Speeches by Miliband.

“Absolutely not, Sir Christopher, and you and I—if my answer was not clear to you—absolutely share a commitment that we need to act, and this Government have a commitment to act on flood defences and all the issues that you mention. There we agree. But if you want to then suggest to me that we should throw under the bus…”

“Absolutely, it should have priority.”

“I do not think that would be a responsible course of action, and I think you are posing a false choice. I think if we say to the British people—just to step outside this Committee for a minute—”Should we tackle the threat that climate change is going to pose to people’s way of life?”, they would say, “Absolutely.” But …”

“That is a bit harsh, if I may say, to defend a member of your Committee.”

“Absolutely. Thank you for what you said. Planning reform—I am pleased you have asked about it—is absolutely crucial. We are determined to rewire the planning system from end to end, including through the planning and infrastructure Bill that will be coming in the next few months, on which we have been working closely w…”

“Let me deal with the two parts to the question. First, the land use framework is an incredibly important piece of work that my colleague Steve Reed has embarked upon, setting out clearly for the first time the role of farming and agriculture, the role of nature restoration, and the role of, for example, renewable energ…”

“Of course; that is absolutely fine.”

“I will come to that specific question in a second. It is important to say that what we are doing in this document is quite path-breaking, because we are setting out for the first time the energy mix we need to meet clean power. I do not want to be over-party political in this, but that was not done before. That is so i…”

“Exactly.”

“It is worth also saying that even the floor will involve almost trebling the amount of solar power from today. We are talking about a big increase. In answer to how we make this a reality, this is one of the issues. It is something I get asked about a lot. This is something we are working on with MHCLG, which is making…”

“We are absolutely hand in glove with industry because they are in our solar taskforce. This is something that the previous Government were working on, but I wanted to make sure that we were at the maximal end of ambition when it came to solar. That is the work we embarked upon and, in the coming months, we will publish…”

“There is a broader point here that I want to touch on, which is that, in general, the grid delays we have are enormous. That is because we had a first come, first served system and we have ended up with more than 700 GW of capacity queuing up in the system, and lots of capacity that is not needed for 2030. It is import…”

“We have moved to a much more intentional approach. Some people will therefore have to wait their turn. I am afraid that is tough because we have a national interest here.”

“I do not believe that is what is going to happen. I know you had Fintan Slye before the Committee on this. There were some concerns in the solar industry. Reassurance has been provided about grandfathering. We could decide not to reorder the queue—I know you are not suggesting this, but we could just leave this in plac…”

“Let me go to the bigger picture and then I will come to your question, because if I am frank with you, Chair, I think there has been quite a lot of nonsense talked about last week and quite a lot of scaremongering. I do want to deal with it directly. First, I want to quote the NESO. They said at no point were electrici…”

“Just explain your question, if you would, Chair.”

“I think it goes to the overall picture of bills and so on. I have read some of the testimony on this in the evidence to you. The key thing about this is that, as we said in our manifesto, a clean power system—this is the definition of the CCC and others—always has a strategic reserve of gas on the system. The key quest…”

“That is not the way we are thinking about the role of GB Energy at the moment. We have the capacity market to provide the dispatchable power that we need and GB Energy—maybe we will come on to this—has lots of other priorities. For the present time, we think the capacity market with privately owned gas-fired power stat…”

“Overall, what I pick up from the sector—this is not meant to sound complacent or self-congratulatory—is that they want a sense of direction and we are giving them a sense of direction. Going back to the conversation we had earlier, setting out the ranges of different technologies that we want builds confidence. Consent…”

“The first thing to say is that long-duration storage has an important role to play in our mission. It enables the electricity system to store wind and solar power when it is plentiful and when it is most needed. It is also important to say that no long-duration storage capacity has been built in a number of decades. Th…”