The Man From DECC

See original post at: http://www.bettergeneration.com/green-energy-blog.html

Speaking at the Social Liberal Forum on Saturday 18^th June, Chris Huhne laid out his ideas for improving environmental standards which he believes has a “win, win, win” formula as with his proposed changes, Huhne claims that competition can increase, thus leading to lower prices for the consumer and in turn, can benefit the government by helping them to reach the standards required in the EU and worldwide.  The three important “priorities” to enable this to happen include:

·         

   *Encouraging consumers to shop around more, perhaps using a well known market comparing website, this in turn will increase competition and save consumers money.

·      * The Government needs to create a clear set of incentives to develop renewable energy –  apparently a proposal concerning the electricity market will be unveiled soon.

·     *And lastly, apparently “more fundamental” is to get society and the economy away from   fossil fuels and their price catch.

Reviews of Huhne’s speech have been mostly focused on the attacking spirit that Huhne has shown, the full transcript of his speech can be found here yet  this is not the first time that Huhne has shown a fighting spirit only to back down again, as it was only a few months ago that there were rumours he may resign if Lib Dem lost the AV vote – they did lose, and he didn’t resign.

Ministers are currently considering the amount of regulation in place with the UK and are encouraging people to contribute to this discussion via a project called the “red tape challenge”  which acts a little like an x-factor competition – if enough people call for an item to be scrapped then it will be removed. This list includes over 270 environmental regulations. Huhne’s attack on the governmental plans to scrap plans of deregulation of policies such as the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Climate Change Act seems to be part of a common theme within government at the moment, where the Coalition government have toned down a variety of policies, most notably the NHS in recent weeks after continual pressure from the Lib Dems.

Huhne makes it clear that he is not against removal of any regulation or “red tape” as he points to the astounding figure of over 4300 new regulations implemented by the Labour government of 1997-2010, and it is understandable that as Environment Minister he should be protective of his own departmental area, however Huhne’s attack on the “deregulation zealot” takes away from the point he is trying to make and instead focuses attention on the internal conflict within the Coalition government, rather than encouraging people to support him in protecting vital regulations for the environment.

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