My Lords, I was not going to intervene at this stage, but the right reverend Prelate’s intervention and his association with my noble friend Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation prompted me to pursue the point that he raised. A lot of our discussion has been on the penalties —in other words, the removal of subsidies from people who thought that they had a chance of the subsidy when they started their projects. That is aside from whether the project is environmentally okay or whether they get local government approval for planning reasons and so on; it is simply the question of whether they were caught by various delays and, therefore, would not get the subsidies that they thought they would get when they set out.
We are not in any way trying to stop the development of the very successful parts of the onshore windfarm industry. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, reminded us, electricity from wind power is getting cheaper. If it is getting cheaper, it will in due course need less subsidy. Remarks from outside this country—particularly an ill-informed remark by the UN adviser, Professor McGlade, that somehow Britain was putting a stop to its movements towards low-carbonisation by putting a stopper on all wind power and so on—are way out of kilter and far from representing where we stand.
It is no less interesting to work out to what extent these grace periods will help the situation—I thoroughly approve of all the amendments that my noble friend has brought forward with such assiduity. Presumably, as a result of these grace periods, we will see slightly more subsidy paid out, which has to come from the consumer—the industrial consumer in particular—than we would have done before he introduced the amendments. The money that was not going to come from somewhere has to come from somewhere. Somebody will have to pay for it. This is on a day when we are staggering under the colossal redundancies that have been announced throughout the steel industry—including the steel industry in Scotland—which, we are told, are overwhelming the result of very high energy costs. Apparently, for electricity, we are paying twice the German level. In turn, of course, energy costs for the steel industry of Europe are leading people to predict that the entire industry will be wiped out. At a time like this, we need to watch with needle sharpness what is happening to the costs that are falling on the industries where all
these jobs are being destroyed. How much more of that cost is still going to persist in meeting all the grace period conditions which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, with his massive legal knowledge and detailed grasp of the situation, has described as being necessary and fair? How much more will this kind of fairness cost in the end in burdens on the electricity users of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom in ways which will precipitate even further these appalling redundancies? We need to keep that side of the argument very clearly in our minds.