Northern Ireland (Regional Rates and Energy) (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Tony Lloyd

2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 6th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point. Obviously, it is not a small difference; in fact, it is a huge difference to those on what could be described as the receiving end, those at the £20,000 level, or the non-receiving end for those at the £2,000 level. The details for a particular farm that I will come on to bear out exactly the point that she makes.

We need to know about state aid compliance, not only what lies behind it but how it has the system so circumscribed that we can do no other. I want to challenge Ministers on some of the things that they have told us. For example, the Secretary of State said that the cost of fuel might be different in Great Britain from Northern Ireland. I am told, however, that a lot of our non-home-grown fuel is imported from the Baltic states, where there is an awful lot of wood—I can assure the House of that, because I have seen it. Those pellets are shipped from the Baltic states to the UK generally, and I can recognise no enormous difference in the cost thresholds such as to produce a very different cost profile in Northern Ireland—a much cheaper one—from that in Great Britain. That we would have such different cost pressures does not seem logical. We need proper answers to such questions, although I fear that we will not get them today.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman is saying. The purported purpose of this legislation is to give certainty. I have rarely seen the Government produce legislation that is so obviously ripe for legal challenge on the basis of legitimate expectation. In such circumstances, at the end of the day, surely we will not even give the people concerned, the recipients of the subsidies, the certainty that the Government claim they want.