Utility Week

6 | 2ND - 8TH AUGUST 2019 | UTILITY WEEK News Inside story T emperatures were running high at Westminster last Thursday during Boris Johnson's rst House of Com- mons appearance as prime minister. And while the opening clash between Johnson and his opposite number, Jeremy Corbyn, was causing the political thermom- eter to soar, MPs were also contending with the same sweltering conditions that resulted in record temperatures. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the topic of climate change was on MPs' minds as the new prime minister was quizzed repeatedly on the subject during the hour-and-a-half session on the rebooted government's priorities. Johnson insisted the drive to tackle cli- mate change was "absolutely core" to his government's programme. Even though some observers have reser- vations about previous stances adopted by Johnson on the science of climate change, his former backbench colleague Tim Yeo reckons this re‡ ects his approach to the issue. He says: "Boris sees the green agenda as a part of the modern world." The new PM was speaking within 24 hours of undertaking a dramatic government reshu‹ e, which was widely described as a "bloodbath", with no fewer than 17 cabi- net ministers leaving the government. They included Greg Clark, secretary of state at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and energy minister Claire Perry. The energy sector will at least be dealing with a known quantity with the new busi- ness secretary, Andrea Leadsom. She held the energy portfolio during the dying days of David Cameron's government. The South Northamptonshire MP was energy minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) for just over a year before the ministry was dismembered when Theresa May became prime minister. So, Leadsom has some experience of the brief. "It will save a little bit of time, but only if she broadly buys into the agenda that Greg [Clark] and Claire [Perry] adopted," says Yeo, who is a former chairman of the House of Commons energy and climate change select committee. No green friend Alan Whitehead, who was Leadsom's oppo- site number, acknowledges she had a "good grasp" of the brief. A bigger concern, says Labour's shadow energy spokesman, is the policies that Leadsom implemented while in post. It was on her watch that the government cut subsidies for solar feed-in tari› s (FITs) and ended support for onshore wind devel- opments. Decc gave local authorities the planning powers to block wind farms and excluded onshore wind and solar from the contracts for di› erence regime. "In her previous guise as energy minister, her principal contribution was the ban on onshore wind and backing fracking," says Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK. These days, Leadsom sings from a very di› erent hymn sheet (see box, right). "She's been on a journey from being a cli- mate change sceptic: everything she has said and done since shows she has changed her view," says Chris Rum tt, chief executive of public a› airs company Field Consulting. Léonie Greene, director of advocacy and new markets at the Solar Trade Association (STA), counters that the cuts to FITs have to be viewed in the context of the "real threat" at the time that they would be axed entirely. "We managed to keep the FIT. It wasn't what we would have liked, but there was a level of listening." Only a fortnight ago, the then interim energy minister Chris Skidmore told the BEIS select committee he was open to so¤ ening the government's stance on onshore wind. And last week, the committee's chair, Rachel Reeves, added her voice to the call. However, Leadsom is a long-standing opponent of onshore wind. One of her rst acts as an MP a¤ er being elected in 2010 was to sponsor a backbench bill calling for local communities to be given greater powers over the siting of wind farms. Based on her track record, Whitehead believes there is "absolutely zero chance of movement" on this issue unless Leadsom has undergone a "Damascene conversion". Rum tt agrees there is little prospect that Leadsom will waltz down this route. He says: "Leadsom thinks the whole thing can be solved by the free market, and that intervention and support is a constraint on the market rather than shaping the market to get it into a better position." Alan Whitehead MP, shadow energy minister Under new management Do Boris Johnson's wholesale cabinet changes signal an end to the policy logjam? David Blackman reports.

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