My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the government amendments. I will speak to those and also to Amendment 78C in my name, and in support of the amendments tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace.
As we enter the second day of Report, I do not feel that the Bill has been well handled, as has already been referenced. This may stem from the fact that the Bill was not ready when it was presented to us. Significant areas of policy were still being developed. It was a very fluid situation. In fact, the term “liquid legislation” will probably stay with us for many years to come. It was coined by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, in the recommital stage of Committee and describes very accurately how we have been dealing with a set of moving parts as we have gone through the Bill. Here we are on Report, but it still feels very much like a Committee stage, and that is regrettable. We should not be in this situation where we have so many controversial issues still unresolved.
Throughout the Bill’s passage, I have pressed the Minister to give me a justification and a sound argument why the Government have chosen the route that they have in this Energy Bill of introducing what is now Clause 66 regarding the early closure of a renewables support scheme that was already closing 12 months early—and, in fact, not closing it to everybody but just to one subsection of technology: onshore wind. Why do we find ourselves in a place where the Government appear to have singled out for special treatment a single technology from all the low-carbon technologies available to us, and where that special treatment is so damaging and corrosive to investor confidence? I am afraid that I have not received a suitable answer to that question throughout the passage of the Bill. Now the answer given boils down to a very few words that appeared in the Tory Party manifesto, that the Conservative Party would put an end to—