Great British Energy Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd December 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Frost]

2: Clause 1, page 1, line 3, at end insert “, in order to advance the objectives set out in subsection (1A).
(1A) The objectives which the Secretary of State must seek to advance in designating a company as Great British Energy are—(a) reducing household energy costs in a sustainable way, and(b) promoting the United Kingdom’s energy security.”

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 2 in my name, and I thank my noble friend Lord Offord for his Front-Bench support for it. I draw noble Lords’ attention to my interests as set out in the register, and I note my regret that I could not be here for Second Reading.

The purpose of my amendment is to establish why the Government are creating Great British Energy and what its underlining objectives and purposes are. Ideally, this would be clear from the Bill or the related documentation, but it is such a thin Bill that calling it a “skeleton” Bill really does not do it justice. Its rather evanescent, wraith-like provisions provide no solidity other than giving a fig leaf of cover to the willed actions of the Secretary of State. I think that we as legislators and the British people are owed a bit more than that from the Bill.

Before I come to the detail, I note that the Bill includes a requirement for the articles of association to contain a statement of “objects”. Of course, objects are not the same as objectives, and what is now Clause 3(2) bears that out. The objects there described are process requirements on the company and limits on where it may spend its very generous taxpayer funding: production of energy, reduction of carbon emissions, energy efficiency, security of supply and so on. They are a “what”; they not the “why”.

The Bill also includes a requirement, in Clause 5, for Great British Energy to have strategic priorities and plans but, again, there is absolutely no constraint on the Secretary of State as to what those strategic priorities may be. Really, this is not good enough for a vehicle for £8 billion of taxpayers’ cash. It is important to have a clear idea of why Great British Energy exists and what its purposes are. That is what my amendment is there to secure and why it is written as it is.

My amendment sets out two objectives for Great British Energy:

“reducing household energy costs in a sustainable way”

and

“promoting the United Kingdom’s energy security”.

In putting those two objectives forward, I am not inserting my own view to substitute for that of the Government. Rather, I am ventriloquising into the Bill, looking at the political statements, spoken and in writing, of the Government and the party opposite and trying to use them to ascertain why they feel this Bill and this company are necessary.

I will briefly take noble Lords through this. I look first, of course, at the Labour Party manifesto— a document whose probative status has been quite significantly weakened in recent months, one might say, but it is all that we have. Number four of the six priorities of the party says:

“Set up Great British Energy, a publicly-owned clean power company, to cut bills for good and boost energy security”.


Those are the two purposes set out in my amendment. Similarly, the launch document for Great British Energy, which was published on 25 July, says that:

“In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee our energy security and protect billpayers permanently is to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels”,


et cetera. At Second Reading in the Commons on 5 September, the Secretary of State said that the Bill would “protect family finances”. The Energy Minister said that it would

“guarantee our energy security and protect bill payers”—[Official Report, Commons, 5/9/24; col. 529.]

once again.

It seems a fair reading to see these as the underlying purposes of Great British Energy and to see them reflected in the Bill. If the Minister, speaking for the Government, thinks differently on this, then perhaps in winding up he could explain what the Government see as the objectives of Great British Energy instead and why they should be different from those in this amendment.

Noble Lords may ask why, if those purposes are understood by all concerned to be the objectives of Great British Energy, they need to be reflected explicitly in the Bill. There are a few reasons. The first, which I have touched on, is simple transparency. The hard-pressed British taxpayer needs to know why they are being asked to stump up over £8 billion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always helpful to have that kind of clarification, because I certainly was not intending to mislead the Committee in any way. From what I see in Clause 3, I am clear that GBE can participate in, encourage and facilitate the production, distribution, et cetera—informed, as I say, by the strategic plans and priorities. But I will obviously look at that and, if I have got myself confused, I will certainly reflect on it.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for his response and to all those who contributed to our discussion, including the mini-discussion at the end about the difference between objectives and objects, which is important and I am sure we will return to it. I do not want to detain noble Lords long but, as the Minister repeated the words of Lady Thatcher on this subject, I cannot forbear repeating her words in her final work on it:

“By the end of my time as Prime Minister I was also becoming seriously concerned about the anti-capitalist arguments which the campaigners against global warming were deploying”.


She—rightly, in my view—added:

“We should be suspicious of plans for global regulation that all too clearly fit in with other preconceived agendas. We should demand of politicians that they apply the same criteria of commonsense and a sense of proportion to their pronouncements on the environment as to anything else”.


Those wise words are worth bearing in mind today when we discuss this issue.

I am not sure that we have entirely got to the bottom of this issue, and I suspect that we will have to return to it in some form on Report, because it is so fundamental to what the Bill is about. For now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.

Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Lord Frost Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 20th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this landmark Bill, and I welcome my noble friend the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, to their Front-Bench positions. I firmly believe that the Bill protects consumer rights. However, I declare an interest as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which scrutinises statutory instruments. In that respect, I refer to the amendment in the names of my noble friend Lady Crawley, the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, and the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, which would require the Secretary of State to conduct appropriate consultation on draft regulations under the Act.

It is vital that we set out as we mean to go on. One criticism that our committee had of many of the statutory instruments is the lack of proper consultation, as well as inadequate memorandums and impact assessments. This amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Crawley is timely, and I urge my noble friends on the Front Bench to accept it. More effective scrutiny processes are required in legislation to ensure that the policy decisions made with the powers set out in the Bill can be effectively scrutinised as products and marketplaces evolve, particularly those that will evolve online. It is important that consumers are totally protected.

The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, referred to relationships with the EU. I hope that the Government are successful in resetting that relationship and that there is a closer relationship with the EU, because it is important not only for trade but for society and economic growth—and it is good for wider relations in this part of our global world.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

I shall speak briefly to my Amendment 128. I begin, like others, by congratulating my noble friend Lord Sharpe on his role.

My amendment is only a small one, and it is overwhelmed by the pretty savage surgery proposed in other amendments tabled by other noble Lords—a surgery that is well merited, on the basis of what we have seen so far. I shall save my substantive remarks on my main concerns about the Bill until the fourth group, where most of my amendments lie. I share the concerns about constitutional and democratic process expressed by other noble Lords so far. I would probably not go so far as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, in advocating a very complex, process-heavy and corporatist EU-type process for the Bill, because I believe that speed and simplicity in legislation are also advantageous —but certainly, if any of the Bill survives, we need some sort of serious scrutiny-sifting process to make it work.

My Amendment 128 is just one tiny part of this. It would ensure that, if Clause 2 survived at all, the powers under Clause 2(7) would be exercised—if they were exercised—under the affirmative procedure. That, however, is really a minor part, when we look at some of the other proposals on the table. Nevertheless, I hope that the Minister will reflect, and I look forward to hearing his thoughts.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Frost]

4: Clause 1, page 1, line 9, leave out subsection (2)
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment removes from the Bill a broadly-drawn power to align with EU environmental regulation.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 4, I will also speak to my Amendments 6, 15, 36, 37 and 42. I thank the Minister for the constructive exchanges we have had in the previous two or three weeks, both face to face and in writing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I will pick up where I left off. I was about to note that my six amendments in this group have a substantive purpose and, I guess, a probing, clarificatory purpose. I will begin with the substantive. My amendments are separate, but they all stem from the same broad thought, and they are designed to deal with the fact that the powers in the Bill give Ministers the ability to make regulations for products in the UK, or GB, in a range of areas defined by simple reference to existing EU laws; and, beyond that, to provide for those regulations to evolve dynamically —that is, when the EU changes its law, that change feeds through into our regulations.

Personally, I am not and have never been a purist in this area. I do not think it is necessary for GB to have its own defined sets of rules on every single thing, with the UKCA designation that covers everything—unless, of course, we were to drop the current approach to regulation entirely, which was, after all, developed in the last few decades under an EU law framework, and revert to a more traditional, common-law, objectives-based framework. That is possibly a step too far for the time being. Given that, it makes sense to look at other standards and whether they work for us. In practice, that is what happens now, in a limited way. For example, we recognise the CE marking for the EU while sometimes having the UKCA marking or our own rules in parallel, but there are two problems with this.

First, I do not see why that possibility of recognising other standards should be limited to EU law only. Of course, I do not really agree with the thrust of Amendment 17 in this group, which we are about to discuss, which would require alignment with EU law. We may want to use other standards from other territories with less prescriptive regulatory frameworks, and we may want to allow goods with different standards from more than one place to compete on our market to make the country open to the best standards globally. That is the first problem the Bill presents.

Secondly, I do not really think it is right for us in this Parliament to subcontract our lawmaking to another body. It must be clear what the law of this country is at any given moment; it must be properly on our books. It is not good enough to say to the question “What is the law on product X?” that the answer is whatever EU regulation number whatever says it is today. My amendments are designed to deal with these points, and I take them in logical, not numerical, order.

Amendment 4 deletes Clause 1(2). I propose this really to explore why it is necessary, in a Bill specifically on product regulation, to include the ability to import large areas of EU environmental law. I can see that it might be convenient, but the same could be said of lots of other areas too. If there is a more specific and persuasive explanation, I would be interested to hear it from the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

I hope I have reassured the Committee with my comments and respectfully ask that the amendment be withdrawn.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a very interesting debate, even though it may have had a slightly retro feel to those who lived through it all in 2019 and 2020.

I have a couple of quick points. On Amendment 37, if it is genuinely the Government’s view that this clause is not intended to and does not give the power to create ambulatory references, it seems we agree on substance—but maybe it could be clearer in the Bill.

On my question about the Windsor Framework, I gently suggest that the Minister has not quite answered the point. It is not about mirroring in GB; it is about goods that are able to circulate in Northern Ireland and therefore can circulate in the rest of the UK without further ado. I would appreciate it if that could be clarified further. I will not prolong this debate, even though I suspect we will return to this on Report. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 4 withdrawn.