Agenda item

Purpose: To address two motions submitted to Council seeking support of the Local Electricity Bill. The first motion was submitted by Councillor Adrian Abbs at the 3rd March Full Council meeting and the second was from Councillor Steve Ardagh-Walter submitted at the 10th September Full Council meeting.

This report seeks to address these motions and make recommendations as to whether they should be implemented.

Resolved that:

·         The Local Electricity Bill be supported, but that this support is contingent on the resolution of the issues identified in the APSE Energy Report, attached as Appendix B.

·         The issues identified within the existing draft of the Bill are brought to the attention of our local MPs, so that they can potentially be addressed as the Bill progresses through Parliament.

This decision is eligible to be ‘called-in’.  However, if the decision has not been ‘called-in’ by 5.00pm on 29 December 2020, then it will be implemented.

The Executive considered a report (Agenda Item 8) which addressed two motions submitted to Council seeking support of the Local Electricity Bill.  The first motion was submitted by Councillor Adrian Abbs at the 3 March 2020 Full Council meeting and the second was from Councillor Steve Ardagh-Walter submitted at the 10 September 2020 Full Council meeting. The report sought to address these motions and to make recommendations as to whether they should be implemented.

Councillor Steve Ardagh-Walter confirmed that the Environment Advisory Group had been very supportive of the motions as were at least two of Berkshire’s three MP’s. The report had gone into a little bit more detail and had highlighted some ways in which the drafting of the Bill could be improved. For example by encouraging and showing greater direction towards explicit green energy rather than just local energy and the recommendation broadly was to recommend to all our three MP’s that this Council was supportive of this sensible change in law and it looked forward to it progressing through Parliament in the early part of the following year. The support was contingent on the resolution of the issues identified in the APSE Energy report which had been attached as Appendix B to the report.

Councillor Richard Somner confirmed that he was happy to support the proposal and there was clearly cross party support on this as it has been raised by two different parties.

Councillor Tony Vickers stated that some small companies were trying to get into this field by what could be achieved by the Bill. They would be suppliers of renewable energy and he felt that the Council was making it conditional on there being explicit mention of renewable energy. It would be a shame if the Bill fell just because of that as he felt that the majority of the companies that would be formed would be promoting renewable energy. Councillor Steve Ardagh-Walter agreed that it was a good point but the purpose of the Bill was to empower organisations and definitely smaller companies to supply renewable generated electricity for local users at a competitive price.

Councillor Adrian Abbs expressed his disappointment that it had taken so long to get a response to these motions particularly when there had been cross party agreement.

RESOLVED that:

(1)       The Council supported the Local Electricity Bill that this support was contingent on the resolution of the issues identified in the APSE Energy report attached as Appendix B;

(2)       The issues identified within the existing draft of the Bill would be brought to the attention of the local MP’s so that they could potentially be addressed as the Bill progressed through Parliament.

Other options considered:

The Motions could be rejected but this would be at significant odds with the Council’s Climate Energy Declaration, the associated target of achieving carbon neutrality for both the Council and the district by 2030, the Council’s ‘maintain a green district’ priority for improvement and the recently adopted Environment Strategy which specifically targeted the increased adoption of energy from renewable sources.