Energy Bill
Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Oxburgh
Viscount Ridley
My Lords, I sympathise with a great deal of what the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, but I worry that the amendment would be counterproductive and produce a worse result. We had an interesting debate last week about the importance of competition in keeping capitalists honest. We are all agreed about the danger of setting up a system that will be extremely prone to crony capitalism, which will be such an oligopolistic system that it will be easy to game and to lobby the Government in ways that can be helpful. I am worried that this panel of experts will probably make the problem worse and will remove accountability from Parliament, which is ultimately where we will be able to scrutinise this. As the scientist Richard Feynman once said,
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”.
We have to bear in mind that experts get things badly wrong quite often.
We have heard a great deal, even today, about the need to help producers of energy. I am sorry if I sound like a cracked record on this, but we are not here to help capitalists. We are not here to give certainty to investors or to make producers of energy comfortable. We are here to get the best deal for consumers of energy, whether they are pensioners, single parents or indeed the owners of small businesses. We will not do that by offering these extremely high strike prices and then leaving a group of experts, who will be easily captured not just by the industry but by other pressure groups, to monitor the system. We therefore have to be careful when handing responsibility away from Parliament and the Government to a panel of experts who, as I say, will be easily captured by industry or pressure groups.
Lord Oxburgh
My Lords, I support the general thinking behind the amendment, which is different from the amendment that we debated a week ago about a higher-level advisory committee. I am not sure that I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, in his pessimistic approach to this. I do not see the amendment as taking power away from Parliament or diverting interest in that way. It could provide the kind of information and scrutiny that makes Parliament’s role easier.
The one point that I would make, which has not yet been made on the amendment, is that the most important thing about a panel is not just its expertise but its continuity. At the moment, there is very little corporate memory within DECC, and bodies such as an expert panel can indeed provide continuity. I agree that it has previously been very important to solve things in this way. I therefore hope that the Government will take on board the broad intention of the amendment.