Energy Prices Bill

Lord Redesdale Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 19th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, I will be extremely brief at this time of the evening, because although the Bill offers a cornucopia of issues that I would wish to speak on—I see the usual faces who participate in these debates and have followed many of the points raised, especially on energy efficiency—I have only two questions to raise.

We obviously support the Bill, and it is going through very quickly, but there has been a complete lack of consultation. One area that has not been covered in discussions is that, at the beginning of the energy crisis, it was energy retailers who were collapsing and causing a number of problems. Indeed, the Government have had to pick up billions of pounds’ worth of contracts from Bulb. My first question is: have the Minister or the department had any consultation with energy retailers? While we can focus on the suppliers and the issues they face, this is an area that will affect people in the way they are billed, especially with these measures.

A particular worry in relation to the Secretary of State—as mentioned, mostly recently, by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone—is that regulatory risk is coming down the line. You could almost envisage that the Government will nationalise the retail space; they do not have to go down through the generator space but could nationalise energy retailers. Has this been any part of the discussions? I must declare my interest in another field as the chief executive of a water retail company. We do the same thing in the water sector, but if I were working for an energy retailer at the moment, I would be extremely worried about the way that the department has taken powers away from Ofgem—which would have given the retailers some form of security—and given itself unlimited powers. So my second question for the Minister is: has he considered a sunset clause on the powers they have taken in this Bill, so that when we move, hopefully, towards a more stable form of energy pricing, Ofgem can be given back the powers that the Secretary of State has taken? This would give some degree of certainty to the energy retailers that their business model will not be destroyed.

The retail marketplace was in trouble before the price increases made their business case very difficult—one of the big retailers, npower, left the marketplace. Therefore, can the Minister first say whether there was consultation and, secondly, whether he would consider a sunset clause?