My Lords, I wish to reassert and reinforce some of the anxieties that we have been listening to. More than 20 years ago, a Conservative Government sought to privatise the electricity industry in favour of free enterprise and competition. The outcome has been an industry dominated by an oligopoly of six large suppliers owned primarily by foreign capital. There has been an absence of the necessary oversight of the industry that would provide an assurance that it will meet the future needs of the nation, and there has been a severe deficit in investment.
The present Conservative Government have sought to amend this situation through a programme of electricity market reform. The result was the Energy Bill, which we struggled with last summer. The Bill promised to engender a raft of secondary legislation that would come to haunt us later. Now, that legislation is represented by a massive pile of documents concerning the regulation of electricity market reform, the regulation of the so-called contracts for difference and the regulation of the capacity market. We are aware that not all the regulations are yet before us, and this shortfall promises to cause problems.
On encountering the mass of regulations, I am assailed by feelings of inadequacy. I have neither the time nor the energy for the task of scrutinising the regulations in detail. I fear that my own inadequacy may be a symptom of a more general problem with which government is faced in our era. One of the features of the problem is clear. It is that, by pursuing a philosophy of free enterprise and marketisation, the Government have created an almost impossible amount of centralised regulation.
The foreign ownership of our electricity industry is one of the reasons for the severe underinvestment. The owners of the big electricity companies are large multinational enterprises that are able to look worldwide for the best investment opportunities. They have no overriding incentive to invest in the UK. Therefore, the Government are constrained to look to small independent generators within the UK to provide much of the necessary investment. These companies require careful fostering if they are to fulfil this role and if they are not to be squeezed out by the big six oligopolists.
The Government have signally failed to protect independent generators. Their oversight in this respect is baffling and distressing. Last summer, it seemed that, eventually, the Government had been convinced that the independent generators required an assured route to market for their product. The means of providing the necessary assurance has been termed the offtaker of last resort. In the absence of a purchasing power agreement, the offtaker would be prepared to purchase the power at a heavy discount. This stringency threatens the viability of any investment projects that the independents might wish to pursue, and it has made it unlikely that they will be able to raise the necessary finance.
Now we are discovering that, notwithstanding the belated assurances of the Government, the problem persists. It seems that there will be an 18-month delay between the negotiation of the first contracts for difference and the realisation of the arrangements for the offtaker of last resort. My supposition is that this delay has been caused by the sheer volume of secondary legislation that is entailed in the electricity market reform and that this crucial element of the programme has been sidelined or at least severely delayed. The consequences for the independent generators and for their investment programmes will be dire.