My Lords, this is a very interesting order and quite complicated for some people to understand. I have a few questions for the Minister.
The first question refers to this issue of non-road mobile machinery. The Minister will be aware that a lot of work and debate took place on this issue, which has been around for some time. The Commission, after much persuasion, produced a directive which was published in October or November 2011 and allowed non-road mobile machinery to continue not to comply with stage III B or the equivalent for a period of three years. That would allow the railway industry—I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group—to purchase locomotives which did not comply with the new directive. There is a good reason for that: nobody had designed a locomotive that would comply, so it was either no locomotives or ones which did not comply. The industry persuaded the Commission of this and since then, surprisingly maybe, one or two designs have popped up. However, there is still a demand for this. It is now one year and three months since the directive was agreed in Brussels but it has not yet been converted into British law. So, technically, although anybody who buys a locomotive—I think that it also applies to tractors and other things off-road—is compliant with EU legislation, they can be taken to court and fined in this country because the Government have not got round to producing these regulations.
Perhaps the Minister can therefore answer two questions. First, when are we going to see these regulations? I hope the answer will not be “soon”, because in many Governments’ terms “soon” probably means a year’s time, and by that time they will have run out of space.
Secondly, what effect will the new regulation converting the directive into UK law have on this order? It seems to me—I may have got it wrong; I stand to be corrected—that we are implementing what is not a very sensible
scheme from the Commission to add biofuel to existing fuel, especially when there is a shortage of crop area and crops around the world, which puts up the cost of fuel. Turning some of those crops into bio seems a bit perverse to me. Certainly the Renewable Energy Association believes that this will be a seriously perverse incentive to investment in renewable fuels and renewable generating capacity. It is talking about the market size being reduced to 30% or 40%, jeopardising investment of £1 billion and putting 3,500 jobs at risk. One can dispute those figures, but what consultation has taken place with the Renewable Energy Association? It is a very respectable organisation.
On Monday I attended a sort of round table with the noble Lord, Lord Deighton, our new Treasury Minister, who was extremely good. It was a Chatham House event so I am not going to say who said what. It was to do with investment and infrastructure, and investment in other things that the Government are so keen on at the moment. We were told, and there was general agreement, that there was not much trouble with finding the funds for investment. The two problems were: first, planning—which is going on in the Chamber at the moment; and secondly, some kind of comfort for the investors that the Government are not going to change their mind and change the ground rules or the buy-in price or whatever during the time when investors are trying to get a return on their capital.
I hope that the Government are going to follow-up this particular regulation with a new debate with the Commission as to what is right and what is wrong for biofuels and whether they should be there at all. Current thinking across many parts of the world has probably overtaken the original idea behind this.