All Party Parliamentary Groups are cross-party groups of parliamentarians (MPs and Lords) that come together to promote a particular cause. Last week I chaired the inaugural meeting of a new APPG on Community Energy. It is the third APPG I am chairing, alongside the one for the AEAT Pension Campaign and the one I co-chair on social mobility.
The APPG is being set up to promote the benefits of community energy and specifically of the Local Electricity Bill, which Herald readers may know I am the lead sponsor of. The Bill is a piece of draft legislation that is designed to open up the electricity market to small, renewable generators of energy.
More and more people are keen to see solar panels and wind farms operating in their local villages and towns but, at the moment, those operating them couldn’t sell the energy they generate to local people. This is because there are very high set up costs to be able to access the grid – in the region of £1 million – which are out of the reach of most small-scale initiatives. You need to be able to supply the whole country when you just want to be able to supply your neighbours.
We’re pretty confident that people would want to buy their energy from a local, renewable source if they could, and the potential of community energy could go some way to helping us meet the net zero goal. In addition, it would help promote competition and support for small enterprises.
The Government agrees that there is great potential in community energy and that the costs at the moment present a barrier, but they have concerns about unintended consequences of the legislation. Their concerns include (but are not limited to) unintentionally distorting the market and the ability of suppliers of community energy to deliver the services and consumer protections that large utility companies do.
Last month I therefore chaired a meeting of a handful of the MPs who support the Bill – 295 MPs now support it overall – with the Minister for Energy and Clean Growth, Greg Hands, and his officials. We talked through some of the Government’s concerns and I was very pleased with how open the BEIS department is to see if they can work with us to try and achieve the aims of the Bill, even if the Bill as currently drafted is not something they can support.
I’m therefore hopeful we might make some progress in the future and, if we do, particular thanks will go to Steve Shaw and the Power for People organisation who have done a lot of the running on this issue and will support the new APPG. I will keep you updated.
