My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for describing her amendment and will comment briefly on the group. Starting with the last point about making administrative changes to the way the RHI works through the negative process, I do not think that is necessary—we are not there yet and I would not support it. One of the benefits we have had over the last year or two as we have been talking about the RHI is that we have had regular opportunities to discuss the issue. It is definitely not the case that everything is hunky-dory and that we can just forget about it and let it all roll on. There are still some quite important issues, and we will need to return to them and have parliamentary scrutiny over them.
Having said that, it is also true that there are some issues with the RHI that we need to see streamlined. I do not wish to sustain a bureaucratic and complex jungle of regulations, but this is a complex piece of legislation and removing parliamentary scrutiny is not going to resolve that. It is fundamentally about improving the policy over time as we become more comfortable with what the RHI is delivering. The other reason for not supporting that element of the amendment is that, unlike the RO and the FITs, this is money from the public purse and therefore requires a higher degree of public scrutiny.
I was interested to see this amendment last night, but I am afraid that I did not get a chance to speak to the noble Baroness beforehand about the background to it. Not so long ago I was at a party when someone came up to me and said, “We have just installed a renewable heat boiler”. I will not reveal any names, but the person was concerned that in order to get it going, they had had to work around the regulations as they stood because of the restriction on who can receive payments and the fact that it is not the same as self-owned or self-installed renewable technologies. I would be interested to learn about the background to this amendment and certainly I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say in response to it. It is about flexibility around the finances that are required for what are often quite capital-intensive projects. The funding has to be arranged in a flexible way so that people who do not have a lot of capital upfront are still able to engage with the RHI through arrangements that may not be standard. There is something here that I would strongly recommend the noble Baroness to look at and perhaps come back to us. As I say, it is a simply a coincidence that someone raised this issue with me personally.
On whether Ofgem is the right body to deal with this, well, if we have a Labour Government we will not
have an Ofgem, so we can revisit that question then. We will certainly have a regulator, but we will look again at how these things are taken care of. Again, I thank the noble Baroness for tabling the amendment and I look forward to the Minister’s response.