My Lords, many of the points that I would have made have already been made by other speakers more eloquently than I could have. I simply make three separate small points.
First, the importance of the OLR to small businesses has been emphasised on every side. I hope the Minister will take this back to her department and seek urgent action on it. It is very important. The Government’s stated objective to bring in small companies and open up the market simply will not happen unless this is fixed.
My second point is more a comment. Does the Minister realise that the very process of consultation that the department has embraced, with the best intentions in the world, discriminates against small businesses? I read that there have been 30 separate consultations over the past 12 months. The big companies can take their responses in their stride—they have people who do nothing but write responses on their behalf—but for small companies it is a major burden. The department runs a serious danger of seeing responses from the big companies overemphasised in what is intended to be, with the best will in the world, an open consultation. The Government have to take that into account when responding to this process and acting on it.
I will not pursue the second point in detail, but it relates to the capacity mechanism, which we have not been discussing in detail today. The information we have received so far is not encouraging. Clearly, competition is important—many of us around the table here support that—but there is competition and competition. An awful lot depends on the precise and detailed rules associated with that competition.
To go back in history, we had the ROC system—we still do—which was introduced as a technology-blind mechanism. It did not matter what technology was
used. The fact is that, given the structure of the ROC mechanism, only one technology could compete: wind. There was not really any competition between technologies. We are in serious danger of getting into the same apparent open competition, with the capacity mechanism as we see it now, without it being truly open.
Without going into detail today, I need to be persuaded that the capacity mechanism as we see it at the moment, given what has been published so far, is not heavily weighted in favour of the continuation of heavy use of coal. That is not consistent with the Government’s objectives, legally committed to, to climate change and carbon reduction. I would be very grateful if the Minister could describe how she sees the capacity mechanism playing out in the balance between coal and gas.
My final point—I declare an interest as honorary president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association—is to ask the Minister why carbon capture and storage has not been included in the list of CFD-eligible technologies. I see no reason for that. We have had a competition on carbon capture and storage, and two companies were selected. I do not criticise the basis of that selection, but, if I remember rightly, five or six companies had done a lot of work on that competition. We would like those companies to continue to engage with carbon capture technology, because it is one of the legs of the Government’s low carbon strategy. I am a little surprised not to see it mentioned here, because it would at least give those companies that were unsuccessful in the main national competition something to think about and some encouragement to go forward.