UK energy policy has always had three aims. There is the need to ensure sufficient capacity to keep the lights on at all times. There is the need to keep prices down so energy is affordable for families and competitive for businesses. There are the environmental objectives.

Successive UK governments have achieved a lot in shifting to low or no carbon forms of generating electricity. Success in decarbonising must now shift to the parts of the world where there are still large increases underway in coal, oil and gas extraction and use. China is currently planning an additional 250 GW of coal based electricity capacity, more than 6 times the UK’s total electricity output from  all sources. India is planning a substantial expansion of her coal industry, and China aims to add another 900m tonnes of annual output, compared to our total use of some 10 million tonnes a year.

Policy has not been so successful in ensuring future self sufficiency in energy. Current plans assume a growing dependence on imported power from the continent, which makes no sense. The continent runs a lot of coal still in its  mix, is very dependent on Russian gas, and may not have cheap power available when we need extra supplies. The policy is literally playing Russian roulette with our energy supply.

In order to balance a system which now contains a lot of interruptible renewables the government needs to create conditions for more pump storage flexibility, and for more combined cycle gas stations to provide base load when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. It is an urgent requirement to examine the resilience of our system, to reduce its import dependence, and to ensure sufficient growth of power provision to take account of possible growing demand from transport and home heating.

There is also the question of cost. Some of the marginal power introduced into the system is expensive and requires substantial subsidies to maintain it. The system needs revision to bring down excessive subsidy costs, and to send the right financial incentives to those who can produce more power at low cost on any normal cost attribution and pricing system.

I would be happy to go into more detail of how the UK could rebuild self sufficiency, and offer more cheap power to consumers and businesses. The government has rightly said it wishes to encourage more industry in the UK, so it needs to ensure a plentiful reliable supply of competitively priced power to business. It does not currently do that, encouraging industry to locate in places like China where they keep power costs down by burning plenty of coal. This makes no sense for the environment or for our economy.

Now the government has decided to unite our foreign policy with our overseas aid policy, there is a great opportunity to rethink what we do and what it achieves.

41% of our aid is currently routed through multinational bodies where we have little control over how well it is spent or who receives it. The Department has worked closely with the EU all the time we were a member, allowing them to spend some of our money as well. Surely now we need to unite our efforts behind policies that work and give to countries where we wish to help.

Given the big pressures on public spending brought on by the CV 19 crisis, the government should announce the new budget figure for spending this year, as 0.7% of GDP will now be a lower figure than the Treasury thought a few months ago. We should begin winding down our indirect commitments of aid, and work up a great UK programme which achieves more.

The UK has done some good work on clean water, on medical services and economic development. It should concentrate its efforts in areas where we have special expertise, whilst always being ready to be generous with disaster relief. We have the ships and  manpower to make an important contribution when disaster strikes a country.

We know that many countries on our aid list have been poor for any decades, and know that past aid programmes have not succeeded in breaking the evil spell of poverty. We also know that trade is more powerful than aid at raising living standards, and know it is better to teach a person to fish than to send them  fish when we remember to.

Over the days ahead I am going to sketch out some ideas on how we can achieve more for countries crying out for help with development with new approaches to the support and the investments we make. I invite your comments as I do this work.  One of the ways forward could be to help finance economic development projects and business development that generates sustainable jobs whilst providing returns for investors.

Several informed people contacted me following my speech on importing electricity in the Commons on Monday.

One wrote:

“I listened to your speech yesterday in the House and I completely agree with point that you made regarding the inter connectors.

I have worked in the industry for 35 years ……..

The inter connectors serve a purpose to balance the European system but each country has its own energy policy and agenda. The U.K. is a dumping ground for other countries for their excess generation……

I fear that the Interconnectors will used and abused post Brexit negotiations and that the British public will suffer.

The point is that we can manage without the interconnectors if we focus on U.K. home generated power ……

Furthermore, why we are paying entities to stop importing power and wind farms to curtail their output is beyond comprehension.” (I have removed references to his detailed involvement as he wished to remain anonymous).

I also was reminded of work done by the Centre for Policy Studies revealing the dangerous gap opening up in the amount of domestic power available, and the way that was going to be filled by imports. According to CPS research in 2012 the Coalition government estimated imports of 6 terawatt hours of power by 2030. The plan was to build 26GW of new gas plant to replace retiring coal and act as back up for intermittent renewables like wind. Instead we will build under half that. By 2016 the forecast was to import 77 terwatt hours of electricity by 2025, almost one fifth of our needs.

There are many drawbacks to importing so much. I think we need our own resilience with our own supplies that we control for strategic reasons. We also need to watch out for price rises as and when the continent gets round to ending all its coal power and retires much of its nuclear.They could end up short of electricity. In the meantime the Greens should be campaigning against this interconnector power, as it may well be coming from coal or gas generators. It is all very well the UK claiming it is having coal free days, but it may well be importing coal generated power from the continent for days it thinks are coal free.

The interconnector power is given all sorts of advantages, including no carbon floor tax or transmission charges which the UK competitors face.

It is high time we had a new energy policy suitable for us. It should end our dependence on continental imports, especially given continental growing dependence on Russian gas.That is neither green nor wise, leaving us open to threats of disruption to supply.

I am very concerned about the regulation, its provenance and whether it will limit our freedom of manoeuvre in ways we do not wish from the beginning of next year. I hope we will be redesigning an energy policy that is fit for purpose to meet our three main priorities.

The Government have been very clear on their environmental priorities. They are not the subject of our debate today and I have no wish to go into them. The Government have always said that they have two other crucial priorities that matter a great deal as well.

One is to have good value power—power that people can afford in their homes and which can make us more competitive in industry and commerce—where I think we have room for improvement.

We also wish to pursue a policy of independence, so that we have resilience and reliability in our system. I therefore find it extremely worrying that we have responded to a state aid challenge upon us in the dying days of our membership of the single market, or its rules, when we are no longer a member of the European Union which sponsors it.

We are setting forward a trajectory that says we will increase our imported power from 4% to 9%, mainly from the continent of Europe—from the EU—as part of our defence against historic allegations concerning state aid. These claims would presumably go away from 1 January once we have left the European Union completely and once we legislate to make our own position clear.

Today’s regulation is not well described in the explanatory note. If one reads the 80-page European Commission decision document, one can see exactly how thorough their investigation has been since 2014 of our capacity market, how detailed their intervention in it has been. The Government’s response went to great lengths to try to conform to the EU’s wish to redesign our capacity market in a way that they find acceptable. Their way is clearly designed to promote a much wider European integrated energy market.

Now, that may well make sense for neighbouring states close to each other on the continent—between Belgium, France and Germany. That is their choice and I have no problem with that. But as we are an island nation which used to be able to generate all its own power. I have some difficulties with EU control of that.

We have many great advantages to generate wind power, wave power, solar power, hydro power and other renewable power, as well as prodigious reserves of other types of energy where the Government wish to gradually reduce or clean their use. There may well be clean ways of burning some of that carbon, with carbon sinks and so forth, which they will need and want to use.

It seems that the proposal today is from another age when we were gradually being linked into a continental system, which, incidentally, is a lot dirtier than our own system and has been really struggling to reduce its dependence on coal. It is also in a very weak strategic position of chronic dependence on Russian gas. The last thing we want to do as a country is connect ourselves to an ever bigger possible dependence on Russian gas via power generated on the continent when we have a wish to do our own thing.

It is a pity that the explanatory note does not mention the phrase “state aid” or explain up front that the regulations arise because of a state aid case. It refers to ​“Commission Decision SA.35980”. Those who follow these things know that “SA” stands for “state aid”, but it is not as clear and transparent as it might be.

The average Member of this House probably does not follow those matters in that much detail and is not aware that we are being asked today to pass legislation because of a state aid infringement that goes all the way back in allegation to 2014. We ran that market relatively successfully from 2014 to 2018, it was suspended from 2018 until the end of last year, and now there has obviously been some sort of deal to get it up and running again.

The explanatory note states:

“Part 1 amends the description of a DSR CMU to clarify that a DSR CMU cannot provide capacity primarily by using a storage facility which reduces its import of electricity”.

Is not that interesting? First, we have to translate it. “DSR CMU” is the process that the shadow Minister was telling us about. One of the responses to a capacity market auction is to bid in an offer to buy less power than otherwise would have been bought as another way of contributing to the stability and resilience of the system rather than offering to provide more power for those who want to buy it.

It is curious that the proposal is linked to any proposal that might reduce the import of electricity in the way that it does. That adds to my worries about the nature of this EU policy and intervention against the broader background of the EU’s trying to create a comprehensive European energy market with us fully linked into it.

The shadow Minister said that perhaps we were found to have acted illegally. The Commission is clear that that was the case for the period 2014 to 2018. It states that in its view the UK unlawfully implemented the capacity market in breach of article 108.3 of the treaty provisions on state aid. It has now come up with a form of words at the end of its decision that says that if we do those sort of things, it will see its way to believing that we are now compliant.

I do not suppose that the House has the appetite for a serious debate about any of that today and I understand that we are considering a statutory instrument, not our wider energy policy, but we should not let this go without some things being said.

First, the regulations are the direct result of the most enormous intervention and intrusion into British energy policy and I hope that from 1 January next year, we will proudly set out our own energy policy and not need that sort of intervention. Secondly, the thrust of the policy was to make us more dependent on a European energy provision system that is neither secure nor particularly green. I strongly repeat that dragging us into more reliance on Russian gas is the last thing we want.

Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con): My right hon. Friend made a point about EU energy not being particularly green. Does he share my concern that we pat ourselves on the back and say we have burnt no coal or had no electricity derived from coal over 30 or 60 days, yet much interconnector electricity has been manufactured by those dirty forms of energy that we are trying to get out of our market in the UK?

Sir John Redwood: That is exactly right. People like to claim that we are importing nuclear energy from France, for example, but we are importing European energy in a pretty unified system, which has surplus capacity because ​it has not only French nuclear but an awful lot of dirty coal, Russian gas and so forth, which should cause us concern.

Thirdly, can we in future have an honest and clear explanation so that more Members of Parliament might understand what is going on and think it is a matter of some concern? I do not think that most of our colleagues realise that we are talking about resilience—our ability to keep the lights on in difficult conditions that might arise in future.

We are talking about the pricing of electricity and these very big strategic issues. And finally, we are talking about whether this country is now going to have its own energy policy, or whether we are hastily legislating so that we can, for the foreseeable future, still be effectively under EU state aid rules, edging ever closer to integration with EU energy policy.

Some here have questioned what has happened to the UK tests for drugs that might help CV 19 patients.

Reminding you this site does not offer medical advice, I read that the UK trials have produced some good outcomes for the cortico steroid dexamethasone used on some pandemic patients.In the case of patients on ventilators one third benefited from this drug, and for patients given oxygen one fifth compared to patients not given it. Less ill patients did not benefit.

This drug is readily available from a range of manufacturers. It was first produced by Merck but now is widely manufactured around the world. It will be interesting to see what use doctors make of this option in the light of the findings of the trials.

The statue debate continues, with Prime Ministerial content adding to the coverage. So let me today explore the issues concerning a prominent statue in York. For me it is central that the future of statues is settled by peaceful and democratic means, and not by criminal damage to them. A town or county or nation has to find a way to be at peace with its past so the factions with differing views can accept the decision.

In York near the Minster, with the throne of the Archbishop, rests a modern statue of Emperor Constantine. He has been selected because he spent time in York, and because he converted to Christianity.

There are a number of issues about his life and times which should give us pause before we celebrate his success in promoting Christianity or in uniting his vast empire. He was the Emperor who developed Constantinople as the new centre of the Roman colonial system.

We should ask how acceptable it is that he presided over a system based on slavery. Much of the hard work in building his cities and palaces, in providing for a sybaritic lifestyle for the grandees, and in carrying out the chores of urban living fell to the slaves. Slaves were often badly treated and traded.

We should remember that in York he worked with and through the large army barracks and fortified system, encouraging the army to keep the local population obedient to Roman law. Dissent was dealt with brutally.

We should bear in mind that he led armies against people the Romans called barbarians because they happened to disagree with Rome and wished to govern themselves, or were settled just beyond the edges of Roman military rule.

He supported a large barrier wall between England and Scotland, with military suppression of any worrying contact between the two places and peoples.

I myself would vote not to have statue to such a man close to one of our great cathedrals were I to have such a vote. It would be better off in a museum to Roman life somewhere.The very least that could be done is to place more explanatory text about this man prominently for all to read if they wish, to explain the good and the bad we now see in him.

There are similar issues with the statue of Trajan by the City of London.

It is welcome  news that most shops closed to help arrest the pandemic are to open again today if they wish and if they can do safely.

Many retailers have been inventive in working out how to allow people into shops to see the stock, to choose and to buy whilst observing the rules of social distancing. The food stores pioneered techniques including asking people to wait outside, limiting the numbers in the shop at any time, going round the store in a prescribed way, keeping your distance when waiting to pay and protecting staff with screens and protective clothing. It helps if customers wear some facial covering. These and other ideas will now be adapted by the non food retailers who start trading again today.

I trust people will welcome this relaxation and will want to go and buy things from the shops. Many people say they value their local High Street and want the shops there to be available for them. To help secure their future it is important to back them in the only way that counts in the next few weeks, by visiting them and buying things from them. Of course if you are vulnerable or have to self isolate different considerations come into play, but for most people the risks of shopping for non food should be no bigger than the risks we have been taking to shop for food in recent weeks.

I have argued throughout this crisis so far that government needs to give the highest priority to saving lives,  but also has to follow policies that can save livelihoods. I was pleased the government took up the idea of government cash to support staff who could not go to work, but this cannot go indefinitely. The only way to pay the wages in the months ahead is for people to be back at work serving and supplying customers who will pay the bills.

High Streets were struggling a bit against the formidable competitive challenge of on line shopping before the pandemic hit. It has now got a lot tougher, with almost three months of no trading from shops whilst people switch to the internet offer. That is why if we want to help restore our High Streets we  need to support our favourite retailers as they go to the cost and trouble of adapting to the new conditions and opening their stores today.

The PM should give no ground in talks next week. We need to take full control of our fish, our laws and our borders on January 1 2021.

Nor do we need to delay bringing in checks at our borders on EU food and goods. They should be the same as the checks we currently apply to non EU food and goods. If it needs more people and more checking lanes at ports then there is six months to increase capacity to do it properly with no added delays. We can also use trusted trader arrangements so most of it is pre checked, not needing a border post check. If we know what is on the truck and can spot check or follow up leads if wrongful declarations are ever suspected we can allow easy transit for most goods.

How many more times do we have to explain this to a reluctant Establishment? Ministers must instruct them to do it. It’s what we already do for other countries so why the fuss? People importing food are anyway responsible in law for checking a consignment when they receive it, as it is  their reputation  on the line. They want compliant and wholesome food, so they do most of the checking and enforcing well away from the ports.

I am glad the government started to test a sample of the population and to re test regularly to construct a time series of the incidence of the disease.

The latest figures for the period 25 May to 7 June show the figure down to just 11 people having a positive test out of the 19,933 people  in the sample or 0.06%. These tests exclude hospitals and care homes to capture the position in households.

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As feared and predicted, UK GDP fell a massive 20.4% in April on top of the fall in March already reported. There were few surprises. Cars were down 41.6%, and  food and beverage 38.8% as you would expect given the lock downs. Retail managed to keep the fall to a very creditable 8.9%, demonstrating the way on line took up some of the slack with an explosion in the digital alternative to a visit to the shops and with heavy demand for food from supermarkets.

What is perhaps more surprising is the large fall in Health, down 11.4%. It underlines the impact of Covid 19 even here on activity. Whilst we are all grateful to the many nurses, doctors and support staff who were working very hard and taking risks to care for very sick patients with the virus, other large sections of the NHS closed down or just dealt with emergencies. Much of the private hospital sector was also taken over for use as part of the NHS plans for Covid 19 and related healthcare.

Education also fell a hefty 18.8% as schools pared back to look after a limited number of children attending in person, and putting on variable amounts of distance learning.

It shows us that the public sector as well as the commercial sector has a job to do to get back to anything like normal. The NHS now has a massive backlog of elective surgery and non urgent treatments to provide, and has to reconnect with seriously ill patients who have kept away from hospitals not wishing to get in the way of pandemic emergencies, or worrying about picking up the infection.

Meanwhile the debate continues about one metre or two for social distancing, which makes a lot of difference to businesses that need to meet their customers in person. Government needs to communicate some optimism and confidence that we can create safe models of doing business so livelihoods can be restored and the economy can pick up some momentum.