Lord Lea of Crondall
Main Page: Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-affiliated - Life peer)Energy Bill [HL]
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The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, in principle we are surely all in favour of this technology playing a part in our energy policy. It is simply practicalities that I want to ask the noble Lords, Lord Teverson or Lord Oxburgh, or the Minister about. First, we have been told by the Minister that the Government will not favour subsidies for developed technologies, but for developing technologies, such as offshore wind. We are told by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that this is a well developed technology. Does his proposal require some structural subsidy in the regulations he anticipates? It would be helpful to the Committee to know what financial arrangements are envisaged because there is no point in going into all this work if it is never to going to happen.
Secondly, does the success of geothermal depend on some combination of electricity generation and community heating systems? Do you need to have both? If so, there has to be a big enough community near to the geothermal unit for that to be possible. I understand that Cornwall is geologically the best area in this country in which to exploit this technology, not the north-east.
Thirdly, I understand that once a well has been drilled, the heat is gradually depleted in that locality under the surface. A typical geothermal station might operate for 20 or 25 years, which is a decent length of time for some purposes, but not if you are designing a heating system for a substantial urban area. Those are some practical questions on which either the mover of the amendment or, in due course, the Minister might want to comment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I support one of the points made by the right reverend Prelate. I am sure that the principle underlining this Bill, and other Bills, is not that we have a totally random system of subsidies but that we have a consistent system of subsidies, a point to which the Minister will perhaps respond when I move my amendment a little later. Nothing would be more fatal than for people to think that any fool can get energy from any place they like and receive unlimited subsidy to do so. As I understand it, that is not part of the principle of a Bill, but it deals with how this consistent pattern of subsidies, or a consistent pattern of carbon taxes, for that matter—that is the reverse side of the coin—will operate, so that it is transparent to all. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, would agree with that principle. It would mean that we would not have the anxieties that have been revealed.
I am all in favour of geothermal, by the way; in fact I spent much of last summer in Iceland and Greenland, where one can see boiling water coming out of the earth all over the place; it is a good form of cheap energy. However, we have to look at the competing forms of energy with some consistent system of units, whether a price per kilowatt hour delivered or whatever. I am sure that this is capable of being embraced within the spirit of the amendment.
Lord Grantchester
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for tabling his amendment today, as both he and I mentioned it at Second Reading last year. The Minister replied in that debate that he was actively looking at a licensing system. I trust that he will be able to update us today with a positive proposal. As we know, the industry has spent £4 million of the £6 million allocation from our previous Labour Administration, and from the remaining £2 million, the Conservative-led Government have cut the funding by 50 per cent to £1 million with no arrangements in place thereafter.
The noble Lord, Lord Judd, has already updated us on one such proposal. My noble friend Lord O'Neill will also know that geothermal energy has been tapped into since Roman times, with the enjoyment of hot springs, and shallow geothermal projects such as ground-source heat pumps are slowly growing. Even conservative estimates calculate that deep geothermals a few kilometres down could provide 10 per cent of the UK's electricity. It operates 24 hours a day and is always hot; emission levels are virtually non-existent and it should not run out. We agree with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that the timing in his amendment specifying within 18 months gives an unnecessarily long leeway within which the Secretary of State could operate such a system. We would support a shorter timeframe.
I would also add to the suggestion of my noble friend Lord Lea that perhaps we could look at increasing the feed-in tariff threshold to 10 megawatts and include a deep geothermal tariff of 23p. If the Minister's plans have extended that far, he could update us on what those might be. We look forward to that.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, now that the point has been put in terms of a mechanism, I begin by not having any knowledge about whether a conflict is likely. Assuming that it is conceivable, as in the case made by my noble friend Lord Whitty—my noble friend Lord O’Neill has questioned whether it is just either/or as regards renewables having preference—I thought that the general philosophy with which we deal with energy policy is that we put a price on market externalities. In other words, we level the playing field financially, whether that is through Kyoto, carbon tax or something else. Everyone pays the same price through a carbon tax or something like that, but once you have done that, you do not make a separate judgment about preferring renewables to hydrocarbons. That market externality to meet our medium-term targets should be incorporated into the fiscal system. We are gradually doing that through the myriad consultations about carbon price floor, entry tariffs, the document produced by the Treasury before Christmas entitled Carbon Price Floor, and so on.
If I could take the suggestion that has just been made a stage further, the word “criteria” is not just a mechanism because the Department of Energy and Climate Change cannot be left just holding a pup, it has to know the criteria on which it has to operate. How far is it that this famous level playing field can be made level by not treating all forms of energy alike? That is not what we mean. We are trying to make the level playing field level on the basis of market externalities which are made into financial quantities in the tax and subsidy system. We do not need to do it twice. As I understand it, that would be the criterion.
You cannot just ask the department to have a mechanism without stating so that there is no ambiguity how the market externality is translated into a level playing field price. I hope that that can also be fed into the thinking and the way in which my noble friend Lord Whitty takes forward this thought in his amendment.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for not standing up because I may fall over. I thank the Minister for his comments and for his good wishes to my foot, which were gratefully received. I hope that he will not mind if I do not take him up on his offer to take my wheelchair through the voting Lobby. I will rely on my noble friends to ensure that I get into the right place. On a serious note, I am grateful to him for agreeing to suspend last week’s Committee sitting so that we could sit today and I could be here. I am grateful to noble Lords for their indulgence on that.
I thank my noble friend Lord Whitty for bringing forward this amendment. It has invoked a lively discussion. I am not sure that there is as much disagreement between us as might seem apparent from some of the debates. We are all trying to seek a sensible energy mix and to ensure that there is access for all forms of energy. The Government have targets for renewable energy. If those targets are to be met there has to be some certainty for the renewable energy industry.
It is worth reminding ourselves that my noble friend’s amendment is not anti-oil or anti-gas—I did not see it in that way at all—but tries to find a way in which both can coexist sensibly on a level playing field and one does not undermine the other. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, I pay tribute to the work of RenewableUK, which has been trying to seek the kind of protocols, or guidance, required that means that problems can be addressed before they arise so that we do not have to move to the position we would have to under this amendment.
However, there may be cases where a proper disputes procedure has to be in place to ensure that we are not in the position that we are at the moment. If oil or gas is always a priority, there will be a difficulty in ensuring investment in renewables. Indeed, the amendment talks about a site that is developed or operated for renewables, or is intended to be developed or operated, or for transmitting electricity from renewables,
“in respect of which the Crown Estates that have granted a lease license, agreement to lease or agreement to license for that purpose”.
It is not just a site that has been chosen but a site that has been granted a licence already.
The proposed new clause says that the Secretary of State is not able to grant a licence for activities within an offshore renewable energy site without the agreement of the holder of the lease, licence or agreement. One problem is that, with no disputes procedure, there is no compensation for a licence-holder if their licensed renewable site is to be overridden for access to gas and oil.
I do not think that there is much disagreement. There is, and has been, a clear wish within this Committee to ensure that we maximise all our resources for all energy sources. However, I have concerns that, if some kind of dispute procedure or something along the lines suggested in the amendment is not put in place, the Government could be unable to reach their targets on many renewables. If a licence can be revoked purely on the order of a Secretary of State, that lack of certainty will lead to a lack of investment.
I understand that the Minister may have concerns about the wording and the way forward. It would extremely helpful, however, if he could take this away and give some thought to the principles behind the amendment to look for a way forward that gives certainty to licence-holders of renewable energy sites.
Lord Lea of Crondall
“PART 4AEnergy revenues and taxes: price effectsStatement on energy revenues, taxes and subsidies
(1) The Treasury shall publish an annual financial statement of all fiscal instruments, including revenues, tax expenditures and subsidies, currently in force which relate to the supply of energy, and the quantum of money generated or provided by each of them.
(2) The statement shall also list any relevant regulations relating to those fiscal instruments.
(3) The Treasury shall also publish, along with the statement, an assessment of the degree to which each fiscal instrument differentially affects consumers with different levels of income.
(4) The statement published under subsection (1) must assess the effect of any revenue, expenditure or subsidy on the Energy component of the Retail Prices Index, and must specify what effect those fiscal instruments have distinct from other impacts on the energy component.”
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, expenditure on energy in Britain before tax is now about £76 billion. With tax, it is about £145 billion. That is of the order of just over 10 per cent of total UK expenditure. The statistical series which is the most obviously pertinent for this discussion is the annual statement produced by the Office for National Statistics called Environmental Accounts 2010. In 2009, environmental tax receipts—the label given by the ONS which includes hydrocarbons, unlike some other definitions of environmental tax receipts—totalled £40 billion. The tax take was £40 billion a year, which is double—I repeat, double—the amount collected in 1993. Therefore, it doubled in about 16 years.
It would be foolish to suppose that we will not see another move like that in the next 16 years, notably through the commitment to introduce carbon taxes of one sort or another. At present, by far the largest contributor to that £40 billion is hydrocarbon oils, which accounts for two-thirds of the above number—that is, £26 billion. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has a table showing all green tax receipts—on the same definition as the ONS and not the DECC definition—rising from £40 billion to £60 billion by 2015-16. That, noble Lords will notice, indicates that it will take six years for, on the face of it, the next 50 per cent increase. That shows the acceleration doubling every 12 years. It is an obvious acceleration. The GDP deflator for the six years concerned aggregates to 17 per cent, which brings the 50 per cent increase in real terms down to between 35 per cent and 40 per cent. Even so, that is an increase to £1,400 for a family presently paying £1,000 a year.
The statistical picture on taxes and transfers is becoming a jigsaw on which it is essential to get some clarity. I studied physics and mathematics—the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, will recognise this—and the thing you have to do is have a consistent system of units. You cannot compare apples and oranges all the time. That is true of energy finances as well. We are getting into a jigsaw where a great many of the pieces do not easily fit together. It is easier to double count or miss things out. There are things like the winter fuel allowance and a plethora of means-tested benefits. This is a pattern of complexity across the piece.
A few moments ago I referred to the treatment of energy subsidies, or quasi-subsidies of one sort or another. To give one example, right in the middle of the Bill there is a tweaking of the rate of interest for the Green Deal. You have to have a consistent system of financial accounts which treats all such moneys equally.
Dealing with regressiveness is a central purpose of my amendment, if we are to keep the people with us. There is a rather obscure publication—it was obscure to me, at least, but I am most grateful to the officials of DECC and the Treasury for drawing it to my attention at a meeting which the noble Lord, Lord Marland, kindly facilitated last Wednesday—called Estimated Impacts of Energy and Climate Change Policies on Energy Prices and Bills. I recommend it as bedtime reading for anyone who wants to, as it were, spend more time looking at these statistics.
The document shows the remarkable contrast between the top and bottom deciles in the impact of energy and climate change policies—particularly on what you might call home heating, because that definition does not include hydrocarbons. I shall come back to that in a minute. The tables are very vivid. They are all in the form of the steeply declining share of a household’s income spent on energy as you go from the bottom decile of income distribution to the top decile. This is quite a remarkable contrast: the top decile pays 2 per cent of income on household energy bills and the bottom decile 16 per cent.
There are also three interesting paragraphs in the text, which I shall read out. They are paragraphs 17, 18 and 19 of this document, which was produced last July, after a very thorough and expert review of all of these quasi-subsidies, subsidies and arrangements. I am taking only these three points but noble Lords can perhaps see why I think they illustrate an important principle. Paragraph 17 says:
“The increases in gas and electricity prices accelerate closer to 2020 as the ambition of the policies that are rolled out increases. However, there are a number of policies that already have some impact in 2010 (including the”,
renewables obligation—there are a lot of acronyms here—the,
“Carbon Emissions Reduction Target … Feed-in-Tariffs … and EU”,
Emissions Trading Scheme.
Paragraph 18 says:
“Table 1 also shows the estimated impact of energy and climate change policies on an average domestic energy (gas plus electricity) bill. In total, policies are estimated to increase the average bill by £13 (1%) compared to a bill in 2020 in the absence of these policies. The breakdown of the energy bill into separate gas and electricity bills shows that the biggest percentage increase comes from the rise in domestic gas bills”.
Now, noble Lords might say, “£13? Well, that’s peanuts”, but let them listen to paragraph 19:
“The impact of policies on gas and electricity prices is much greater than the impact on gas and electricity bills. This is because bills are a combination of prices and energy usage, and therefore include the impact of a range of policies which improve energy efficiency by helping households and businesses reduce energy consumption, lessening the overall bill impact. Chart 3 … shows the estimated average bill impact of individual policies in 2020”.
Lord Teverson
In terms of home energy costs, surely price elasticity is directly related to the income group that you are relating to. In a fuel poverty area, price elasticity is extremely high, which is one of the big problems of the energy crisis that the noble Lord is talking about. At the higher income levels, price elasticity is remarkably low, which I should think is the thing that affects price elasticity rather than the particular source of energy.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I think that the noble Lord is wrong. On reading the literature, heating is inelastic because people do not want to freeze to death, whereas they can drive less in their cars. This is the difference between the two elasticities.
Lord Teverson
I say this as a really serious point. One of the biggest obscenities in this country is that people die because they do not heat themselves sufficiently. It is a real issue and I am sure that others share my concern. Statistically, when the temperature goes down in this country, we get a significant increase in deaths, which is because people will not put on the heat.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I am comparing the price elasticity of home heating with the price elasticity of petrol for your car. That is my main point. It is precisely because people do not generally in this country freeze to death that price elasticity is different.
It is necessary to note that, in practice, the people at the bottom are stopping motoring. There is another statistical problem, or fallacy, built into the ONS statistics. Because they have disappeared from the statistics, it does not look as if the detailed distribution for motorists is as bad as it was. It is rather like saying, “The working class can no longer go to the Costa Brava for their holidays. We do not want that riff-raff going there anyway”. They are out of the statistics and they are out of the motoring statistics. This is another problem with the idea that we can easily use the price mechanism to determine consumption, even though in an ideal world it might be somehow very nice if there was a big reduction in motoring or airline expenditure. As I said in an earlier intervention, the logic is to have the same market externality carbon price, whether it is for aviation or for anything else. But how do you deal with the poverty effects on home heating?
I have three other points. At Second Reading, I used the phrase, “hypothetical hypothecation”, which will not get wider circulation in the bar in Burton upon Trent. We need a statistical picture which would be revealed by hypothetical hypothecation—I will not use the word again I can assure you—but would be quite separate from the actual amount of recycling of revenues within the system to deal with the actual regressiveness.
On the consultative forum, people will ask themselves intuitively, “Where is all this money going?” There is an extent to which we want to say that it is obvious how we are going to spend it. My noble friend Lord Prescott always used to say, “It doesn't matter if someone is charging £50 to drive 100 yards down Piccadilly in a Rolls-Royce. You can throw £50 notes out of it and that will satisfy the Rolls-Royce driver”. But Ken Livingstone or somebody like that would put it all into new buses. That is hypothecation. There is implicitly some undercurrent of the need for hypothecation—with a less fancy word—in what we are talking about. We need a statistical picture that would be revealed by hypothecation even though that is separate from the actual amount of recycling of revenues.
Finally, on fiscal arithmetic, there is a price floor for carbon, which is currently £15 per tonne. The power industry argues that the price needs to be about £35 a tonne to provide a viable return and the noble Lord, Lord Stern, for his part, is in a different fantasyland with an assumption of £75 a tonne at 2010 prices to make his scheme work.
Putting all that together, we have to take a crack at what I am saying in my first amendment so that there is no doubt that we have an agreed statistical basis. Who is going to agree it? That is the second amendment. A consultative body, I might be told by the noble Lord, Lord Marland, is not going to be flavour of the month with a coalition Government who is scrapping public bodies right, left and centre. However, I will make a practical point that even the Government’s own philosophy on the Public Bodies Bill is that it is not supposed to be the slaughter of the innocents. It is supposed to be ostensibly the slaughter of those who are not fit for purpose. I radically disagree with some of the conclusions that they make about that, but fit for purpose this would be. It would have a very clear purpose to get agreement, understanding and therefore some ownership of buy-in on behalf of their constituents—in every sense of that word—and all the different stakeholders in the country.
We have got to a point where this will literally begin to make sense in the bar in Burton upon Trent. It is those people who will complain about the price of heating, petrol, congestion taxes, parking taxes or whatever. This is where the regressiveness issue provides a bridge with the consultative stakeholder forum I referred to on Amendment 37B.
I should leave it there. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Marland, for his co-operation in getting some of these statistics sorted out with the department and the Treasury. I beg to move.
Baroness Noakes
My Lords, I rise to support the principle behind the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall. I am not sure that the wording is easy to follow because it starts with the term “fiscal instruments”. The noble Lord went on to talk about a lot of the things that are leading to increased energy prices. He referred to the document put out by the department last summer showing the impact of policies on prices. Most things that have an impact on prices are not fiscal instruments in the way that you would customarily describe them in the sense of specific moneys going in or out of the Treasury. They are items that are borne by the energy companies and passed on to consumers. At the heart of what the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, was talking about is an important issue: there is a complete lack of transparency on the impact of the Government’s various energy policies and the way in which they impose costs on the energy sector, which are in consequence passed on to consumers. It is important that we have greater transparency.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, we come back to the heart of the Bill at its conclusion. At the very start, my noble friend Lord Marland laid out the vision of this Bill. These amendments, which are about the transparency required to ensure that we deliver what we are seeking to do, have brought us back there again. Therefore, I welcome the opportunity to be able to debate this set of issues. The Government are very committed to greater transparency, thus building on what the previous Government were committed to and we seek to take that further. It is extremely important that transparency enables the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account and we are strongly committed to that. We need to be very clear and very public about where we are heading.
On these amendments, I point out that publications by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Treasury and the Department of Energy and Climate Change already provide information relating to revenues, tax expenditures and distributional impacts similar to those suggested in the amendment. They clearly are not especially popular in the sense that not everyone is totally familiar with them all. However, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lea, for taking the time to go over these publications with DECC and Treasury officials and for discussing his amendments with them. His opening speech showed that a tremendous amount of material is already available and it reminded me of the discussions I hear my sons—both of whom are doing PPE—having about the economic effect of this and that and whether it will happen in this direction or that. Nevertheless, the noble Lord was able to do that, I suggest, because much of that information is available.
Obviously, we need to go further and faster, as I think we would all agree. However, a great deal of information is already available. We welcome the noble Lord’s suggestions about how to take this forward. I also point out that DECC produces an annual publication, alongside the annual energy statement, setting out the impact of energy and climate change policies on gas and electricity bills for households and businesses. People may not pay too much attention to that, but it is available.
The department is looking for opportunities to build on and refine the analysis so that it is more accessible to the public, and the noble Lord’s contribution will feed into that. For example, we expect the next publication to include an analysis looking at the impact on illustrative energy-intensive users, which was mentioned just now. It is also extremely important to remember—the previous Government deserve credit for this—that the Equality Act, which we passed just before the general election and which we are now implementing, requires an assessment of the impact in various areas, including on those who may be in deprived groups, of various policies right across government. Wearing one of my other hats, I know that this is indeed happening and that the assessment of the impact of policies is being made in a way which I think the noble Lord, Lord Lea, would welcome. This is an early stage of the development but it is very important and will be taken forward. It is already happening.
I turn to the important elements emphasised by the noble Lords, Lord Deben and Lord Whitty, which is that we need to stand back and look at what we are seeking to do here. Clearly, we need to get the case across. Transparency helps, but do not doubt that statistics will be used by both sides in different ways as they seek to bolster their own arguments. In the end, that is why it comes down to what the Government decide should be the right strategy. There is a tremendous amount of agreement in the Committee, although there are one or two dissenting voices, but generally speaking we know where we are trying to head and we certainly wish to have greater transparency so that we can take people with us. In the end, the decision will go beyond that. Either we have to tackle climate change and we have the tools in this Bill to do that, or we do not. Generally, I think we agree that we need to do that, which is why we have introduced the Bill and why we are taking these proposals forward.
As there is already a lot of information available and as we welcome the suggestions about how we improve on that, how we take that forward and how we ensure that there is as much public discussion as possible, although not necessarily on the details of hypothecation, I hope that the noble Lord will be willing to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, I thank everyone who has spoken, not least the Minister, for a very positive and helpful conclusion. I will disappoint her if she thinks that I am inclined to leave the matter here. Some alterations are needed and some of this material needs to be altered by an amendment on Report. I hope my Front Bench agrees, but I have yet to find out.
I will just, if I may, say that I did not know the Equality Act had been a topic in looking at this. I know that there is horizontal equality, but I did not know that vertical equality was part of the scope of the discussion arising from the Equality Act.
Baroness Northover
Perhaps I can help the noble Lord by pointing out that you have to look at an impact assessment of everything you are doing to see how it might disproportionately affect different groups. Therefore, policies such as this come within that. Everything that the Government do comes within that.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I thank the Minister. She knows that I have the highest regard for her. But can I take it one by one, if I may put it that way? I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for her broad support for the idea. She said that it was something that needed to be raised even though she stopped short of making it a mutual admiration society. That would be awkward for both of us. Many things that she said rang a bell with me. I will look at all the points that she raised.
We all know the noble Lord, Lord Deben, much better as Mr Gummer. He may remember Rio where I was a delegate, in 1991 or 1992. I am sorry that he adopted a slightly theological approach. I will rephrase that: it was an ideological approach. It was as if anybody raising the point that I was raising must be trying to destroy the policy. I have been on this wicket batting and scoring runs for as long as he has and we will hit a brick wall—to mix my metaphors, which I always do—unless we get some more buy-in in Burton upon Trent. I am very glad that Burton upon Trent has been mentioned four or five times. I will rechristen the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester, the Bishop of Burton upon Trent. That will help also the scoreline.
I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, about this point. Surely it is making a mountain out of a mole hill to say that the Treasury cannot do the work. As we have just heard from the Minister, a lot of this material is around.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, I rather cut short my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, but she will perhaps forgive me for that. I think I thanked the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and was addressing some remarks to the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I made one remark about this being a great cost to the Treasury. I do not think it is a great cost, but I think it is a challenge, and I make no apology for mentioning Burton upon Trent once again because we have to keep in mind the audience that we have to get to if it is not going to revolt. It is not just a statistical bulletin. Statistics unfortunately do not speak for themselves. That is where spin comes in. I would rather there was a stakeholder body that agreed on certain things that needed to be done or were self-evidently true. We cannot afford to be elitist. That is a statement of the obvious. There is a huge increase in taxation in these tables.
The second point on which I would very respectfully part company with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, is about his remark that this is the wrong Bill. When two or three years ago, my noble friend Lord Rooker was summing up on the Climate Change Bill, which was not a million miles different from this Bill, he said that his job was to get the Bill through, but he was not sure that it was the right Bill. I can foresee the next 10 energy Bills never being the right Bill, so I have got my teeth into the backside of this particular elephant.
Lord Deben
I said a number of things, but I do not think I said that this is the wrong Bill. It seems perfectly reasonable to put it in; I just think it is the wrong amendment, which is rather different.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I am pleased about that. It may have been the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, and as he is not here, he cannot deny it.
I thank my noble friend Lord Whitty for his broad support. I totally take his point about the need to make some adjustment. I say to my noble friend Lord Judd that rationing by price is a rather crude but accurate way of describing the world we live in. Whether it is capitalism or socialism, rationing by price is a fact of life in the middle of India or anywhere else. We also have to bear in mind that if we cannot change the income distribution in this country to be more reasonable than the outrageous distribution at the moment, we will have to fiddle around with a lot of discounts, exceptions and adjustments. Unfortunately, the question would then be whether so many people would be excluded from the heavy incidences of some of those price rises that we would not raise the revenue or have the carbon effect that we wished. That is the moral hazard that we are into, and it requires a lot of thought.
My penultimate point is that I do not think that today is the day when Treasury officials in the Room are going to stand up and say, “We’ve fallen in love with hypothecation”. What I am suggesting is in the Treasury’s interest. The priesthood in the Treasury is not separate from the rest of society, and we want to encourage it to be part of fronting up some of these matters. The consultative body and all the stakeholders have got to be able to communicate with Burton upon Trent. I think that community needs to be brought together.
Finally, my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham was very kind in what he said. I can assure him that we are at one in wanting to get this in a form that does not have all the teething points. I do not think the amendment as it stands states as crudely as he implied that we put all these taxes into one bundle and redistribute them in energy. I go halfway to that to make sure that the quantum is clearly identified. I recognise that this is mainly for general taxation, but in Burton upon Trent, it is a huge selling point to be able to say, “This is what we are doing with some of the money”. I want to be a bit pedantic about that distinction. I hope that it is acceptable for me to say that one bundle does not quite sum up what I was trying to say. I will conclude on that note. Although I hope that we can come back to this on Report with a slightly different amendment, I would like to withdraw the amendment.