All through conference, my LibDemVoice colleague Helen Duffett has arranged a series of blogger interviews of key figures in the Lib Dems, including several ministers. I think it’s a testament to their openness that Lib Dem ministers, including the most senior, still make themselves available for interviews in this way. A large group of people interviewed Nick Clegg yesterday, and today a group including me convened to talk to Chris Huhne, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.
It is quite remarkable how little you can get through in an hour when the person you are talking to is on top of his brief and really enthusiastic to talk about what is planned. We heard at great length about plans for the New Green Deal, which should be starting its process through parliament this autumn, ready to start being delivered by 2012.
This massively extends previous projects to get world class insulation into the vast majority of British homes which are woefully energy inefficient. Most energy efficiency projects like this actually pay for themselves by savings in energy costs, but many take 10 or 15 years before the payment is complete. The scheme Huhne is promoting will borrow the money from future energy bills, meaning that householders do not need to take on any personal debt to do it or affect their credit history. The money will sit between the energy provider and the householder and be paid off as part of future energy bills. Moving house will still be possible as future owners of your house will still have lower energy bills than had the work not been done and the prospect of drastically lower bills once the cost of the scheme has been paid.
In addition, the work will create a new industry. Huhne estimates there are only about 20-30,000 people working in this field at present, and in the future there will be a sustainable need for ten times that. The scheme will need carefully planned training courses, but is a reasonably simple construction type activity that a lot of people could learn to do relatively easily. Best of all, there will be a need for people to work in this field right across the country. Wherever there are houses there will need to be people working to implement the Green New Deal.
When it came to my turn to ask a question of Chris Huhne, I chose to ask about the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI). RHI is a scheme the last government consulted on but ran out of time to implement. Like the Renewable Obligation Certificate (ROC) and Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) this is a pot of money designed to transfer money from old energy to new energy to make the transition away from carbon more manageable. ROCs take money from carbon based energy generation and pay them to renewable generators. And CERT is a levy on energy companies that goes to pay for energy efficiency in people’s houses – in Nottingham this is delivered by the Warmzone work.
RHI is particularly important in my work as a director of EnviroEnergy, Nottingham’s district heating system. This massive heat system transfers waste heat from the incinerator to heat many of the civic buildings in Nottingham and thousands of homes, largely in the Victoria Centre flats and St Anns. The company has struggled to break even in recent times, but is predicted to start making a profit real soon now.
What would help enormously with its finances is an injection of RHI cash. So I asked Huhne what the plans were for RHI.
His upfront position was that it will happen; that everyone in government sees the need; and that heat is central to meeting the legal target the UK has to generate 15% of its energy needs from renewables by 2020.
Chris Huhne said:
It’s inconceivable that we couldn’t support heat, because it’s such a crucial part of our renewable energy objectives. It’s absolutely key.
There is a minor “but” however. Unlike ROCs and CERTs, which are funded by levying industry, the RHI will be funded directly from taxpayers’ money. As such, it is part of the comprehensive spending review, which is indeed proving comprehensive. So until that process is complete, a little over a month from now, the details and the price are simply not certain. But RHI is definitely on its way.
Chris Huhne added:
“I have said as plainly as I can to the industry, ‘Hang on in there, the cavalry is coming.'”
Many many thanks to Lib Dem Voice editor Helen Duffett for organising our major fringe event tomorrow. She’s been hunting around the country for the best talent to speak to us, and has overcome many seemingly insurmountable obstacles to bring a stellar event to the conference.
Hall 1B is a lovely room with a giant set of seats sitting on an enormous turntable, for reasons that will probably become clear if you come and see the fringe.
Without further ado, our speaker lineup is:
Evan Harris
Susan Kramer
Will Straw
The title is:
Fairer? For Whom?
As will all our fringe events, we are planning to record the event using our trusty Zoom H2 and make the recording available as a podcast right here on the Voice.
Tonight of course, the BOTYs reach their glittering climax, and the tape of that should be with you before daybreak, flakey hotel wifi permitting. A full list of the shortlisted bloggers can be found here, and mere hours from now the new winners will be revealed.
EDIT: Dates and times: Fairer? for whom? Sunday, 19th September 2010
13.00 – 14.00
ACC Liverpool, Hall 1B
Blog of the Year awards Saturday, 18th September 2010
22.00 – 00.00
Hilton, Grace Suite 1
I have finally figured out what was stopping me upgrading the twitter plugin in on my blog. What follows will be incomprehensible unless you vaguely know about computers like me.
Twitter changed their authentication system to OAuth. Twitter Tools plugin upgraded, but needed PHP5 to work. Dataflame used PHP4 on my blog.
I asked Dataflame to upgrade me. They did.
Twitter tools plugin still didn’t work.
Check cPanel – definitely says that I now have a version of PHP > 5.
Plugin still not working.
Today I re-read the help email I got from Twitter Tools “your file is still being executed under PHP4”.
Logged in with cPanel. Played with PHP configuration tool. Found an option to say “which version of PHP should files be executed under.” Choices are PHP4, PHP5, Server Default. Change to PHP5.
All is now hunky dory. Apparently the plugin can now run.
Now this place should be fairly automatically be updated every day, even when I don’t blog. Thanks for your patience.
So, Tuesday night saw a live version of the Pod Delusion, a sort of podcast version of FOOC from a skeptic view point. They have had a weekly audio programme for the last year built up of short contributions from a variety of people, including me, and were celebrating their birthday by doing what they usually do in front of a live pub audience.
Despite the travel, I jumped at the opportunity and dusted off my gay blood ban material and added in a few jokes that would not have been appropriate last time I used it in Full Council.
It went very well. People laughed a lot. They laughed at the jokes I wrote and even found some of the other bits funny too.
The full piece will doubtless be available as an audio file on this week’s Pod Delusion, along with some sterling other contributors and ending up with some jolly songs.
The bit of the evening I was dreading most was the questions, but in fact two good points were raised.
Firstly part of my speech included referring to Typhoid Mary, and someone in the audience rightly picked me up in that. Whilst in common parlance Typhoid Mary just means pariah, I had just a few weeks ago read the WP page for Typhoid Mary, and the real story is much worse, and wholly inappropriate for use in the gay blood campaign. What’s worse still is that I knew that! Typhoid Mary was a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. She was not ill herself, but was able to infect others. Through her work as a cook she infected at least 50 other people, three of whom died. She refused to believe she was infectious, and spent at least part of her life behind bars.
So, she was infected but didn’t know it, refused to comply with the health-based rules, and ended up infecting and causing the deaths of others. Really, really not the sort of case to invoke in the arguments around the gay blood ban.
The second question was around HIV incidence and who was the largest group of people now being infected. I wasn’t sure on the night and the questionner has subsequently got in touch on Twitter with twodocuments of interesting data which a) show that heterosexual infections are now more common than gay ones and b) although there are now more gay men being diagnosed HIV+, a higher rate of diagnosis probably doesn’t mean higher incidence, just that more of those who have it, know about it.
From Blood Service’s point of view the fact that the straight infections count for a larger proportion of new infections is probably not helpful to the arguments around the gay blood ban, because the group of straight people is much bigger than the group of gay people. So incidence amongst gay men is around 5% whilst in straight people as a whole it’s probably only 0.001%.
The third question was “do you have to have anal sex to catch HIV.” No you don’t, but it helps.
Perhaps the most touching thing to happen was after I got home. I start my schtick talking about the Anthony Nolan Trust and the bone marrow register. I’ve signed up, and given a saliva sample – and just last week received my donor pack.
This, and carrying a donor card, I do partly because it’s right, and partly “pour encourager les autres.” If some parts of the NHS are happy to deal with gay men, that should be encouraged.
It’s probably quite unlikely my number will come up and they find someone who’s a match who needs my bone marrow. But if they do, I will do what I promised to, and go to London for medical treatment and donate bone marrow. Most of the time, that’s a fairly simple course of injections followed by sitting hooked up to a machine a bit like a dialysis machine. More rarely, it involves an operation.
The person who got in touch after I got home wanted to thank me for signing up with the Anthony Nolan Trust – because he was a leukaemia survivor, who was only still alive thanks to bone marrow donation. His came from a sibling rather than the register, but it was still a really interesting story he sent me.
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