My Lords, I am rather encouraged that there has been some detail from the Government on this point, and I welcome it. However, I want to understand a little better why this particular percentage has been chosen. My noble friend the Minister held an excellent meeting with us to go through the principles
of this part of the Bill. I thought that the figure of 5% must be a minimum amount, but it actually means that it cannot be exceeded. Once you work your way around the language in which the Bill is written, you see that it means the exact opposite of what you might have thought; that is, when the regulations are produced, the minimum percentage that a company must offer should be no more than 5%.
Amendment 94AH is a probing amendment and I am not saying that my suggestion is right, but what concerns me is that if we adopt the attitude—which I do—that it is essentially to put a backstop around the hope that the voluntary schemes work, as my noble friend Lord Jenkin has so strongly advocated, in the end we must make sure that if they do not work, there is a way of ensuring that this style of ownership of these projects can move forward. Yet what we have here, or at least as far I can see in theory, is a provision which will allow the regulations to provide that the minimum should be 0% or 1%. It seems to have the potential to undermine a scheme in that companies could offer very small amounts. I have tried to change the provision by suggesting some more sensible language for it. There should be a straightforward minimum of something like 5% and possibly a maximum of 25% in terms of what the Government’s recommendation should be. Again, I say this within the context that if the public do not want to take up the offer, they will not do so and the whole amount will not be taken up, so the percentage would not be so high.
On the other hand, I can see that allowing too high a percentage as a maximum, if it were taken up for certain kinds of renewable scheme, could involve a very large sum of money—well beyond the ability of a community to meet it. I think that this should be written down in a much more positive way so that we do not have something that must not exceed a minimum. We should have a minimum and a maximum. I have explained this incredibly badly and I should have worked it out before I started to speak, but I think that that is illustrative of how this part of the Bill is written. I apologise to the Committee.
It may not be possible for the Minister to respond to my next point in detail, but I shall ask her about it anyway. There are very strict rules indeed covering the ability of companies to sell shares in their organisation to unsophisticated investors. The Financial Conduct Authority has all sorts of rules around it. I would like to understand how the Government see that important financial legislation working in this instance so that it does not become too burdensome for the energy companies to offer such financial investment opportunities and high barriers are not put in place that would prevent members of the community from actually signing up. I am myself a member of a community energy scheme and it is terribly straightforward. I presume that there may be limits on this and I am interested in understanding how we are going to make sure that it will be something of which individual members of a community can take advantage. The regulatory burden should not be too burdensome on renewable energy companies; it should help them not to transgress against the various rules of financial conduct.
5.45 pm