Speeches by Shanks.

“I absolutely enjoy it, and I appreciate all the questions. I will endeavour to be there.”

“The profit lies across the system. We have a privatised system from top to bottom. That is not our design but what we inherited. Inevitably, there is a profit motivation. We have regulated monopolies that deliver much, particularly in the grid. There is a recognition that if we are going to have operators in this space…”

“It is worth reminding ourselves why the carbon price support exists in the first place. It was introduced to incentivise the building of low-carbon infrastructure. It recognises the fact that there is a cost to carbon-intensive infrastructure; it might not be borne immediately, but it is borne in due course. Therefore,…”

“We decided not to pursue zonal pricing because to split the country up into individual zones would, in the assessment that we made, lead to a significant period of uncertainty and potentially to increased costs of building projects, wherever they might be in the UK. Any benefit that may have come from zonal pricing in …”

“First of all, the previous Government built a sizeable amount of renewables—I think I am the last man standing that credits them with that—but they did not build the grid that connected it all, and so we are curtailing many of these fantastic projects that were built under the previous Government. The second thing is t…”

“It could be. That particular fund is to recognise the really significant costs of distribution in the north of Scotland and to balance it out, not so that they have lesser bills than anyone else but so that the cost is equalised to the level of others. We have kept it under review every year, so it has a slightly diffe…”

“They are significant—absolutely. That is the result of two things—”

“That is absolutely a fair point. But that is partly why the warm homes plan targets some of those households: so that they are not the most left behind.”

“The gas network is a hugely important asset and, at the moment, we want to maintain it in a way where there might be future potential for other types of molecules to pass through it. Green gas is an important part of that, but we are also looking at other options as well. To be honest, these are some of the questions t…”

“There are a number of schemes that we are going to have to look at in terms of their sustainability as people move off gas. Investment in the gas network itself is something we have consulted on recently, because the number of gas users is decreasing and will continue to decrease. We have to keep those schemes under re…”

“That is a good point about investment in the network, but it is worth reflecting on what that helps us to achieve. There is an up-front investment, which is right: £108 on bills by 2031, £48 of which is on the gas network, because we are talking about both networks, and £60 is on electricity. That investment in the sam…”

“Particularly with this, if we are going to target it at the most vulnerable, we need to have some sense of who that is. The second thing is a practical thing around how the Government actually reaches those people. A complexity with the warm home discount is that, at the moment, my Department does not have access to th…”

“It is not a tariff, but it achieves some of the same aims, which I think was probably the point that was being made. The aim is for us to direct financial support of £150 to the most vulnerable households. In some ways, it achieves the same aims. There are two challenges with a social tariff, and we have looked at this…”

“It is worth explaining—not to you, because I know you know this inside out—that the reason we have the marginal system is that we still have gas often as the very last unit we put on to the system. Gas is still setting the price because of that. We are trying to do everything we can to push that off, and that is why ne…”

“Again, we are looking at this across the board, because, yes, there is a fairness argument around standing charges, which we accept are too high. If we can have efficient homes and charge things through the unit rate, people will obviously pay less, but there are trade-offs within that where we have households who are …”

“Not specifically, no. We expanded the warm home discount so it would reach 6 million households. That was important in order to say that low-income and vulnerable households would get £150 off their bills. Clearly, we look at the cost of that, and we have obviously expanded the scheme and will continue to look at it, b…”

“We are looking at some of those options at the moment. It is worth saying that if we take a snapshot of the year, yes, gas is still setting the price significantly higher than other countries, but on individual days of the week that is increasingly not the case, and we do have renewables setting the price. What we need…”

“We are focusing on reducing the price of energy, but we also have some of the worst homes anywhere in Europe. If we are not going to improve the quality of our housing stock now, and improve the design of future homes so that we are not having to retrofit, people are going to keep paying much more to achieve the same o…”

“Our latest estimates are that it is still setting it more than 80% of the time. It fluctuates, and over the past year we have seen gas setting the price less, but it is still far too often.”

“Again, that is a really important point. I have been contacted by a lot of people working in this space who are doing a very good job. We should be really clear: this terrible practice was not everywhere, but it was on a concerning scale. There were good people working in this space. Our expectation is that although th…”