My Lords, I take some comfort from what my noble friend said in response to this short debate. She said she will do her best to see that we get some indication of what is going to be in the regulations, and I very much welcome that. I understand her argument about not wanting to tie herself down. The Government would tie themselves down by taking a legislative power or even indicating legislative powers some years before they have to become operative because there may be many lessons to be learnt before that time. It is quite clear that we are going to have return to this on Report.
I was slightly surprised and disappointed that my noble friend told the Committee that we are not going to get the final report from the task force until October. It is having a consultation phase—and I refer to the first page of the task force draft report—before publishing the final report in September, because the task force would like to seek wider views. The difference between September and October is quite crucial, because we will resume the sittings of this Committee in October, perhaps within a day of reassembling. That will be followed in due course by Report, at which stage will presumably wish to come back to this, having moved beyond this part of the Bill. So this is really rather important. I hope that my noble friend might be able to convey this to the chairman of the task force. She said September, and there are people in the House who would like it to be September. It should not be like so much that the department has done and slip from month to month. That is not the right way in which to do things. If you say that you are going to publish on a certain day, that is the date on which you should publish. I find the readiness to accept slippage of that sort, sometimes running into many months, rather distressing—but there we are.
I had one representation this morning from a group or a firm that is anxious that the task force is laying down prescriptive models for community participation.
It sees a whole range of other things that it could do, which would achieve exactly the same objective—namely, aligning the interests of the community with those of the investor—which do not appear to be considered at all. It would want to have at least what it calls “shared generation”, in which the commercial operator ensures a proportion of the energy generated from a project is discounted off the energy bills of the houses and businesses in a specified local area. As I said a few moments ago, they have been doing that in France for years with the big nuclear power stations, and it seems to work; it provides precisely the readiness of the local community to host what otherwise might be an unwelcome, large and intrusive investment. It would be entirely appropriate for something like that to be available in these circumstances, so this is a moving scene. The minute that we encompass it in statute, it needs primary legislation or at least amendments to subordinate legislation to widen the scope.
This is unfortunate, but I accept one point that the Minister made. She set out her stall and said that there is a backstop provision in the Bill, so I can now understand why, as she put it, it would send the wrong message if we were now to take it out. I can see that, but perhaps it would have been clever not to have gone down this path at all. We might have relied on the voluntary system to take the whole thing forward and then, if it was not successful, started talking about legislation. However, that is not what has happened. We cannot take this any further this afternoon, but I hope that I have made my views clear.