Energy Price Freeze

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Alan Whitehead

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo), the Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee. He made a number of points in his contribution, not all of which support what the Secretary of State was saying this afternoon.

This debate is about ensuring that competition works better across the board—for those who generate and supply power, for those who retail power and for what happens in between. I found curious it that the Secretary of State had the air of a querulous member of the Opposition trying to pick holes in Government policy, using some fairly obscure devices yet apparently forgetting he is the Government.

The Government are presiding over a situation, of which we are all aware, in which competition does not work well at all. We all understand that that is related to the vertical integration of companies that have dealings across the board—in both generation and retail—and the extent to which opportunities to put that right over time have conspicuously been missed. The debate this afternoon over what we do about an energy price freeze and how that brings in other arrangements, which secure much better competition and a much better functioning market, does not solve the problem of world energy prices but goes an enormously long way to ensuring that those arrangements can deliver the best possible outcome, particularly for customers, in the context of varying world prices. The question of whether a price freeze creates a problem for investment seems to be rather misplaced, inasmuch as one argument for a better framework for investment in the future is that if the market works better in the first place people will invest in supply and the workings of the market.

It is not just Centrica that has stopped investing in gas power plants. No one is investing in gas power plants in the UK at the moment; 14 planning permissions are available but only one has been taken up, by an Irish energy company that has a long-term view of how the market will work rather than a short-term view of how it is working. Other plants are being mothballed as we speak. It is not that the market is working well at the moment in attracting investment and future arrangements might harm it; the question is how to maintain the long-term arrangement to secure proper investment.

In some of his rather more obscure defences of the fact that the Government have done only minor things to secure better competition in the market, the Secretary of State mentioned the Ofgem report on wholesale power market liquidity produced a little while ago. The report does not support the Secretary of State’s claims. All it says on the market making obligation is that if the market has

“robust price information…available…along the curve, the market will be functioning sufficiently well to support competition.”

It does not say that along the curve most of the trading is between energy companies, not on the market, and that reforming the day-ahead market does not make any difference. Claims that a pool is only about the day-ahead market are also rather misplaced, in that a functioning pool also deals with issues along the curve. The problem of independent companies having access to the markets is therefore substantially ameliorated by the existence of the pool, because it gives them access to the market that they do not have at the moment.

The Secretary of State says that the Government made some competition changes in the Energy Act 2013: they made only one, which he mentioned and which was a result of an amendment that I tabled, by creating an offtaker of last resort. That was it—that was the one thing in the Energy Act that concerned competition—and now, as a result of going for an auction contract for difference market for established players rather than an administrative market, they have destroyed the effect of that.

The aim is to get competition working better across the board. Things are better for investment in the long term as a result, and that is the way in which we should consider this issue for the future. I suggest therefore that the motion, which says exactly that, is one that the House should embrace, because that is what the markets need to work better for customers and investors—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order.