Speeches by Shanks.

“Let me take that away. I think the reason that the consultation focused on established technologies was that we have a good sense of what the equivalent megawatt community benefit would look like and what it has been in the past—in solar and onshore wind, for obvious reasons. There tend to be bespoke arrangements for n…”

“Good morning. It is good to be with the Committee. I am Michael Shanks, the Minister of State for Energy, a portfolio that covers most of the energy system—from renewables to oil and gas, the transition and Great British Energy.”

“Yes; we will take that forward later this year. It is—I don’t want to say an experiment, but it is a pilot to see whether we can make this work. Our belief is that there absolutely should be a way to make it work, but we want to make sure that the market responds in the way that we think it will, and that consumers can…”

“It is important to restate to the public that the price cap is in place now, and that it has brought down bills by 7%. That is because of conscious decisions that the Government took in the Budget to take costs off bills and to put them into general taxation. That has brought down bills. Clearly, we are now in the obse…”

“That is a really important question. To date, we have tried to work with the Scottish Government on devolving funding to schemes that are already in place so that we are avoiding duplication. Particularly on community energy, for example, the funding has gone via CARES, the Scottish Government scheme, to projects acros…”

“There is a mix. Some are civil servants who are helping with the start-up and will go back to their jobs elsewhere in the civil service, and some are based in the headquarters in Aberdeen. I can write to the Committee with more detail. There are over 120 people working for GBE. The Bill received Royal Assent in August …”

“Great British Energy is ramping up its recruitment. There are more than 120 people currently working for Great British Energy. I do not have the exact number. I can write to the Committee, but it has been increasing its workforce.”

“We have said that there will be hundreds working in the office, but there will be thousands through the investments that Great British Energy makes. We will be careful to ensure that every single job is critical to delivery and plays a really important role.”

“I don’t know categorically, if I am honest, but it is obviously the easiest route into tariffs that involve time of use. My understanding is that those tariffs are dependent on having a smart meter so that you can access live electricity use, but I can write to the Committee on that.”

“That will clearly be important, but it is not going to reduce the cost entirely. We think it will play an important part. Apart from anything else, it is better for it to be in consumers’ pockets rather than going on switching off wind. As a principle, we think it is really important. It is not going to deal with the e…”

“That is genuinely a hugely important question. The consensus is why we achieved as much as we did as a country. I half joke that I am the only person left standing who defends the previous Government’s record on building renewables—because they don’t any more—but it was an important mission for us to be on. I have told…”

“We set up Great British Energy with two principles. First, we believe in 21st-century public ownership. We look around Europe at other countries with publicly owned energy companies that have built a huge amount of the projects we see in the UK, and we think it is right and proper that the UK should have an equivalent …”

“You are absolutely right. We have a target of, I think, 12 GW of consumer-led flex in the clean power road map, so we have real ambition in this space in terms of how much consumers can benefit from this, but it has to be driven by consumers getting a benefit. That also helps the system, so it is of mutual benefit, but…”

“We are at the very early stages of designing what this will look like, so I cannot go into any of that detail at this point. We want to do quite a lot of work in the background to work out a coherent pilot that gives us the evidence we need. It also needs to be defined clearly enough so that people know they are part o…”

“Because we want the public to have a stake in those projects. We do not want to be giving grants with no return; we want to be investing for a return so that the British public own something. This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about it: we want to drive forward investment, but we also want the British pu…”

“They will predominantly be working on the projects that are being taken forward by developers and others, but they will be unlocked by the investment that Great British Energy makes.”

“I will come on to that point.”

“I will not be drawn on golf course membership, because I do not know how many of my constituents are members of golf courses; I can imagine how many Conservative Members are. I come back to the point about land use, because we absolutely recognise the importance of having a framework for how we use land across the coun…”

“I was going to come to the trading of statistics later in my speech, but let me do it now, because there is a fundamental point around the disingenuous trading of statistics on land use. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) made a valiant effort at trying to correct that, but let me give Members s…”

“I am not going to give way to the hon. Lady again because I want to come to floating solar, which the hon. and gallant Member for Spelthorne eloquently made the case for. I completely agree that it is a hugely exciting technology that we should be expanding, and I also agree that there are none of the trade-offs that t…”