Energy Bill

There is both good and bad in this suggested new clause. The point about the first three subsections seems to me to be inherent in the nature of the scheme. However, I do not know whether this is the right way to make clear that the scheme is intended to give the consumer, the householder, the best deal available. I am sure that there will be many circumstances where the assessor will have to weigh up the situation and say, ““Are we asking too much?””, which means that it could not be paid back within a reasonable time; and, ““Are we asking too little?””, which means that the householder could have paid rather more. This may need to be written into the Bill in some form. With the use of the words, "““the best overall energy solution””," you are opening up the possibility that someone will sue if they can be persuaded that they could have got a better one. Somehow one has got to try and avoid that. That is the good part. Subsection (4) is totally impractical and undesirable. As I said at Second Reading, one of the great advantages of the Green Deal over the CERT programme is that this is not written directly around carbon savings but is intended to provide the householder—the consumer—with incentives for lower bills and warmer houses. To require that in every individual case someone has to sit down and estimate what the carbon savings are likely to be seems to me to be unrealistic. I apologise to my noble friend for using what may seem to be fairly strong words, but everyone has recognised that one of the advantages of this is that people may choose to have warmer homes and pay back rather more because they will not get as much savings as they might have had had the whole thing gone into saving energy costs. How is anybody going to conceivably estimate that at the outset? We have a classic case here where the carbon savings, which certainly lie at the heart of this in order to achieve our carbon targets, are the consequence and not the primary objective. As I said at Second Reading, people will respond much more easily and readily to an offer of lower bills or a warmer home than they will to someone coming along and telling them that they have to cut their carbon footprint. Subsection (4) is very difficult and I would find it hard to support if it were to find its way into the Bill.