My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response, and for the contributions from other noble Lords in this debate.
This is an issue that will not go away; it will come back and be debated with different amendments. As I said, this is a probing amendment, which is designed to enable us to have this debate. It is a very important debate. I know that the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, has well-known views on this, but surely it is a matter of some subjectivity whether one considers the landscape to be ruined. Perhaps we should be weighing that against the economy being ruined by destabilising a very important, growing industry in a country that desperately needs inward investment and jobs. Comments were made, but it is the job of government to run the country in a way that tries to enable a good and sound policy environment that people can understand and act on in good faith.
We will spend the rest of the afternoon discussing these clauses—there is plenty to get at—so I will not make some of the points that I will make later, but I will flag in particular that the Minister has talked about a transition. I have sufficient concern that we are transitioning to something very uncertain. We do not know when the next round of CFD auctions will be held. We have seen a departure from the expected schedule already, very soon into the new Government. That will cause considerable concern and we will come to it.
The justification is that this is about an orderly transition. That masks the political nature of these clauses. As my noble friend Lord Foulkes said, this is quite a political amendment and quite a political part of the Bill. I do not think the Government will be able simply to brush this off and say that it is all for the good of the UK. Clearly, we have the Scottish Parliament for a reason. When it comes to these matters, where it has had powers in the past, it seems to go completely against the trend that there should be no concession from the Government on the Scottish Parliament having some say in this, particularly in this case, where the Government have taken the Salisbury convention and stretched it to its maximum. It is true that there is nothing specific in the Government’s manifesto about the sudden alteration of a policy that was discussed at length following a great deal of consultation not that long ago.
On the basis that we will return to this, I am happy to withdraw the amendment at this stage.