Speeches by Miliband.

“I would encourage all companies involved in the energy sector to take seriously the role that trade unions can play in their companies.”

“I think that is a really good question, Chair. Let me say a couple of things. First, I think the combination of heat pumps, potentially solar panels and potentially batteries offers a way to give people real control over when they use electricity. After all, the wider promise here is to get off the insecurity of fossil…”

“Are you enjoying it?”

“On the one-metre rule. I am glad we have been of service to you, Chair.”

“Let me answer that directly. What we have done is changed the permitted development right on the one-metre rule, as you said. That was talked about for a long time, but nothing was ever done. I think it has made a difference. Some retailers, I think, have said to you that the noise issue remains a big barrier. You have…”

“I think your inquiry is really important, and I will look forward to seeing the results of it. We have to make the case, and all of us who believe it have to make the case. Workers who are benefiting from clean energy, scientists who can tell us why we need to act, businesses that are operating in this area and ourselv…”

“The most important thing is that it happens. It is worth pausing on that for a moment. Against a very tight fiscal backdrop, the Chancellor chose to invest £13.2 billion over the Parliament in the warm homes plan, in line with our manifesto commitment. That is incredibly important. It is part of contributing to us upgr…”

“It was, if I am allowed to use this phrase, a clown car operation, I think it is fair to say. Richard Tice wrote a letter saying he was going to rip up the contracts, and then went on the “PM” programme that afternoon to rebut his own letter—to say that he had been highly misinterpreted and that he was not going to tea…”

“It is interesting that you should ask that question, Polly, because the industrial energy prices thing is a very serious situation. I read with interest some of the testimony your Committee had as part of your cost of energy inquiry. It is important to understand why this happened. I have a chart here: when the crisis …”

“We should be judged on the justness of this transition; we are absolutely determined to have a just transition. Let’s take the North sea; 70,000 jobs have been lost in the North sea in less than a decade, because it is a declining basin. The truth is that unless you build the future in carbon capture and storage, offsh…”

“It is quite the opposite, if you think of the building of network infrastructure, which is creating tens of thousands of jobs, and the signal we are sending to investors. I meet investors all the time from all around the world. I am not trying to blow our own trumpet here, but so many of them say to me, “You are a Gove…”

“That sounds too softball a question—there must be a “but” coming. I see the Committee as very valuable, and I am not saying that to butter you up. As I say, my enjoyable Sunday reading was the testimony that you had had, which was very useful.”

“Yeah, I knew it was coming.”

“Okay, so one nerd level down, if you like. I consider that to be a compliment, by the way. That is absolutely fine. If the Committee’s request is that when we do written ministerial statements, we provide extra detail to you, I am sure we can meet that.”

“I am very happy to look at how we do this. We are obviously careful about making sure we do written ministerial statements in Parliament—and, indeed, oral statements. I am happy to take this offline with the Committee. The Chair, the Clerk and I had a conversation last week about how we can furnish the Committee as wel…”

“I really do, Mike. You only need to look at some of the instability we have seen in our world, in relation to Iran, for example, in recent months, and to see the extent to which oil and gas prices responded to that, to see how vulnerable we are as a country through our reliance on fossil fuels. Whether that is the Nort…”

“Happy to be tougher. I think what Richard Tice is doing is deeply irresponsible, and I think, frankly, it is playing politics with people’s jobs and people’s bills. For all of the workers who rely on working in clean energy, to the nuclear workers at Hinkley Point and the future nuclear workers at Sizewell, for those w…”

“The thing I would say to you is that REMA was an incredibly complicated process and an incredibly complicated piece of work, and it was really important we got it right. We said at the end of last year that we would announce a REMA decision in time for the opening of the AR7 auction, which is at the beginning of August…”

“I think in a way, Mike, you have partly answered your own question. If I can put it this way, we are dealing with the dilemma of doing things at pace, but in a collaborative way. If you think about the partial list of the things we have done over the last year that I gave at the beginning, it has involved acting at spe…”

“We said that we would cut people’s bills by up to £300, and that remains a commitment. It was based on independent modelling. The key thing is that we need to move to a system that can cut bills for good. The way to do that is with the lower wholesale prices that renewable energy will bring.”