My Lords, I am grateful for the contributions to that short debate. On the issue of “may” versus “must”, nothing has been said to persuade me that I was wrong. On the contrary, everybody who has spoken has persuaded me that I am right to make a point about this. If a nonsense is systemic, that is no reason for not combating it and trying to get it right. I shall now feel even more emboldened when the word “may” comes up. I shall feel very sceptical about it; I shall look at it and may very well—not just in this Bill, but in others—put forward amendments of the kind I have today. I hope colleagues who also think that the present system is pretty nonsensical will be emboldened to do the same.
In a free society permissive legislation is otiose. Anything in a free society which is not specifically prohibited is allowed. Therefore, there is no purpose in passing a Bill with a clause saying somebody “may” do something. The issue is whether they must or must not do it. Those are the only things worth including in a legal obligation.
Turning to the more substantive issue, I reiterate that I was in no way suggesting that people had not been talking about the requirements of small businesses or of families and households. I am well aware that the Government have addressed, as the previous Government did, the issue of fuel poverty. We are all conscious of the importance of that, given that energy prices are bound to rise in real terms as a result of our very necessary policies. However, it is extremely important to draw the attention of everyone in this debate to the need to make sure that these new smart methods of monitoring the price of energy through the day, from minute to minute, are available not just to big sophisticated companies and energy users, but to households and small businesses. Only in that way will we get the full benefit of these new technologies, reduce energy demand in the way we need to do, and address the fairness problem and the lack of a distinction between smaller and larger businesses which are substantial consumers of energy.
On the relationship between the capacity market and demand reduction, all I say to the Government is that they had better get on with it. They have got the timing the wrong way around: I repeat, they cannot know what additional capacity they need to meet peak demand, plus a safety margin, until they know how successful the demand reduction efforts are likely to be. The two things are related all the way along: they are reciprocals, as I have said from the beginning.
They need to get started with these energy demand methods and pilots very rapidly; they have taken far too long to do it. That is my main message to the Government.