Speeches by Shanks.

“I have said we are looking at a whole range of policies. I am not going to be drawn on one particular thing that, I am sure, will be quoted in a particular way after this meeting. What I am saying is that we are looking at a whole range of options to reduce bills. But the principle that carbon has a cost and that it is…”

“I said earlier that we are looking at absolutely everything, but there are some fundamentals that there simply is no way to go around. We are not looking at completely changing the Government’s policy on recognising the price of carbon.”

“You are a very good civil servant. [Laughter.]”

“No, I don’t, because, fundamentally, the gas would still be more expensive even without that. The comparison I have seen, which I think is what you are referring to, assumes a load factor of gas of above 90%, which we have never run in this country. That is not how we run gas in this country. Even though the equivalent…”

“As I have just set out, we see it as an important way to lead the decarbonisation that we need to see as a country. It is about recognising that if you take gas generation and put it alongside renewables, there is an additional cost to society from that gas generation that is not otherwise recognised. That was a fairly…”

“I don’t have the exact number in front of me at the moment, but they sound around the right—I mean, they are far too high, is the bottom line.”

“Well, it is. I would also say that there is not some magic button we can push that electrifies the country without building the things that get electricity to homes and businesses. Look, we built the grid in the ’50s and ’60s. It was an extraordinary project then to electrify the country. We have not done any big scale…”

“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…”

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

“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…”

“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 …”