Great British Energy Bill

Lord Vaux of Harrowden Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a very interesting set of amendments, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who tabled amendments and have spoken in this debate. Clearly, as we said before, the overarching aim for the statement of strategic priorities is to ensure that Great British Energy operates in line with, and delivers on, the priorities set out by the Government. That is proper for the Government to do.

It is clearly important that we have a means through which to influence the strategic plans of Great British Energy. Equally, we want Great British Energy to have as much operational independence as possible within the parameters of Clauses 3 and 5. Inevitably, that makes me cautious about a number of the amendments proposed during this debate, which one way or another seek either to constrain the powers of GBE or to direct where it ought to focus its priorities and energies.

Amendment 46 tabled by my noble friend Lady Young proposes an addition to Clause 5 to ensure that Great British Energy will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency, ensure security of supply and include community ownership. As she said, we debated some of those matters on our first day in Committee. I agree with her about the vagaries of groupings, which after 27 years of membership of your Lordships’ House remain an eternal mystery to me, as we are enabled to repeat many of the debates already held. Indeed, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, has promised to come back to the very issue of community energy when we meet again on some distant future date in mid-January.

The Bill clearly provides a statutory basis for facilitating and encouraging the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, improving energy efficiency and ensuring the security of supply of energy under the objects set out in Clause 3. Clearly the statement of strategic priorities must be consistent with these objects. I understand the point that the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, made about prices; there was an Oral Question today on the impact these are having on UK businesses. He will know that, as I said then, the highest price for energy was achieved under his Government’s watch.

The noble Lord, Lord Offord, also spoke on that topic, and talked about security of supply. I think he very much reinforced what the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, said when the latter raised the issue of the sun not shining and the wind not blowing, and the resulting reliance on gas. In our aim to move towards clean power by 2030 we envisage using renewables much more than currently. However, we also need nuclear as an essential baseload for our energy generation, and gas as the flexible energy generation which you can turn on and off. Currently gas is unabated, but with CCUS it will largely become abated. That is the way we see ourselves going forward, along with having long-term energy storage as set out in our clean power action plan.

On North Sea oil and gas—again, the noble Lord, Lord Offord, has raised this with me a number of times—I repeat that we are committed to a just transition, working with industry and the workers involved themselves to recognise the importance of the sector, which will operate for decades to come. We remain in close engagement with the industry on these matters. Like the noble Earl, Lord Russell, my essential response to these issues about energy price reductions and the need for long-term price stability is that reliance on international fossil fuels, and the markets that operate in the way they do, is simply not the way to solve them.

I turn to the specifics in Amendments 47 to 50 and 51A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Offord, my noble friend Lord Whitty, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, although he did not speak to them. These amendments would require the statement of strategic priorities to include targets relating to consumer bills, jobs and supply chains, and to include reference to community energy schemes.

On the general principle, we want Great British Energy to operate independently. The Bill is focused on making the minimum necessary provisions to support establishing the company—that is why the Bill is constructed in the way it is. Normally, Governments are accused of trying to micromanage the institutions they are responsible for, but here the Government are saying that GBE needs to have as much operational independence as it can within the constraints of Clauses 3 and 5. However, some noble Lords wish to constrain, in one way or another, what Great British Energy should do. We are resistant to that as a general matter of principle.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

I am rather baffled by the Minister’s argument. The Government are going to publish a statement of strategic priorities, but if Great British Energy is going to be independent why does it need such a thing? Presumably the statement of strategic priorities will point the company in the right direction, but the implication of the Minister’s argument is that it is going to be incredibly thin. Is that correct?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

I do not really know why the noble Lord is baffled by what I said. I thought I clearly said that we wish Great British Energy to have as much operational independence as possible, within the constraints of Clauses 3 and 5. At this stage, I cannot tell him what will be in the statement of strategic priorities, because it is being worked on, but it will have sufficient detail to make absolutely clear the Government’s priorities within the constraints I have suggested, while allowing Great British Energy the breadth and room to move in the way it thinks best.

On the issue of jobs, which my noble friend Lord Whitty was absolutely right to raise, all the organisations he mentioned have a role to play to ensure not just that we create the required jobs but that we can fill them. The issue is not so much lacking jobs for the future but enabling enough people to come forward to be given the right training and skills to fill them as effectively as possible. There is a clear message in the action plan we published last week:

“The wider transition to net zero is expected to support hundreds of thousands of jobs, with Clean Power 2030 playing a key part in stimulating a wealth of new jobs and economic opportunities across the country. These jobs will cross a range of skill levels and occupations, including technical engineers at levels 4-7 … along with electrical, welding, and mechanical trades at levels 2-7, and managerial roles including project and delivery managers at levels 4-7. Many of these occupations are already in high demand across other sectors”.


We have within the department the Office for Clean Energy Jobs, whose role is to co-ordinate action to develop a skilled workforce to support and develop our clean power mission.

I should mention the nuclear industry. I am at risk of repeating myself, but other noble Lords have enjoyed doing that during our deliberation. The Nuclear Skills Taskforce calculated that we need 40,000 extra people working in the nuclear sector—civil and defence— by 2030. That is in five years’ time. That goes up into the 2040s. There is a huge job to be done, and I believe it is my department’s role to work with industry and all the other organisations to spearhead that.

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Moved by

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden]

51: Clause 5, page 3, line 8, at end insert—
“(1A) The Secretary of State must comply with subsection (1) within the period of six months beginning with the day on which this Act comes into force.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would introduce a time limit by which the Secretary of State must prepare and publish the statement of strategic priorities.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 51, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, for their support on this.

In many ways, this group addresses the key problem with this Bill: namely, that it includes no detail at all as to what GBE will do. There are no objectives of any sort in the Bill. We have discussed previously the difference between objectives, of which there are none, and the objects in Clause 3, which simply restrict the company’s activities. There is absolutely nothing in this Bill against which success can be measured or the use of public money measured and scrutinised.

The last group was about what the statement of strategic priorities required under Clause 5 should include. That debate demonstrated clearly how much better it would be if we had the statement of strategic priorities before the Bill finishes its process through this House. The Minister said clearly on the last group that that is not going to happen, which makes this group much more important.

This group is about the process by which the statement should be published and scrutinised. In response to some of the concerns that have been raised in this respect, the Minister said at Second Reading:

“On the structure of the Bill, noble Lords will know that this was laid in the Commons very soon after the election as an early priority of the Government. Because of that, we have focused, inevitably, on the provisions that are fundamental to the establishment of Great British Energy. Clearly, we are still working through some of the policy issues on which we need to come to a view”.—[Official Report, 18/11/24; col. 98.]


Others have described that as meaning, “We will make it up as we go along”. It is quite hard to disagree.

The Minister referred earlier to having found the right balance. I find that a difficult concept, given that there is no balance. There is nothing at all about the strategic objectives of Great British Energy in this Bill—that is not a balance. However we look at it, we are being asked to scrutinise a Bill when we have no information as to what the Government are planning and no meaningful impact assessment on those plans.

This Bill looks rather like a skeleton Bill: a Bill where most of the detail is added by the Government at a later date. This Government, when in opposition, were rightly critical of the use of skeleton Bills by the last Government. I agreed with them then and I agree with them now. However, there is an important distinction between this skeleton Bill and the more usual skeleton Bills that we have seen in the past. In a typical skeleton Bill, the Government give themselves the ability to add the missing detail by means of statutory instruments. We all recognise that the scrutiny of statutory instruments is not that strong, but parliamentary scrutiny does take place and there is at least the theoretical ability for Parliament to decline them. In this Bill, no such scrutiny of the strategic priorities is available. The Government will simply publish the statement of strategic priorities at some unknown future date, and there will be no opportunity at all for Parliament to debate it, and certainly no opportunity for Parliament to amend or decline it.

That is clearly unsatisfactory, and your Lordships’ Constitution Committee said so in its report dated 28 November, in which it pointed out that,

“in the light of the centrality of Great British Energy to the delivery of a significant policy initiative, we are concerned that clauses 5 and 6 amount to ‘disguised legislation’”.

It went on to say:

“We are concerned that clauses 5 and 6 do not offer an adequate degree of parliamentary oversight”.

I cannot disagree with any of that.

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Amendment 119 would seek to defer the commencement of other provisions in the Bill until the statement of strategic priorities under Clause 5 has been laid and approved before Parliament, and Amendment 128 would defer commencement of other provisions in the Bill until the expiry of the 40-day period referred to in Amendment 52 from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. We would be worried that this, in effect, would hinder our ability to act as quickly as we wish. However, I have listened very carefully to the debate, and I respond directly to the noble Earl, Lord Russell: we are obviously considering carefully the Constitution Committee report on the Bill and are committed to appropriate parliamentary oversight, but this is without commitment, and we also think there are very strong arguments for the way the Bill has been constructed at the moment.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

There was one other question I asked the Minister which he has not answered, which is whether the strategic priorities document will be accompanied by an impact assessment. The impact assessment we have with this Bill basically says that there are no benefits or costs because all it does is create the company, so we are effectively going to go through this process of creating something that can spend £8.3 billion with no impact assessment if that does not happen. Will there perhaps be an impact assessment that accompanies it?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, at this stage, I cannot answer that because it is still to be decided as part of the work that we are taking forward in relation to drafting the statement.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. Before I sum up, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that I am not against this Bill. The problem we have here is the lack of any detail in it and the lack of any scrutiny once we have that detail, which is what the Constitution Committee pointed out. As the noble Earl, Lord Russell, pointed out, there is a high degree of unanimity around the House that the current situation set out in the Bill in that respect is really not adequate and that we need a greater level of parliamentary involvement in what will be the core element of this Bill: what GBE is going to do.

I take on board the points that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, made about secondary legislation. I agree, but it is what we have at the moment, so we have little choice but to work with it. I would love to see a change to the way secondary legislation is debated, and it should be amendable, but we have a way to go before we come there.

There were plenty of ideas in this group as to how we might improve the scrutiny. I do not think any of us are wedded to any one of them. I am encouraged by what the Minister says about listening to the Constitution Committee and his belief in parliamentary scrutiny. I therefore hope that we can have some useful and constructive discussions between now and Report on this subject and come up with something that we can all agree on as an appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny on this most critical aspect of the Bill. If we do not, I am absolutely confident that we will come back to this on Report. For now, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 51.

Amendment 51 withdrawn.