Debate on the Address

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. The cock crowed three times for Ofgem economists, who three times refused to acknowledge that the Government’s own targets for renewable energy should, when it came to decisions such as locational charging, play any part in their framework. That is nonsensical, as I have said. Hon. Members have been waiting for some time. I see that there is plenty of time left on the clock, but I have only a couple of further brief points before I come to my final main point. I had an exchange earlier with the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), who was kind enough to say that he agreed that the Home Office was perhaps suffering from a surfeit of legislation and a lack of implementation. After a quick check, I found that out of 57 Home Office Bills over the last 10 years, only 36 applied to Scotland. We have missed out on 21 of those marvellous pieces of Home Office legislation. I have to say that I do not feel that Scotland is any less safe as a result of missing out on those legislative provisions. I believe that the administrative ““not fit for purpose”” argument may have some relationship to the legislative flow, which must be committing huge amounts of Home Office administrative time in order to cope with what amounts to an average of five and a half pieces of legislation every year. The permanent revolution in legislative competence over those last 10 years cannot be contributing to the efficiency of the Department. There are many other issues, but that is certainly one of them and we hope that, at some stage, the Government will recognise it.