My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, and of course I look very carefully at all amendments and consider their impact. I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lord Deben for rightly raising the important points about the information that is already available and the cost burden that it may impose further down the line on consumers. We must be very careful that we do not add to what is already a large pool of requirements put on suppliers and generators.
We are concerned about accountability. The Bill places sole responsibility on the Secretary of State to meet any target range. Once that is set, recognising that it is the Secretary of State who is responsible for setting energy policy in the UK, it is he who will be ultimately accountable to Parliament. My concern about the amendment is that it would be unfair for us to ask suppliers to manage their portfolios in order to meet national carbon intensity limits because, as has been said, it would be incredibly complicated to oversee and would confuse the responsibilities of the state in setting the target range with those of suppliers by specifying the annual level of carbon intensity that they must meet.
The question of the merit order, the order in which generation is dispatched, which is currently in response to price signals, is a commercial decision for industry and I would certainly have reservations about government interfering directly with it. There is, however, a role for government in seeking to achieve decarbonisation by supporting a market framework that will make it more attractive. I think that is what the noble Baroness alluded to by prioritising low-carbon electricity. That is exactly what we are doing through contracts for difference and the carbon price floor to improve the relative economics of low-carbon generation.
Those measures provide a much better means of addressing the gap raised by the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, under his amendment. To quote my noble friend Lord Deben in the fifth report of his Committee on Climate Change:
“The gap between actual and achievable carbon intensity will be closed as coal plant is retired as the relative cost of coal increases under the rising carbon price floor and given tightening EU legislation on air quality”.
We are reaching that point but we do not need to add extra pressures to provide further information when there is more than adequate information around.
I will finish, and ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment, by saying that the Electricity and Gas (Energy Company Obligation) Order 2012 and its predecessors, the CERTs and CESPs, have always required energy companies to save carbon dioxide by promoting energy efficiency measures in households. There is enough going on in the system.