Contracts for Difference (Electricity Supplier Obligations) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on bringing forward these regulations for our consideration this afternoon. My first question is not dissimilar to that asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, and I am grateful to her for the research she has clearly put into that. Paragraph 7.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum states this fairly complicated payments procedure and says at the end:

“We expect that suppliers pass on the costs of these payments to their customers.”


As we know, while retail shops and business customers generally closed down, as they were told to do because of the Covid-19 virus—and it was absolutely right that they did so—that meant that everybody was working from home and the consumption of electricity and water went up incrementally. I am therefore concerned that this will be passed on to the domestic customer in what is a very grey area as regards transparency of payments.

Successive Governments have introduced renewable energy, and we as domestic customers pay handsomely for the privilege. However, the transparency of how we pay is indeed very opaque. Can my noble friend put my mind at rest as to how this increase will appear, and what role Ofcom will have in agreeing to this? Presumably Ofcom was consulted, and as the regulator it will have a view when it comes to sorting this out at the end of the next quarter or at the end of the financial year.

Finally, I do not quite understand the thinking behind why the agreement that the Government have entered into—between BEIS and the LCCC—is not part of our proceedings this afternoon. That would have been very helpful. I hope that my noble friend will agree to publish all the responses on the website, in the normal way.