Energy Bill

My Lords, I wonder if I could support this amendment but also refer back to the Minister’s remarks about the Bill. I have just begun to realise that the Bill is about the Green Deal for certain properties. You have to have an eligible property, and the noble Lord explained very clearly that this is a commercial operation that will not apply to quite a number of properties. That is a very important point. The preamble states that the Bill will: "““Make provision for the arrangement and financing of energy efficiency improvements to be made to properties””." In fact, the improvements will be made only to certain properties. You may have a house which, as I mentioned on Second Reading, is subject to flooding. As the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, said, there are going to be houses and properties that are not very appropriate. I think it is very important to say that this is a selective Bill; indeed it is an experimental Bill. Of course, ““experiment”” is not a word used very often in legislation. We used to use it on Cambridge City Council—because that was Cambridge—and it worked quite well. We are approaching a new and complex situation and we are going to define this for certain properties with certain types of energy. It is clearly not going to be a Magna Carta, a democratic right, where everybody in the UK can have a Green Deal. I think that that should be made very clear, or clearer. For example, when we come to renewables and low-carbon technologies, as I think the Minister said, certain ones will be approved and certain ones will not be approved, and that is also part of the spirit of the Bill. As I understand it, the point about this experiment is that some of these investments will not be undertaken by people unless there is a long term. As I understand it, the philosophy of the Bill is that you will approve certain kinds of insulation and energy systems, but you must obviously improve them in such a way that an investment can be made with the energy companies; and there will be cases where this is not true. However, you cannot have is an experiment to approve something for a certain period and then say, ““I am going to disapprove that””, because obviously investments must be made. Therefore the timeframe in which you make your approval should be reflected in the Bill, otherwise people will not know what they are doing. That is my view on how we are proceeding, and I think it might be helpful if we made it clear that that is the nature of this Bill.