Speeches by Billington.

“Zoë and Marna, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what features of the Scottish Government’s CARES scheme—which, Zoë, I know you mentioned earlier—have made it more successful at supporting shared ownership than equivalent schemes in England.”

“You talked about 20 MW of shared ownership in Scotland, is that right?”

“Going to your point that what community ownership can do that other people cannot is the difficult bits—which are very important for us in terms of the warm homes plan, demand management and all those things—has there been any modelling of those community projects? For example, say they are generating 20 MW but they ar…”

“I would just point out, however, that when we are talking about measuring impacts and so forth, if we have a clean energy superpower target of 2030, many of the things that you are talking about that are community benefit are not a metric that is measured in that mission. Community energy’s other benefits—the community…”

“If it was not compulsory?”

“Great. That comes on to my point about financing shared ownership. How should the Government and Great British Energy help communities to access finance to participate in shared ownership? Should, for example, Great British Energy be doing that early-stage development work that you are talking about?”

“Can I have one more question before I move on to the financing issue? I am particularly interested in the equitable nature of community energy, especially since we have talked about the difference between municipal energy and community energy, and especially when we talk about raising money and stakes in it and so fort…”

“What conditions would you think it would be worthwhile putting on, to make sure that the British taxpayers’ money in GB Energy is being used for good purpose on good outcomes?”

“I am going to be a bit rude here, but I cannot imagine Whitehall being particularly good at making those judgments. What do you think?”

“You are almost as polite as I am.”

“Zoë, go on.”

“Is that a bit like your idea, Jake, that Great British Energy should temporarily act as a buyer of last resort? Can you explain that a bit more?”

“Zoë and Marna, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what features of the Scottish Government’s CARES scheme—which, Zoë, I know you mentioned earlier—have made it more successful at supporting shared ownership than equivalent schemes in England.”

“You talked about 20 MW of shared ownership in Scotland, is that right?”

“Going to your point that what community ownership can do that other people cannot is the difficult bits—which are very important for us in terms of the warm homes plan, demand management and all those things—has there been any modelling of those community projects? For example, say they are generating 20 MW but they ar…”

“I would just point out, however, that when we are talking about measuring impacts and so forth, if we have a clean energy superpower target of 2030, many of the things that you are talking about that are community benefit are not a metric that is measured in that mission. Community energy’s other benefits—the community…”

“Can I follow up on that? I have always been interested in the idea of shared ownership because of my scepticism that developers are nice guys—funnily enough, I just don’t think that is necessarily the case. Why should a community be confident in going into shared ownership with a developer that has big, fat lawyers, lo…”

“Yes. I was just going to follow up slightly on a couple of those points. First, I am interested in understanding, if we were to incentivise shared ownership, how that would accelerate the deployment of clean energy generation at a scale for us to hit the 2030 target. How much would this particular set of recommendation…”

“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is indeed a very worrying direction of travel from the Conservatives. We on the Labour Benches think that people should not be allowed to harass any workers. I honestly did not expect this to be a controversial aspect of the Bill for the Conservatives. Perhaps I…”

“I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and declare that I am a proud member of the GMB. I stand to speak against amendment 289, which would exclude the hospitality sector and sports venues from the Bill’s duty for employers not to permit harassment of their employees. The first ti…”