Lord Ravensdale (CB)

My Lords, I have just a few brief points to add to what the noble Earl, Lord Russell, stated. For me, this goes back to the governance system. Of course we have made progress in recent years; we have the strategic spatial energy plan, which is being managed by NESO, but we are hearing some feedback on that plan. In effect, it tries to map out what energy projects should be located where, in minute detail across the country. The industry has highlighted a number of problems with trying to do this at that scale; we need local knowledge flowing up into these plans. As well as the top down, we need the bottom up. We need to capture all the great knowledge that local areas and local authorities have. I will just take heat as an example. One area may be better suited to heat pumps and another to heat networks. One area may have relatively well-insulated housing stock; another, poorly insulated housing stock. We need to capture all that and bring it into the energy transition. It is an important piece of the puzzle to making this energy transition work and making it cost effective. A recent study by UKRI highlighted tens of billions of pounds of savings if a place-based approach is taken over a place-agnostic approach, so it is important that the Government make some progress on this. We have not seen the progress needed. We have had some good pilots using this approach in various areas across the country, but we now need the Government to get behind this approach to feed all the benefits of that local knowledge into the energy transition. I would welcome some reassurance from the Minister at least on timescales, on how they see this programme developing and on it reaching a decision on the role that local area energy plans will play in the energy transition.