Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420
- 423)
WEDNESDAY 20 JANUARY 2010 (afternoon)
PROFESSOR DIETER
HELM CBE
Q420 Judy Mallaber:
Who to?
Professor Helm: To Parliament,
and then there is a hierarchy of possibilities here. One is that
we could just go back to the existing system and the Secretary
of State has the requirement within a guillotine timetable to
make the decision, so a politician has finally decided and they
could be given two months to do it, or a month, or a week, or
whatever is required.
Q421 Judy Mallaber:
Hang on a moment here. You have left discretion. You said there
should be discretion to the Infrastructure Commission and power
to the Secretary of State or Parliament to then decide if they
have exercised their discretion properly?
Professor Helm: The IPC would
not be instructed as per currently for many of these issues, it
would be left for the IPC to assess them in coming out with its
recommendation as to whether planning should be approved or not,
but its recommendation would not, in my view, be a decision. The
decision would be taken either by the Secretary of State or in
really massive national strategic and controversial issues like
nuclear power stations my own view would probably be that you
need some parliamentary support, probably to approve at least
the overarching framework of that. But the ultimate decision would
not be taken by an unelected official, however good they would
be, and it is only in those circumstances that I think you can
give that person discretion in respect of these things in making
their recommendation and that enables you to cut out a lot of
this stuff in here which otherwise will have to be revised regularly
by the Secretary of State by changing and withdrawing these documents.
I come back to the point that as I understand it—and tell
me if I am wrong—the Secretary of State will have to withdraw—I
think it says "the document" but maybe they withdraw
clause 2.698 to introduce the idea that semi-soft start procedures
might be used. This is a nonsense, that this would have to be
done through that kind of process. That is why we need something
in the system which gives that discretion, but it is only possible,
in my view, if there is democratic accountability after it because
the IPC should make recommendations, not take decisions.
Chairman: We are going to finish with
Colin.
Q422 Colin Challen:
Thank you, Chair. I think I am not necessarily with Julie here,
but I am certainly at one end of the mixed ability class so far
as this question goes. My original understanding of the creation
of the NPSs and the new planning regime was that they were going
to remove bottlenecks. It was going to make things simpler and
faster to implement, so the Government can get all its nuclear
power stations built in three months flat, we can have an end
to the blockages to 3GW of green power, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. From what you have been saying this afternoon it seems
to me like the whole new regime has been over-designed, is over-concerned
with complex details and that given the number of things that
can be revised in this system people will be continually held
up waiting for the next revision. Is that how you would characterise
it?
Professor Helm: I could not have
put it clearer and this is an example of the intention that was
put. The intention was to speed up the process and get these things
done, and we need this infrastructure. It is not as if we are
in a position whereby we have got massive extra capacity as in
the 1980s and 1990s, and we have got to decarbonise this system
quickly. We have an enormous quantity of investment to be done
very quickly and we have a planning system which has produced
delays, of which the stylised example, the caricatured example,
is the Sizewell Inquiry and all its follies. So we need to speed
this process up and get things done. The trouble is that we could
have been achieved these objectives, by guillotines and timetables
and a number of other ancillary changes. What has been put in
place has been an amazingly complicated structure with all these
NPSs whereby Government now finds it necessary, as I say, to describe
what sort of piling system we can use on offshore wind farms.
In a world in which, because we do not have democratic accountability
for the decisions, we have allowed an unelected body to take the
decision, we have not got any discretion in the system. Therefore,
my guess is the detail will be added, but if we wait for two or
three years we will have twice or three times the volume of documentation
and lawyers will crawl all over that stuff. What I say is, this
is the opportunity to stand back for those people who are desperate
to get their projects approved. They just want to get on with
it. I have enormous sympathy, but remember in the end if you start
building lots and lots of nuclear power stations and you have
not got the consent of a legitimate process, you could go back
to where we were in 1981 when the then Secretary of State announced
that there would be ten nuclear power stations, one a year. One
got built eventually, Sizewell. The rest did not happen. We can
announce four CCS plants, we can announce hundreds of offshore
wind farms, but the problem is how are they actually going to
be delivered, through what process? How is it going to be joined
up? In the past we have not needed an energy policy. We have been
awash with energy—North Sea oil, North Sea gas, coal, more
power stations built in the 1970s than we could possibly imagine.
Now we are in a desperate position whereby we need a lot of investment
in a coherent way which is going to be extremely expensive. It
is going to raise consumers' bills and in that context these sorts
of decisions have to be made in a way in which people can accept
the outcomes. This is massively complicated.
Q423 Colin Challen:
Perhaps just to end on a philosophical note, really the problem
that we have is that we are setting objectives as politicians
which then other people have to deliver. If we cast our minds
back to the mid-nineteenth century, 1844, when the first railway
mania began, is it likely that the entrepreneurs and the capitalists
and the rest of them who built the railway system in virtually
seven years flat had set themselves an objective apart from making
a profit, do you think that would have happened and should we
start re-examining whether the state is interfering too much?
I am all in favour of objectives about nuclear power, energy efficiency,
and so on, but then we are not backing it up with a carbon price,
or we are not giving people the incentive to go out and do it
except to say that it is a very fine thing to do. It is a socially
worthwhile objective, but nobody else seems to be very interested,
so how far back do we have to go and why all this bureaucracy
and regulation and red tape to actually get the kind of achievement
in the system that we actually want, to tackle climate change,
but seem to be endemically incapable of getting very far with
it?
Professor Helm: Let me answer
that in two ways. In the example of the railways, of course anyone
could have planning permission for virtually anything then and
if you did not you could buy people to get the appropriate special
bills, and so on, for it and it was chaotic and it took a long
time to sort out the mess of infrastructures put in place to produce
a coherent railway network, and we still probably have not got
there yet. On the broader question, my view is that what politicians
should do, what the democratic requirement is, is to set the objectives,
to set the security of supply requirement, to say how much decarbonisation
we want and what is more they cannot avoid being involved in what
kind of networks we are going to have, but to get involved in
picking technologies, especially when things are moving so fast,
as I described, information technology, the electrification of
transport, unconventional gas arising, second generation renewables,
it is utterly hopeless to start specifying in each technology
what you want. It will not work. It will not get delivered. The
question is, how long it takes to realise that that is not going
to happen and how much we spend in the process, and the wind example
is clear. It will cost at least £100 billion. For the British
economy that is a big requirement and some of the time none of
that, or virtually none of that capacity will be operational.
So you need an enormously larger total capacity to meet that.
It is not just that you have got to build all those wind farms,
you have got to build all the back up technology as well at the
same time.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that.
It has been very challenging at times and we are grateful for
you coming and giving us your time and giving us a different and,
as I say, very challenging view forwards. Thank you very much.
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