Yorkshire’s Drax power station will continue to receive public subsidies of £1.2mn a day under a statutory instrument on which I have secured a debate tonight in the House of Lords.
For what is that subsidy paying? For the cutting down of old-growth North American forests, which will then be converted into pellets in factories situated in poor areas of America which suffer awful health impacts, then shipped across the Atlantic on diesel-powered ships, before being burned at Drax. To say that this is nothing like ‘green’ and should not be being subsidised – should not even being allowed – is a statement of the obvious.
Subsidies to burn millions of trees
Under the term of the statutory instrument, that will mean £1.8bn in subsidy for burning 108 million trees, on top of the £6.5bn Drax has already received for destroying 300 million trees.
Why has the Labour government tabled this instrument? Well, they say, this is an improvement on previous arrangements that saw Drax being paid £2mn a day for the same activities, and from 2027 the earnings of Drax will be restricted, a little. And this is step – a slow step – towards eventual phase out.
But we are in a climate emergency. The heatwave much of the nation has just experienced is, experts say, likely to have ended the lives of 600 Britons. Farmers are facing an awful year of drought. Here and around the world, the climate emergency and nature crisis are intimately interlinked, and the damage being done to forests is clearly contributing significantly to both.
The unsustainability of Drax
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), in a special report on Drax, concluded that it was unconvinced that the subsidy extension for Drax is “good value for money for consumers”, while the companies responsible “are marking their own homework” on the source of the wood.
Claims of sustainable sourcing, PAC concluded, could not be stood up, with neither the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) or the regulator Ofgem knowing if their attempts to ensure that are “effective”. DESNZ has promised tougher sustainability rules, but PAC said “neither DESNZ nor Ofgem has a plan for how Ofgem will enforce these more stringent regulations”.
PAC further points out that the extension to Drax subsidies was agreed without any kind of competition, and that Drax will be receiving for burning wood “far more than will be paid to offshore windfarms and other renewable generators”.
Release the Drax report
The cross-party, and always carefully measured, House of Lords secondary legislation scrutiny committee – a mouthful of a name for a lot of important work – said the statutory instrument was a problem from the start, regretting “this lack of transparency and failure to make clear that the main and immediate financial beneficiary” is Drax. We have an issue with trust in politics; why has the government not been open and clear? Could it be that it is ashamed?
The Committee demanded that a KPMG report into Drax, which has been supressed, be released. “We consider that this should happen before this instrument is debated.” Again, a blow to any kind of trust in the processes of our politics.
And it should not be forgotten that even more trees could disappear into the fiery maw of the Drax inferno than are covered by the subsidy, with talk of the new power-chewing (and water-gulping) data centres possibly establishing independent contracts with Drax.
Regret motion on Drax subsidies
What is the government likely to say tonight? Well, I can safely predict that the phrase ‘keeping the lights on’ will be used. But that could be done with renewables, storage and inter-connectors, particularly if we start to use energy more sensibly, in ways that could improve the quality of all of our lives.
A test: as you live your life over the next 24 hours, have a look at how much electricity you see being wasted. It might be video advertising in public spaces (advertisers surely don’t need to use electricity to get their messages across given how bombarded we all are daily anyway); it might be offices and shops with lights and signs blazing from midnight to dawn; it might be shops with their air-conditioning running full blast with their doors open; it might be many other things. Is it for this that we are trashing the planet?
So why have I only put down a ‘regret’ motion, rather than a ‘fatal’ that would kill the statutory instrument? Well, the reality is that the House extraordinarily rarely backs fatal motions. By putting down this regret motion I hoped to get on the record the level of opposition to the continuing subsidy for Drax.
#NoWayToRunACountry
But I don’t know if I am going to call a vote on the statutory instrument. This is ‘last business’ in the House, starting around 9pm, so I don’t know how many people will still be in the chamber. I know that none of the three largest parties will be whipping to support my motion, and the government will be whipping against it. So I’m going to have to see how it feels, whether I can give the large number of peers who I know oppose the continuing Drax subsidies from across the political spectrum, the vote this deserves.
You might think, as per the hashtag I often use, this is #NoWayToRunACountry. You’d be right. That’s true about the Drax subsidy, and true about the difficulties in opposing it.
