The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Whitehead) (Lab)

I thank the noble Lords for their thorough and constructive response to this Statement on the local energy plan, and for their general support, particularly for the local power plan itself. I particularly thank the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for his forensic analysis of the detail of the report and for the various questions he asked, over and above what I took to be his very strong support for what the local power plan is trying to do: substantially to enhance the ability of communities to own and run their own energy arrangements and to distribute the benefit of those arrangements back to the local communities themselves. I know the noble Earl has been looking into and opining on this issue for a very long time, and I too have something of a track record in it. I understand, therefore, why it is necessary to get the detail of this right. I hope that this evening I will be able to say one or two things about how that detail is going to be got right, but if there are things that I have missed, I will certainly be happy to write to the noble Earl, putting some of those things exactly into the place they should be. But I think I can give him an assurance that we have thought about most of the things that he has raised this evening. Indeed, we see those things as an essential part of the move forward with the local power plan, so that communities can, for example, start to trade in local energy, have security and resilience in their local plans and benefit from a substantial hand-holding operation that is designed into Great British Energy’s approach to the 1,000 projects that it is hoped we will be able to get under way in this Parliament. We hope that those will be as robust as they can be with the sort of support that Great British Energy will give them—not just by throwing a little bit of money for a local community project and hoping it works, but actually being with those local communities right down the line, from development and first thought to the “valley of death”, where it gets to operation. I hope that the noble Earl can take some assurance from the fact that we have thought out the whole process, not just the first part of it. As far as the ambition of the local power plan is concerned, the £1 billion is based on what we think can be reasonably accommodated, invested in and sorted out, and that is the 1,000 projects in this Parliament. That is not the end of the matter; there is potentially a lot more to come. Even within that £1 billion, there are other sources, from the National Wealth Fund and various other things, that can come into play to add resource to the investment. So the idea that a large part of what was supposed to be the original investment has been lost, I am afraid, is not correct; it is more about how we get through the process of this over the period of time, making it work constructively as we go forward. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for the Opposition, concentrated much more on the other part of the Statement, which concerned the results of the second part of AR7, which was the solar, tidal and onshore wind pots that came within AR7. He was, I think, generally supportive of the results of AR7. In AR7, we have secured a fantastic step forward in terms of the deployment of solar, a very substantial and encouraging initial deployment of tidal stream and the beginnings of the establishment, or re-establishment, of onshore wind, which, as the noble Lord will recall, was banned, in effect, by the previous Administration. So it is perhaps not surprising that we are building onshore wind back up again in this round, when it had been dormant for a long time previously. Overall, these are really good results, which, by the way, will in their own right lead to the development of a very large number of additional jobs in this sector. Indeed, overall, it is thought that the programmes that are under way will lead to perhaps 10,000 direct and indirect jobs over the next period. In addition to that, the Government are quite earnestly engaged in what we might call a just transition process, which the noble Lord will know is under way, of making sure that those people who are working in the high-carbon industries, which will largely be replaced by these low-carbon industries, are able to transfer their skills and their contribution to the development of the low-carbon industry. Indeed, there are active retraining and reskilling programs under way. Examination of the skills in the high-carbon and low-carbon sectors show that something like 70% to 80% of jobs in the high-carbon sector are certainly transferable to the low-carbon sector, provided the skills are in the right place. It is not just a question of creating lots of new jobs. It is a question of making sure that as many of the jobs in the high-carbon sector—which, yes, will go as gas, for example, retreats in front of the new low-carbon regime—that can be translated to the low-carbon sector are indeed supported to do so over the period. The noble Lord was also at pains to talk about how supply chains can avoid becoming involved in slave labour and abuses of human rights in the production of those supply chains. He was quite right to mention that, and it is something that we are obviously very concerned about on this side, as the supply chains for low-carbon power establish themselves. Certainly at the moment, the world supply of solar panels rests substantially with China. Of course, there are a large number of initiatives around the world to diversify that supply chain from China to other solar panel manufacturers, such as solar panel developments within the UK. That is the first point. The second point is that GB Energy has established an ethical supply chain unit to support robust human rights due diligence and transparency in line with the UK’s legislation on modern slavery and the international human rights framework, including the UN guiding principles on human rights. GB Energy will be exploring alternatives to diversify high-risk supply chains and collaborate with partners to improve renewable supply chain transparency and accountability in the UK. Work is at hand to make sure that we are as robust as we can be in terms of those concerns about modern slavery and exploitation of human labour. The noble Lord will be aware that it is often very difficult to trace supply chains accurately as to exactly where they are coming from and going through, but I hope he will agree that we are doing and will do as much as we can to ensure, within that difficulty, that there is proof against those concerns about modern slavery and other practices.