Energy Bill [HL]

My Lords, we are obviously having a broad debate on energy policy and I welcome that. One of the difficulties has been the rather disjointed way in which all the various announcements have been made. Those announcements must have been coincidental, because I cannot think that they were made as part of the planning. We had hugely important announcements last week about the electricity market regime, and a very important paper, Carbon Price Floor, was recently produced by the Treasury and HM Revenue and Customs. Ever since Rio in 1992, we have known that the trend in policy, including the Climate Change Bill and so on, has involved two or three different rationales for big price increases, and I want to come on to some of the social problems associated with that. I do not want to labour the point but I find it astonishing that we have this Bill dealing with important, as well as less important, matters relative to the hugely significant announcement that we need £110 billion of new generation by 2020. That is 10 years away, and you do not need to be Einstein to figure out that that is more than £10 billion a year. Talk about Heathrow Airport, the railways, the roads and so on! This is a much bigger deal if these figures are correct. Although I agree to a large extent with the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby, and I greatly admire his analysis, I think that we have now entered a new narrative period, because the incentives for new investment seem to have fallen short of the supply requirements for energy security. The situation is a bit like that of Heathrow Airport. We were all astonished last week when it was seriously stated that Heathrow was running optimally, at 98 per cent of capacity. I have never heard such an absurd statement. However, it is a national problem and this, too, is a big national problem. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, that we cannot have a sort of Gosplan for energy but I would say—and I do not know whether the noble Lord would agree—that we need a more holistic narrative than the highly disjointed one that we have at present. The Treasury has come up with this framework for a carbon price floor and I want to ask the Minister one question. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Marland, is not going to say, ““Well, these are all questions outside the scope of the Bill. My job is to get the Bill through. I am not interested in any other questions””, which I think could be his reply. He has indicated that it will be. I thank him but I am not going to sit down; I am going to continue my speech. You cannot have a carbon price floor in Britain without a number of questions arising about a price floor across Europe or any other price floor. I should like to ask him a question and, if he does not want to reply today, I am sure that the department will be able to write plenty of letters, provided that the Treasury agrees with Chris Huhne’s department. I am not trying to be nasty about this. Both Secretaries of State are wonderful people working in co-operation at the moment. However, I think that we need a wider view about the context of this carbon price floor. It seems to me that there are three different rationales for this 30 per cent price increase, announced last week, by 2020—which, surprise, surprise, is the same year as the £110 billion should have been spent. One rationale for the price increase probably has something to do with finding £110 billion, but we do not think that a big percentage of the £110 billion will come from price increases.