EU: Energy Governance (EUC Report)

Viscount Ullswater Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ullswater (Con)]

My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, for her chairmanship of the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee. Her knowledge of the workings of the Brussels machine is of immense practical use when considering matters of this nature. I thank her for her sure hand and guidance with this report, together with the help and assistance of the clerk to the committee, Patrick Milner.

I believe that the report is a fair reflection of the evidence we heard about the Commission’s intention to create an energy union and some form of underpinning governance framework. The Commission’s guidance on the preparation of member state national energy plans is a helpful nudge in the right direction and the concept of regional co-operation is sensible.

However, I wish to concentrate my few remarks on energy security and the duty of member states to provide that security with the technology that suits them best. I am pleased that the Commission’s response acknowledges the right of member states to determine their own energy mix. We have come a long way in recent years from relying on large, coal-fired generating stations sited conveniently beside deep mining pits to provide the bulk of our electricity supply. The North Sea gave us a plentiful supply of natural gas, which provided an alternative source of energy, and more recently we have developed renewable resources, whether it be wind or solar power.

This is a journey of technological advancement and it will not stop here. Civil nuclear power has been delivered by a whole range of reactors, which have provided the base load for the UK for decades. We are perhaps on the edge of the shale gas revolution at this very moment, and the development of small-scale nuclear reactors seems just round the corner. To quote from a recent policy digest weekly report sent to me by email on 3 June:

“The UK just experienced a historic milestone. For the first time since 1882 and on several occasions during last month, the UK power system was powered without coal. Earlier this year, solar also outstripped coal in electricity generation for a full day”.

Whether it is the stimulus provided by the acknowledgement of climate change and global warming, the drive for energy efficiency, or the goal of affordable energy prices, we must not neglect the importance of research and innovation.

Solar power is perhaps in its infancy in this country, but other techniques, such as systems involving the concentration of solar power by the use of parabolic mirrors, are being developed commercially in Spain. We are surrounded by the sea on all sides, yet have not been able to harness this resource in any meaningful way, although we have a mature hydroelectric industry, mostly located in the north. It is this variety that I believe is so important. Whereas I appreciate that perhaps Poland has an overreliance on coal and France on nuclear, I am not persuaded that Brussels should try to dictate which technologies should be developed and where.

The Commission’s desire to oversee the development plans of member states should be strictly limited, for, if geopolitical situations and the differing national energy mixes are ignored, the energy governance framework will never command support or function adequately. I am pleased that the Minister told us in her evidence:

“The core theme running through my evidence is that member states should be given every bit of leeway to determine their own energy mix and their own way of meeting their legally binding targets”.

I share the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s view when it said that,

“the Government does not currently foresee a need for the governance system to be enshrined in legislation”.

I hope the Minister can confirm that the Government will hold firm to that stance.

As I said at the outset, I see this initiative being useful for taking stock and sharing information around member states and perhaps for the greater development of interconnectors. But we live in very exciting times for the future generation of electricity, particularly in this country, and I would not wish to see any curtailment of the freedom to innovate.

Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Viscount Ullswater Excerpts

Tuesday 17th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I am afraid that I have another group of amendments. In moving Amendment 57, I will also speak to Amendments 60, 61 and 68. Other amendments in this group, Amendments 58 and 59, will be spoken to by noble Lords more experienced in the law than I am. Again I await with some relief the arrival of the heavy artillery.

The purpose of this group of amendments is to encourage the use of gisting as a means of ensuring equality of justice. I accept that the amendments are quite challenging in the form that they have been put down, but I ask my noble and learned friend to see that they are balanced by the duty of confidentiality that was imposed on special advocates in my Amendment 67, which was in the group that we were just discussing.

Simply put, Amendment 57 omits Clause 7(1)(c), which imposes a duty on the court not to allow gisting. That strikes at the root of what this group of amendments is trying to achieve.

Amendment 60 takes Clause 7(1)(d) and replaces the words “consider requiring” with the word “require”, so that,

“if permission is given by the court not to disclose material, it must consider requiring the relevant person to provide a summary”,

would read,

“it must require the relevant person to provide a summary”.

As I said, the aim is to widen the use of gisting. Amendment 61 would omit Clause 7(1)(e) because it is again dependent on the national security definition and has in part been covered, as I said in my introductory remarks, by the duty of non-disclosure imposed by Amendment 67.

Finally, Amendment 68 would omit Clause 10(1) because I am not quite clear what it means. It seems to repeat Clause 7(1)(c) and I would be grateful if my noble and learned friend could explain why we need it.

In Committee, all our debates have had a pre-eminent underlying theme: how to balance the liberty of the subject with the need for national security and the judicial process. Gisting is one way to help that balance. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Ullswater)]

My Lords, I must advise your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendments 58 and 59 because of pre-emption.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Viscount Ullswater Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Viscount Ullswater)]

I must advise your Lordships that if Amendment 1A is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendments 2 or 2A because of pre-emption.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, Amendment 2A is in my name and was grouped with Amendment 3 in the name of my noble friend Lord Rooker, who did not move his amendment. If I may say so, I think that he was right not to move his amendment, because I think that the amendment that has just been moved by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours is the best of the bunch of the amendments before us.

I think that it is helpful to voters to disentangle the two questions—first, do you want change; secondly, what you want to change to? That would enlarge the range of choices that could be considered. There is a difference. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours would have Parliament determine which of the other systems which was not first past the post should be the one to go for, whereas my noble friend Lord Rooker wants to offer an à la carte menu to the electors straight away on the day of the main referendum. I like the scheme that my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has put forward.

It seems absurd that if we are to go to all this trouble, to have this enormous national debate, and to give the people of this country a unique option to decide whether or not to change our electoral system, a proportional option should not be made available to them. I find it bizarre that STV, which I have always understood to be the preferred option of Liberal Democrats, will not be on the ballot paper at the referendum.

Noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches have told me that I need to be more realistic, that it was not possible for the Liberal Democrats to secure that outcome in the negotiations in those few days when the coalition was formed last May. I do not believe that. At that point, the Liberal Democrats could have secured the inclusion of a proportional—in particular, an STV—option on the ballot paper.

The reality was that David Cameron and the Conservative Party had lost the election. The Conservative Party—and, I assume, Mr Cameron—was frantic to get into government. We know what the Conservative Party does to leaders who it deems losers. We have seen the fate of Mr Hague, Mr Duncan Smith and the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne. I do not think that Mr Cameron would have wanted to go the same way. I think that he would have been prepared to concede something that was dear to the hearts of —canonical to—the Liberal Democrats but which they apparently did not have the nerve or the skill to insist on in those negotiations. In failing to press their advantage at that point, they did the country a major disservice. If we are to have this referendum, let us have all the sensible and serious choices—or at least a selection of them—put before the people. If it is to be only a selection of them, surely it must include STV.

We know the inadequacies of the alternative vote system—I will certainly not go into them in any detail—but the sheer unpredictability of the effect of using the second, third, fourth and fifth preferences on the part of voters casting their vote means that it would be more rational to have a lottery than to resort to this system. Moreover, there are varieties of AV. For some reason, the variety of the alternative vote system that those political parties and political leaders in this country who favour it have alighted upon is the system known as optional preference ordering. As my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours explained very tellingly in the first day of our Committee proceedings all that time ago, the evidence from Australia is that, once you cease to insist that everyone voting under the alternative vote system has to fill in all the boxes stating their preferences, the upshot is that you get a large proportion of electors only casting a vote for their preferred party. In practice, therefore, the optional preference-ordering version of AV is very little different from first past the post. It does not seem to be a sufficiently worthwhile alternative to offer the voters in the referendum. I do not mind it being there, but other serious choices ought to be on offer as well.