Energy Bill [HL]

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2015 Lords Chamber

It is of vital importance that all parties to the decommissioning process, including the Secretary of State and the OGA, act in accordance with the strategy when carrying out their respective roles. As such, to ensure that the Secretary of State remains under an obligation to act in accordance with the strategy, Amendment 9 introduces a new section which reimposes the duties with minor modifications. These amendments also slightly modify the duty that will be transferred to the OGA under Section 9B(b) to ensure that the OGA’s duty to act in accordance with the strategy when exercising its new functions under Part 4 is not limited to the reduction of costs but will include all the aspects of its new functions under the revised Part 4. I beg to move.

[Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps the Minister could tell the House why the provisions in these amendments, which all seem to be worthy and sensible, were not included in the original wording of the Bill. That would have saved us a great deal of time, because I do not think that any of us are going to complain about any of them. Equally, the additional information should have been taken account of when the Bill was drafted. I do not want to take any more time, because I am accusing the Government of wasting our time by doing this now when we could have had these provisions in the Bill at First Reading.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend makes a very important and relevant point. This illustrates a great feature of this Bill, which is that we are having foisted on us all sorts of detail at short notice and at the last minute. As my noble friend said, this kind of thing should have been included in the original Bill. If it is true, as the Government claim, that they had planned this and that it is all included in their manifesto—that they had thought a lot about it and they knew exactly what they were up to—it ought to have been included in the original Bill. It is clear that they did not know what they were up to. We found this the other day when the Bill was recommitted, when we looked at pages and pages of detail that were foisted on us at the last minute. As I understand it, we still do not know some of the amendments that we are going to be discussing and approving, or otherwise, in two days’ time—major amendments with huge implications.

The Minister took a little bit of umbrage in Committee, but I do not blame the Minister personally. I would say he is piggy in the middle, except that we must not use that kind of expression anymore; he is the meat in the sandwich—you know what I mean—and is getting squeezed. He is between the devil and the deep blue sea—I am trying to think of metaphors that do not bring in animals. We are rightly demanding more details and advance notice; the industry, even more so, should know well in advance exactly what the Government’s intentions are. It is really quite unacceptable that such important things are dealt with at short notice on Report. No doubt even more will come in at a later stage in the other place.

That raises the question of why the Bill was commenced in the House of Lords. My understanding is that only non-contentious Bills are dealt with first in the House of Lords, but this is one of the most contentious Bills that has been considered for some time as a House of Lords starter. An unfortunate result is that we are having so much debate and discussion at this early stage. The Bill has to go to the House of Commons where, no doubt particularly in relation to things that affect Scotland, there will be some even more acrimonious debate and amendments will be proposed, and then the Bill will come back to us. This is really going about it in a cack-handed way.

In relation to staff who are being transferred, what happens to those who are required to move as part of the new arrangements? How many will be asked to move from one part of the United Kingdom to another? Will there be any? Will there be many? It is very important that we should know that. If there are some, we should know exactly how they are being treated and whether they will be helped with their removals from one area to another and be given other assistance in relation to that. For example, if they are moved from a rural area in the United Kingdom to London, their expenses will be far greater. If they are moved from England to Scotland, there are important implications in relation to the differences between provisions in one part of this United Kingdom and the other. It would be very helpful if the Minister in his reply can indicate the situation with regard to staff moving between different parts of the United Kingdom.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan]

I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Howell, because we had a conversation some time ago about how, as a young Back-Bencher in the early 1980s, when the noble Lord was the Secretary of State for Energy, he advocated the gas-gathering pipeline, which would have been of great significance to people in my former constituency who at that time worked in Grangemouth. Much of the energy debate is about purpose, being not just retrospective but prospective, and looking at technological advance and the possibilities this offers to facilitate greater efficiencies and better exploitation of the resources we have. Therefore, it seems very strange that we have a piece of legislation recalibrating—we might say—the Oil and Gas Authority, and that one of its main purposes is to be retrospective rather than prospective. I back my noble friend on the Front Bench because I think that we would be missing a trick here if we simply imposed on this authority in its new form the business of conducting retrospective triennial reviews. A review of past performance is desirable. You could argue that in the first instance three years might be appropriate, but thereafter I think it would be far more appropriate to have annual reviews so that we would have an annual report and perhaps an annual debate.