My Lords, as we are in Committee, perhaps I could come back on my noble friend Lord Jenkin’s important areas. I can reassure him on both those items that we would be better off if this amendment was passed. First, the MacKerron report is quite clear that the current rate of investment going into the National Loans Fund almost certainly will mean that
its liabilities cannot be met, so we have to find another way to do this. The Green Investment Bank is not a fund to give away money; it is there to commercially invest, alongside other commercial investors. It could be perceived as being a greater risk perhaps—I will come on to why it is also a lesser risk—but also as providing a sensible return with a very sound government-backed institution to do the investment, and I think that is good. Furthermore, this fund has to invest its money in the National Loans Fund. That is a euphemism; what it actually means is that it has to give it all to the Treasury. So the Nuclear Liabilities Fund at the moment is similar to unfunded state pensions. It goes in there, but to take the money out will have the same impact as paying pensions into the future. While it is a discrete amount that is accounted for, it just reduces the national debt. That is all that it does on the current terms.
In fact, how secure is that? Yes, there is an accounting mechanism, and my noble friend is absolutely right that the sins of the past are huge in terms of those funds having been lost during the process of changes in the nuclear industry and its ownership over the past couple of decades. First, this amendment would make it far more certain that this fund will be able to meet its liabilities in the future. Secondly, we, as taxpayers and as citizens, would know that that money is in a place where we can actually see it, see its value, see that it is different and separate out of the Treasury from the national debt and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, said, we can predict decommissioning of nuclear plants far enough in advance to craft the investment and our exit strategies around those financial needs.