is ten times less than it is today - which could be possible? Why do you not mandate changes in the billing of energy, so that it starts off low and goes up high? Why do not the Government come out and say loudly and clearly, "Yes, we support the EU going for 120 grams per kilometre for cars by 2012" - except that we want them to get down to 100? We are having conversations with our colleagues at Lotus Engineering, who say that technically this would be possible; it is just not happening at the moment. There is a whole range of things that we believe the EU, together with our Government, could do to drive forward the framework whereby choices become easier for people, because they are not presented with all these other options on the supermarket shelves. Local food - Defra has just indicated in a study that maybe 25 per cent of carbon emissions are to do with food growth and supply. The whole local agenda is another area where we could make a significant impact. You obviously do not save energy in not turning your thermostat down, but if you are buying local food - if done in the right way - it can have a significant impact. So, yes, there is a whole load of stuff there. Q732 David Lepper: What about the argument that we heard put in the earlier session this morning about the fact that Members of Parliament have to be re-elected, and a huge menu, such as that you have just given us, is something that many would be timid about seeing the Government enact? Dr Tofield: Many may be, but we are not telling people, "You must not fly". We are not proposing that you should tell people, "You must not go by car except between the hours of two and four in the morning". What we are doing is setting standards, just as standards are already set for clean air, clean water, and the waste industry. Then industry will innovate; or, at least, innovative industry will innovate and non-innovative industry will go bankrupt. That is creative destruction. Schumpeter wrote about that 100 years ago. There will still be as many choices for us as individuals as there always have been. Maybe a few things will be slightly more expensive: possibly flying. We must not start to ban people's mobility; what we need to do is to give people low-energy, low-carbon options. To do that, we have to drive forward the agenda for innovation. That is where hopefully the Government, together with the EU - the EU is potentially very powerful - can do that. People have talked about the examples of other countries. The Prime Minister of India recently gave a talk, saying, "This is exactly what we want to see the West do. We see there is a problem, but we want you, the West, to demonstrate that you are going to tackle it and we will follow you". If there are problems with oil - you have heard about the "Peak Oil" situation - and if there are problems with security of supply, then all of the things we do to combat climate change will stand us in extremely good stead if these other things happen. So it is potentially a win-win situation. Our business will also prosper - innovative business. It is what California is trying to do at the moment. We are sad, in a sense, that the Government are not pursuing this agenda perhaps as strongly as they could do. Q733 Mr Drew: How much work have you done on socio-economic factors? It is good to speak the language of idealism but, if you are living in poverty, the last thing you are concerned about is the planet in ten years' time. You are worried about how you can eke out an existence at the moment. What is your profile of the people you are involved with? Dr Gerrard: When we started out, we assumed that we would be touching the people who were already green and reasonably well-off. We did our first evaluation after we had our first, something like, 5,000 commitments made. We were surprised that, when we used the profile for greenness, which is a standard environmental psychology profile in the questionnaires we use, it was almost exactly a normal distribution, representative of the UK. That gave us some confidence that we were not just preaching to the people who were already motivated and wanting to do this; there were others in there too. I accept entirely that there are challenges; there are lots of different people out there, we know, and there are lots of different motivations. I think that the trick is to find ways to incentivise them to do things. We heard a bit this morning about how you might do that with fuel poverty, and try to make it a win-win situation. It is not beyond us to be able to do that, I am sure. Q734 Mr Drew: If we look at those who are living with lower incomes, the majority, almost certainly, will be in some form of tenanted accommodation. Last week we had Andrew Warren from ACE, who will be well known to you, talking about the lack of drive in the tenanted sector. One the one hand, you have government with the Decent Homes standard, which is doing some work but which will be really wary about double-funding, saying, "We do now have a Decent Homes standard. The last thing we want is some great new low carbon initiative". In the private sector there is always the issue that many landlords do not seem to want to invest long-term. Sometimes I cannot get them, even with grants, to improve the basic quality of their property, so that not only will their tenants have a better standard of living but also they will gain long-term because they have an improvement to their capital asset. What is your answer to the tenanted issue? Dr Gerrard: We have looked at that with the many tenants we have who are students at the university here. There is a Students Union accreditation scheme for Norwich landlords in the private sector, which covers all of the things you would imagine that it would cover, in terms of statutory compliance with safety for gas fires, and that kind of thing. They do not have anything in there at the moment about energy efficiency. We are therefore proposing with them - and they are very keen to do this - to put into the checklists that the students take out with them when they go to look at houses questions about energy efficiency and the cost of running the building. We think that at least sensitises the landlords to the idea that these sorts of questions are now going to become more relevant. At the same time, what we are trying to do with some of the power companies is provide the landlords with access to the grants that you have described. There is a kind of carrot and stick at the same time. The idea that, if you really want students to rent your properties, you expect that they will ask these questions and, at the same time, provide a solution to them, saying, "If you want to be able to answer those questions very effectively, you will need to get in bed with one of the power companies, get the grants if you can get them, and do something with your house". From our perspective, in a very local case study, we think that is the best chance we have of trying to tackle what is quite a difficult sector. Q735 Mr Drew: Is the Landlord's Energy Saving Allowance of any real value? Dr Gerrard: I am not too familiar with exactly how that works. I would not want to comment directly on that, but I can imagine that there are other schemes around to try and help landlords and incentivise them to do things. I suppose that, the more incentives they have and the more pressure that they feel, the more chance there is that they will eventually change. Q736 Patrick Hall: A rather clever policy of the Government has been to get energy suppliers to subsidise household energy efficiency measures, through the Energy Efficiency Commitment. I have to declare an interest. I am one of those who have taken up a scheme to have cavity wall insulation installed. My wife found a leaflet delivered through the front door that described this. Indeed, our nearest neighbour has done the same thing. For people on low incomes there are 100 per cent subsidies. It therefore seems to be a very good idea. However, I think you have argued that this is not a very effective scheme, this Energy Efficiency Commitment. I think you have called it "a rather ineffectual halfway house". Why do you say that? Dr Gerrard: Our thinking was that there is a tremendous amount of extra activity that could be put into that scheme. It is not necessarily the case that what is actually happening at the moment is particularly ineffectual; it is quite low-scale. I do not think that there are too many people like you who are taking advantage of it, and more could be done to encourage people to take advantage of it. Also, what we are beginning to notice in our connections with the power companies is that they are starting to see the need to create other kinds of activities, other than things like cavity wall insulation and loft insulation, which have been around for quite a while, and to look at the other kinds of new technologies, including some quite sophisticated combined heat and power generating systems for the domestic sector. There is the smart metering kind of idea as well. Our feeling is that there is more that can be done with that scheme, and that could be one of the factors that generate the kind of sea change that we might see, or might need to see, as time goes on. Mr Armes: The public are also quite sceptical, because they cannot understand why an energy company could possibly want to sell less energy and make their home more efficient. I think that there is also a communications message there. Maybe this culture shift in energy companies becoming more about energy efficiency than energy generation and supply is an important element in this. Certainly a lot of people we speak to when we are in Norwich centre, or wherever we are talking about CRed and trying to get people to sign up, do not understand the scheme, and there is a big communications message to be had there. Q737 Patrick Hall: You get a leaflet through the door and it says, "You can have your house cavity wall-insulated for £175". I do not think that is difficult to understand. You have to ring a number to check out whether this is true or not. I do not know why there is this great resistance that you say you have measured. Mr Armes: It is easy to understand for us, because I understand that the energy companies have to meet this commitment, but the public do not. They think, "Why does my energy company want to reduce my energy bill?". Dr Tofield: We have done audits in a number of communities, as have Ashton Hayes and one or two of the other communities, and we find consistently that the number of households, for example with the recommended level of roof insulation, is about ten per cent, and half of them have less than half. Similar things apply to cavity walls. You are absolutely right: it is incredibly good value. Nevertheless, it is not being taken up in the way that it might be. Mention was made earlier of Woking, and that what Woking had done was hopefully being replicated in London on a much bigger scale. There is a tremendous drive now to set up a local energy supply company in London. When you get that much more local, more efficient energy supply company, there will be the drive and the incentive not just to generate that energy but also to save the energy, and to build things like energy saving and reducing energy use into the whole infrastructure of energy supply. They will become part and parcel of the same thing. Q738 Patrick Hall: I think you mean energy service, do you not? Dr Tofield: Energy supply and service. Q739 Patrick Hall: Because they supply it already. Dr Tofield: When you have an ESCo providing heat, and hopefully heat and power, locally - generated locally by CHP or whatever sort of system you have - then that supplier may also become a service company. Q740 Patrick Hall: Yes, and that links in neatly with what the Energy Review says, which is to propose a new obligation, coming after 2011, that energy suppliers should become energy service companies and to be seen also to be servicing and supplying energy efficiency measures. At first glance, that does not seem to make commercial sense, does it? How do you see such a market developing? Dr Tofield: In the United States, people have analysed that it costs six times more to build a new unit of energy supply than it does to save a unit of energy. As I said, there is a huge amount of energy wasted at the moment, and yet no one seems to have the incentive to pick up those pound notes. Actually, for a long time it will be cheaper to save energy than it will be to build and install new units. Q741 Patrick Hall: If it makes commercial sense already, why do we need an obligation? Dr Tofield: Because the whole infrastructure of the way the market is set up does not allow people easily to go in and find it. Energy supply companies are that: they have big power stations or little power stations and their job is to supply energy. That is how they make their money, whether it is gas, power, or electricity. The Energy Efficiency Commitment, in a sense, is a bit like asking a poacher to do a bit of gamekeeping on the side. They are forced to do that by government and they have to do it. That is why you get your leaflets; but they make their money through supplying energy, not by saving your energy. So, in a sense, a restructuring of the industry - which hopefully will happen sooner rather than later - is what is really required. That will be key to many of the questions which the Committee is asking, because suddenly everyone will be focused on this whole business. Chairman: Let us move on in our last couple of minutes to Daniel, and a quick question on schools. Q742 Daniel Kawczynski: How well do you think that the Department for Education has done in terms of introducing energy education programmes, and what else could they do? Dr Gerrard: We certainly have a schools programme that we have evolved ourselves. What we have tried to do is link the energy management within the school, using caretakers and facility managers, to the educational programme. The Department for Education has picked up on that and run with the same kinds of ideas. There is a lot of potential in schools to learn from the very buildings that people are being taught in, and that is good. From our perspective, standing outside the mainstream activity in schools - because ours is funded completely separately from the Department for Education - there is a plethora of different things out there. While not one size will fit all, and it is very good that there are choices for schools to choose different kinds of programmes and activities, we are probably in the same kind of boat that we were in when talking about the community-level activity. There needs to be some level of consistency about that, and checking that the evidence coming back from whether or not these programmes are working is being collated in the round, so that there is a sense that you can even answer the question that you pose. At the moment, it is a very mixed bag out there. We work with HSBC. They have an educational trust that funds schools to do different things, and they have also found it quite challenging. Even though they provide financial support for schools to install renewable energy and suchlike, they have found it quite difficult to find schools that have the capacity to be able to deliver that, because there is nobody in the school who is able to take that on as a project in their own right. I do not know if that quite answers your question, but it is a mixed bag. Chairman: We could have gone on with even more questions, but unfortunately time is the one commodity of which we do not have a limitless supply. Thank you very much indeed. Not only have you given us some perceptive overviews about the whole field that we are investigating; you have given us an insight as to the way that CRed operates as a programme. I look forward, from a constituency point of view, to working with you in the future. As I said at the beginning, you cannot undo anything you have said but, if there is anything further you would like to say, we would always be delighted to hear from you in writing. This brings the formal part of our evidence session this afternoon to a conclusion. May I thank our witnesses and also our ever-patient members of the public, who have come to witness for themselves how a different style of inquisition is conducted by the Committee. I hope that you have enjoyed it, and I hope that you have a better idea of how we go about doing the work that we do. Thank you all very much for coming.
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