My hon. Friend, who is the sponsor of the Bill, is nodding. That would be fine if there was not already provision in law to deal with the stealing of electricity, and that is why the provision is completely redundant.
We are creating a separate regime of stealing electricity from a charging point for charging electric vehicles rather than relying on the general statute law on electricity theft. I do not know whether the House is familiar with this, but electricity theft is a big issue. At the beginning of July the energy regulator, Ofgem, said that it wanted more to be done to combat electricity theft. I know that this is not the subject of the Bill, but a third of electricity theft in this country is to power cannabis farms. Nothing is being done about that—it seems to be being ignored—but meanwhile we are trying to bring in draconian measures to deal with people who, in a fit of over-enthusiasm, might abstract some electricity from a charging point.
Surely we should keep the law simple: whether the electricity is from a charging point, from a company or from someone’s own meter through changing the wires or using a device, we should rely on the same law—that is, the Theft Act 1968. The Theft Act provides that it is an offence to steal electricity and there are guidelines about the reasonable penalty to be imposed on people who steal electricity. I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East why the promoters of the Bill think that existing laws on electricity theft are inadequate to deal with electricity that is taken from a charging point . Some 25,000 people—quite a lot of people—steal electricity each year, and such theft costs each electricity customer the equivalent of £7 a year.
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