My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for introducing this clause stand part debate, and to noble Lords who have contributed to it. I shall make a few comments. As we enter the third day of Committee, I am grateful to the Minister for having agreed to extend the Committee for an extra day. I think that this has arisen because we felt—I have probably made myself fairly clear on this—that the handling of the Bill has been slightly suboptimal, and we are expecting more amendments to come to us before Report. We are very grateful that we now have an opportunity to discuss those in Committee before then.
Today we move on to Part 4, which it is fair to say is the more controversial aspect. People on both sides of the Committee may have different views about the benefits or disbenefits of particular technologies, but we must strive to ensure that we have a good policy and governance regime that will help investors not to waste their money. One of our concerns is that any manifesto, no matter how good the drafters, is prepared relatively hastily and usually without a great deal of thought for the detail. Yet here we are, just months after that manifesto was put into print, hastily enacting some of the statements in it and I think that we are still lacking some of the detail.
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One statement in the Conservative manifesto was that local people should have the final say, it seems, on onshore wind. Within that sentence are hidden quite a
lot of important things. By and large, we have always felt that there needs to be a role for central government—for Westminster—in the setting of energy policy, and that is because it is of national importance. How much we pay for our energy, the sources of our energy and the security of supply of our energy are matters for which the Secretary of State, and indeed the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, should have due regard. However, Clause 59 says that onshore wind is no longer of any national strategic importance and that it should simply be decided at a local level. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, very eloquently pointed out, if you compare that with what is happening with fracking and the extraction of gas using unconventional methods, you see that there is a huge gulf in how different technologies are now being treated by this Government. That is regrettable.
Personally, I do not think that any Government should have an a priori view about any technology. There will be good and bad examples of the deployment of those technologies, and of course we always need to keep an eye on how we treat them and subsidise them to try to ensure that there is fair competition. However, it seems that this part of the Bill is becoming something of a crusade to stop one particular aspect of energy policy in its tracks. That is regrettable because it is an industry that is showing growth, it has attracted inward investment, it has generated jobs, it has helped to create benefits for communities, and it has reduced emissions and air quality impacts. Some people say that it is doing quite a lot for the money that we pay for it.
Therefore, we are very sympathetic to the opposition to this clause. It is incumbent on the Government to make it absolutely clear why they feel that a very successful aspect of our energy policy over the last few years is no longer considered to be of national importance. Of course, national means the United Kingdom, not merely England and Wales. This clause concerns England and Wales but we are going to come on to amendments where we discuss this matter in the context of Scotland, and that will raise a whole set of other questions. However, we are looking forward to hearing the Minister’s response on this particular point, and I am grateful to the noble Lords who have contributed to the debate.