ENERGY SECRETARY Ed Miliband guaranteed £21.7 billion in subsidies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) in October. But is it the “clean energy revolution” he promises, or as critics charge, energy firms grabbing subsidies for a questionable technology?

It is a bad sign that one of Britain’s leading CCS lobbyists is simultaneously involved in another scheme widely seen as a corporate taxpayer rip-off. Labour Baroness Helen Liddell is the president of the carbon capture and storage association (CCSA).

She is also a director of Annington Homes, a firm built around a public-sector housing deal described by MPs as “disastrous for taxpayers.” Liddell’s role with Annington is especially shocking because the scandal involves poorly insulated, damp, mouldy houses — the very opposite of what anyone in favour of reducing carbon should countenance.

CCS proposes cutting greenhouse gases by capturing carbon emissions from oil and gas-burning industries and storing them underground in empty old oilfields.

Critics say CCS allows energy firms to continue pumping and burning hydrocarbons, while paying them for the use of their old oil fields for a technology not yet shown to work. Opponents see it as a mix of subsidy-hunting and greenwashing.

The CCSA is Britain’s top CCS lobbyist. The CCSA, funded by the big energy firms, held multiple meetings with the government to design Miliband’s plan to give CCS schemes a £21.7bn subsidy over the next 25 years.

This suggests a £5bn subsidy under Keir Starmer’s current government. Liddell, formerly an energy minister under Tony Blair, is the CCSA’s longstanding president. It’s an unpaid role, but one that keeps her active. Her duties included hosting meetings for newly elected Labour ministers in the House of Lords in July.

Since 2017, Liddell has held one major paid job, chair of Annington Ltd, alongside her CCSA presidency. Annington’s business is one of the most widely criticised privatisation deals of the past 30 years.

In 1996, the then-Tory government sold all military “married quarters” houses to Annington. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) then leased back the 38,000 homes to house military families, a deal the House of Commons public accounts committee described as “disastrous for taxpayers.”

The National Audit Office says the MoD lost up to £4.2bn from the scheme, which leaves soldiers’ families in often grim conditions. The last Tory government finally lost faith in the scheme and launched legal action to take back the houses from Annington. In 2023, the government won their bid to take back the military houses at the High Court, which described the sell-off as a “bad deal.”

In 2017, Annington, which is ultimately controlled by financier Guy Hands and his Terra Firma group, hired Liddell as chairman. She takes a prominent role in resisting the government’s attempts to recover the houses.

The Annington deal is “disastrous” because the MoD sold the houses to the firm but still needs them to house soldiers, sailors, airmen and their families. As a Commons report explained, the houses are “leased back to the MoD by Annington Homes.” However, the “maintenance and upgrading” of these houses “remains the responsibility” of the MoD.

So Annington only has a limited responsibility for looking after the homes it bought from, and now rents back to, the MoD. The result is that Annington makes a huge amount of money from homes that are badly maintained, often leaving military families in grim conditions.

Last year, Labour’s then-shadow defence secretary John Healey commissioned a major report into armed forces accommodation led by Lord Bob Kerslake. The Kerslake Commission reported that service families accommodation — mostly the Annington Homes — was “substandard, and in many cases unacceptable.”

The commission said: “There are long-standing problems in many places with insulation, damp and mould, heating and hot water, as well as with gas and electrical faults and pest infestations.”

The pest infestations and electrical faults are bad enough, but the issues of insulation, dampness and mould are especially striking because they are about poor insulation — when insulation should be one of the main ways of both keeping families in decent conditions and reducing carbon emissions.

In 2022, a BBC investigation brought the issue of the poor quality Annington Homes back into view, under the headline, “Military housing: families say they’re living in damp, mouldy conditions.”

A typical comment from a captain living in “married quarters” — known as service families accommodation — talked about “cupboards unusable due to never-ending damp/mould. Drafty windows. No loft insulation, cold house all the time.”

While the BBC and other media brought the damp, mouldy forces housing back into the spotlight, it did not spark much improvement. The MoD set up a “damp and mould taskforce” and announced new investment to fix double glazing, insulation and boilers in the houses Annington owns.

However, the Kerslake report says that accommodation had “worsened,” with “growing complaints of damp and mould” while “thousands of homes” in service families accommodation “are in need of urgent repair.”

When the government started plans to take them back, Liddell first proposed Annington would spend £105 million to repair the houses — this is an admission of their poor condition — then in 2022, Liddell decided to “withdraw” the offer because the government would not abandon plans to take them back.

Starmer’s government is still trying to get the houses back. Under Liddell, Annington is still resisting, with appeals to the High Court and European Court of Human Rights.

I asked the CCSA if its chair Baroness Liddell’s involvement with one “disaster for taxpayers” suggests CCS may also be another “disaster for taxpayers.” They decided not to comment.

Liddell’s involvement with the Annington “bad deal” for the public, with its poor insulation and grim houses, doesn’t prove that CCS is also a bad deal — but it doesn’t inspire confidence.

Follow Solomon on X @SolHughesWriter.