I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), but I am not sure whether I agree with him about the logic, let alone the coherence, of the Bill or the amendment. He says that many hon. Members will want to vote for the amendment for logical and coherent reasons, but I do not believe that that is so. Many hon. Members—a very high proportion—although rather less of my constituents vote almost always on the green side of any argument. They vote almost ideologically—they support the greener side of any issue under discussion. The problem with that approach is that it has led to a network of legislation and other commitments in this country that are internally incoherent and make no sense. Instead of hon. Members looking at the matter in the round and seeing how they could best obtain their
overall objective, be that decarbonisation or otherwise, they support each and every of various, disparate initiatives that add up to a whole that does not make sense, even in terms of those objectives.
Those promoting the amendment say that they want to bring certainty for investors, and yet the Minister, too, says that that is his objective. The Minister mentioned that he wanted to protect and insulate consumers from price spikes. The problem is that the method by which he seeks to do so, and administers in the Bill, locks in high prices, so that for a very long period, whatever the uncertainties, our consumers will be locked in.
The primary purpose of the Bill is not the decarbonisation of electricity, but to set up the “contract for difference” model that allows the Government to sign long-term and very expensive contracts with all manner of energy producers—the Government will pick winners through an opaque process—and give certainty to investors that our consumers will be forced to pay those prices and have them added to their electricity bills throughout the length of contracts that could contain a change-of-law clause that it might not be possible to unpick in future should we want to do so. That is what worries me about the Bill. We are changing the pie-in-the-sky, Alice in Wonderland policy objectives that the previous Government proposed—only four or five current Government Members voted against them—but we can undo a Government policy objective for 2050 if we find that it does not make sense or is overly expensive. This Bill, however, essentially makes such a reverse undoable because it moves the policy from the sphere of legislation to that of contractual commitments.
It is sensible that the control levy framework is scored as public spending—I welcome the fact that the Government and the statistics office have ensured that. However, under the framework, the plan is to increase the cap on spending from £2.35 billion to £9.8 billion by 2020. All hon. Members who have spoken in the debate have said that the sum is £7.6 billion, but it is not. The sum is £9.8 billion, unless we say, “It’s £7.6 billion in real terms from a previous year.” Our constituents will pay £9.8 billion in 2020. For most of our constituents for the past few years, wage increases have been lower than price increases.