Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh]

My Lords, I, too, have some sympathy with the interest of the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, in proposing this amendment. However, I, too, do not feel that this is the way forward. This is a very big matter and requires very careful consideration. At this point, I think I have an opportunity to offend all political parties in the House by saying that within the energy industry there is bewilderment that pretty much all the political parties believe that energy poverty should be treated separately from every other sort of poverty at the expense of distorting our energy market and our energy costing. In the view of many outside, it would be much more sensible to let energy prices do what they must. It is inevitable that we go into a more expensive energy world and handle the whole poverty problem together.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I, too, sympathise with a number of the themes that the noble Lord, Lord Lea, has brought forward, but I remind the House that this is Report stage and, to be honest, I find this amendment quite muddled. I find it very difficult to understand its detail or even what it is trying to achieve in terms of its words. I understand from the noble Lord, Lord Lea, what he is trying to achieve, but I am not even sure that if we put this into the Bill it would achieve that. Subsection (1) of the proposed new clause refers to a range of things including quasi-fiscal instruments. I do not know whether that is a technical Treasury term that the noble Lord, Lord Lea, has got from his friends in the Treasury, but I do not understand it.

I seriously do not understand what proposed new subsection (2) means. It seems to connect carbon budget periods, which as we know are five years, with annual assessments, and I am not sure what it is trying to do. The list in proposed new subsection (2)(a) to (c) exclude the industry that paid for my mortgage in the first 20 years—the road freight industry—inland waterways and shipping, and I am not sure that its purpose is comprehensive.

Proposed new subsections (3) and (4), again, come back to statistics that I think are generally available. It has not been difficult for me to find most energy statistics that I have tried to find.

I agree that we have an issue with the amount of money that ROCs and feed-in tariffs actually cost consumers, as my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding reminded us, and with the way in which these charges affect groups in fuel poverty differently. However, I honestly do not feel that this amendment achieves what we want to achieve within a reasonable understanding of what this amendment actually says. For that reason, I find it impossible to support it at this stage of the Bill.

[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords, this has been a fairly substantial debate that justifies at least one decision which the House came to the other evening: that we would not be able to rush consideration of this and the other amendment and deal with them within the time limit that we had at that time. I am grateful to my noble friend for having generated quite a significant debate on the issues.

It is a little unfair to suggest that this amendment comes somewhat late in the Bill, as we discussed it extensively in Committee. I indicated from the opposition Front Bench that we did not find parts of it entirely acceptable at that stage. In particular, we could see Treasury colleagues bridling at the concept of hypothecated taxation, which is an additional complicating dimension to the proposals. My noble friend Lord Lea has worked hard, and harder, to take out that part of his amendment and still retain the merits of the original amendment.

This amendment has come in its proper place in our consideration of the Bill. It is not as though we are at the last stages of our consideration of this Bill in Parliament. The Bill started in this House, and our job in a sense is to clarify the issues and to make amendments where we think amendments should be made so that our colleagues in the other place can address the Bill with the benefit of the considerable expertise that this House brings to bear on matters of this kind. We therefore owe my noble friend a considerable debt for having raised these issues.

Does this matter fit within the Bill? I understand the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, but I fear that that point can be made about every Bill that is likely to come before the House. I can think of Bills that relate to energy, Bills that relate to the environment and green issues, and Bills that relate to a Treasury position. All will say that their Bill focuses on particular issues, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, spelled out accurately, and that we should not try to drop a load of matters into it that are not extraneous but that bring other dimensions into the Bill that are not its primary purpose.