Enterprise Bill [Lords]
Debate between Barry Gardiner and Anna Soubry
Barry Gardiner
My right hon. Friend has enormous knowledge in this area and I absolutely agree with her. The most successful instrument that the Government have created for energising and putting investment into infrastructure projects in this country is now being neutered. That is a tragedy, which these amendments seek to address.
The Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise (Anna Soubry)
It has been an interesting debate, but I must confess that I do not agree with many of the arguments advanced by the Opposition, so I hope that hon. Members will not support any of the new clauses.
If I may deal with things in reverse order, I will first address new clause 8, tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), which seeks to ensure that the Green Investment Bank continues its green investments plans post-privatisation. We agree on what we want the bank to continue to do. We are seeking bidders who can fund the GIB’s legally binding commitments and who have the deep pockets to fund its ambitious green business plan. The bank’s management is clear that it needs access to private capital to fund its green business plan. That could be equity capital raised as part of the sale process, debt capital, which the GIB can raise when it is in the private sector, or private capital raised as part of a fund structure.
Business plans change and evolve as new opportunities arise, and we will not bind new owners into the current plan, so I cannot accept the hon. Lady’s new clause. The new owners of the GIB will have views on the future strategy and business plan. They will assess it as part of their due diligence and make it a part of their offers. Whoever the new owner or owners are, the special share ensures that the business plan, like the GIB, will continue to be green.
It must be said in response to many of the points and arguments that it is almost impossible to understand why anybody would want to buy the Green Investment Bank—the clue is in the name—unless they wanted to ensure that it continued to invest in green projects.
Anna Soubry
I disagree with the hon. Lady, because the privatisation and sale of the Green Investment Bank is about ensuring that more money is available from the private sector to carry out that particular sort of investment. Forgive me, but it really is not the role of Government to gamble and make investments with taxpayers’ money. That was right in 2012 when, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), the Green Investment Bank was set up because of an accepted market failure. However, the idea that the Government are throwing it away, as he put it, could not be further from the truth. The Green Investment Bank is a real success story. No one is seeking to pretend that it is anything else. We want its success to continue, but in the private sector.
Barry Gardiner
Does the Minister actually believe that there is no longer any market failure that needs to be addressed? The figures on infrastructure suggest quite the opposite. The point made by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) about the innovative and novel projects that the Green Investment Bank was set up to support is that they pay much less return into the private sector, which is precisely why risk-sharing between the Government and the private sector was necessary to launch the bank in the first place.