8. What assessment has the Welsh Government made of how the new Prime Minister's agenda will impact the Welsh Government's strategy to tackle the climate emergency? OQ58414

Llywydd, we cannot ameliorate the immediate crisis of energy costs by worsening the long-term crisis of climate change. In Wales, we remain determined to deliver our net-zero commitments and to place the development of renewable energy at the forefront of our efforts to do so. 

I'm concerned that borrowing over £100 billion on underpinning overpriced and unsustainable energy markets will still leave the poorest households in my constituency having to choose between heating and eating. What, if anything, can the Welsh Government do to protect citizens from having to pay for this mountain of debt for the next 20 years or more? And what levers, if any, does it give the Welsh Government to get energy-generating companies to decarbonise to protect our economy from this neoliberal madness and meet our net-zero target?

I thank Jenny Rathbone for those important points. Llywydd, if it turns out on Friday that, as we hear, the UK Government intends to pay for the help that it will provide to citizens facing enormous hikes in their energy prices by putting the debt that will be raised to do so back into the hands of those households, then it will not have provided a solution at all. There are better ways—ways being used by other countries—to take some of the unexpected and enormous profits that are being made by energy companies in order to help them to deal with the current crisis. And there is the need, Llywydd, for a fundamental reform of the way in which energy markets operate.

Here in Wales this year, we expect that 56 per cent of all the energy used in Wales will be produced by renewable sources. Now, the sun didn't start charging more this summer and the wind isn't costing any more either, yet, despite the fact that more and more of the energy we consume is being produced by sources where there isn't a global crisis in costs, those bills are going up at the same rate as everything else. This just tells you that the way the energy market is organised simply does not reflect the new realities of energy generation.

The European Union has announced that it will sever the cost of electricity from the most expensive therm of gas bought on the previous day. That's how energy prices are driven—you look at the most expensive therm of gas you had to buy and you price the whole of energy accordingly, whether it relies on gas or on renewable sources. That simply is not a sustainable way of organising these markets and it leads to enormous distortions of the sorts of profits that we will see—the Treasury itself estimating that up to £140 billion-worth of unlooked-for profits will end up in the hands of energy companies over the next two years. Of course there are better ways of dealing with that crisis than making poor families the length and breadth of the United Kingdom pay for the next 20 years for the schemes that the UK Government appears to be bringing forward.

I thank the First Minister.