Examination of Witnesses (Questions 218-219)
Mr Simon Roberts
12 MAY 2008
Q218Chairman: Mr Roberts, thank you very much
indeed for coming. I am going to ask you, for the record, if you
would tell us a bit about your background and your responsibilities.
We are not going to go through the questions that have been circulated
in advance, but please do pick on any of the topics that you feel
best able to comment on for our benefit. After your opening statement,
if you have one, I will ask a question about achieveability of
the 15% target and then I will turn to Members of the Committee
to ask questions that they believe are relevant. Mr Roberts?
Mr Roberts: Thank you, my Lord Chairman.
My name is Simon Roberts, and I am the Chief Executive of the
Centre for Sustainable Energy, which is a charity based in Bristol.
We have been working, as the name might suggest, on sustainable
energy for nearly 30 years now. In relation to this particular
subject area of renewable energy, I have been a member of the
Government's Renewable Advisory Board since it was set up in,
I believe, November 2002. I have chaired its finance and investment
working group, which particularly helped what is now called BERR,
rather unfortunately, but used to be called the DTI, to understand
the need to engage very clearly with the finance and investment
community to understand its needs in terms of the way one creates
support mechanisms, and to maintain that dialogue on the basis
that most of the funding for renewables was going to come from
the private sector equity and debt finance and not from the renewable
energy developers. We have done work particularly on community
benefits of renewables and worked for the Renewables Advisory
Board, which maybe we will have a chance to talk a little more
about. Over the last three years, again for the DTI, we have trained,
or run workshops, for nearly 2,000 members of the planning community
in England, both councillors and also planning officers and planning
inspectors to improve their knowledge of renewable energy, particularly
wind energy developments, and the role of the planning system
and planning policy that surrounds those. I do think this particular
Directive presents a real and very welcome challenge, particularly
to the UK Government, because in my view none of the levers and
tools it currently has can be yanked that much harder to produce
much faster deployment of renewables in the UK. Having said that,
my experience from sitting on the Renewables Advisory Board is
that it still seems to be looking in the same toolbox. It has
a very limited perspective of what is appropriate. It is very
tied into the idea that it has the right perspective on what constitutes
effective market management and, as a result, it has failed almost
entirely to learn any lessons from abroad and apply them in the
UK. We have already heard from Lord Dixon-Smith the German example,
but you could turn equally to Spain for the deployment of wind
energy, for example. Last year, they put in 3,600 megawatts of
onshore wind, and probably captured almost all of the industrial
benefits of doing so by virtue of having aligned their industrial
policy, their planning policy and their support mechanism policy.
In the UK we achieved just an eighth of that, or possibly a seventh
if one is being generous. Yet the Government still holds on to
the idea that it has the most pure and perfect support mechanisms
in spite of the fact that it is not capturing industrial benefits,
it is not achieving that scale. It also has high risk support
mechanisms compared with overseas where they have much lower risk
support mechanisms which are more predictable and create less
risk premium in the system and, therefore, produce lower cost
finance. As a result, in both Germany and Spain you have a wider
diversity of ownership of renewables, you have much more sense
of community belonging, because communities benefit as a routine
and systematic basis of projects going forward, whereas in this
country we are dependent on a high-risk support mechanism, benefits
to communities being at the largesse of the developer rather than
anything systematic, and as a result I think we are falling well
behind. That would be fine if the Government was now learning
and looking abroad for ideas but I do not see that yet and I think
that is a major failing, and in spite of the fact that this is
an EU Directive it does not seem to be looking to the EU for examples.
I will stop there and answer questions, but there are a number
of points. I should say, I know very little of the conditions
which affected Bismarck, and, no, not a lot of the EU. My main
focus is UK policies, so if we can stick to that, that will be
fine, please.
Chairman: Very helpful opening remarks.
Q219 Lord Bradshaw: I will only endorse
your comments about Spain so far as the railways are concerned
because having ridden on the new line to Barcelona it is absolutely
perfect and was constructed very quickly, to time and everything
works. This is about alignment of policy, I absolutely agree with
you. However, can I go back to what Lord Dixon-Smith was saying
because you did hear him. It does seem that the Planning Bill
is going to be axiomatic in getting anything done and yet he is
already saying that there are serious flaws. Do you share his
view?
Mr Roberts: I do. I am not sure it is
necessarily flaws in the Planning Bill as opposed to the way we
are thinking about planning. We did a study for the Renewables
Advisory Board around community benefits, and what was common
to Spain, Germany and Denmark is that decisions around individual
developments are taken by officials, not by elected members, and
the democratic accountability focuses on the policy framework
and the plan, so you effectively decide what you are going to
have in an area and then individual decisions are made against
that basis. I do not see that really coming through in the Planning
Bill. I think taking some of the decisions into a more independent
planning commission is sensible and to put in much stronger focus
on national policy in that planning commission is going to be
important. But I do not necessarily see the same drive going into
the local planning decisions which are actually where most of
the renewable energy decisions are going to get made over the
next 12 years. I do not see the same drive and dynamism being
applied to that, as would occur in the above 50 megawatt line,
which is going to be for those. I do not see yet that it is followed
through. I still think we have not done enough on the basic process
of planning, so we are still looking at individual decisions,
which can get tweaked on the basis of quite partisan views and
quite limited views at a particular point in time, rather than
thinking more on planning policy frameworks and development frameworks
covering a much larger area. Each decision can be taken in effect
against those by officials rather than by individual members each
time.
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