My Lords, here we are on day three and we are still on Clause 1. Just to encourage the Minister, I remind him that he must have been in the House of Commons when the Maastricht Bill was being debated. It had all of four clauses but it took 25 days, so he is doing extremely well at the moment. But in the interests of making progress I am restricting myself to one speech tonight. That concerns Amendment 36. To me that is the heart of the Bill and very much the heart of horticulture. What a privilege it is to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans. He covers most of Bedfordshire, although unfortunately not the part that I live in, but much of the part of Bedfordshire that is keen on horticulture.
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In my judgment, horticulture today is the poor cousin of agriculture. However, it offers so many opportunities, particularly for import substitution. It does not matter what you list; vegetables, flowers, salad, fruit and—even in Victorian times—tropical fruit are all grown with great success. Noble Lords may, like me, have a glasshouse and mine has certainly had far more attention this year than it normally gets. The tomatoes and lettuces look great, the leeks are ready for planting out, the cucumbers are falling off the top of the wires et cetera.
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, mentioned vertical farms, but the key to restarting horticulture in this country is the cost of fuel. As it happens, we have a
unique opportunity with the increasing incidence of green energy, but somebody needs to talk to Ofgem, which, as I speak, is restricting the return on capital for all the electricity suppliers, including those supplying green energy. It is the green energy suppliers who are investing the most and are most impacted by Ofgem, whose whole strategy at this point appears to be to save the consumer the odd £50, or maybe £100.
If we do not remove that tourniquet on investment for the green energy industry, we will not revive the horticultural industry, because all it does, at this point in time, is undermine the production of and investment in green energy. I had the privilege of sitting on the Select Committee on Energy in the other place and saw there what was happening. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that he needs to have a close look at what Ofgem is doing because, although I will obviously continue to campaign for the area we are talking about—horticulture—I worry about how we will compete with Holland in particular if our green energy suppliers, which are doing so well, are constrained by minor changes to the amount that the consumer pays.
I say to my noble friend that, for once, horticulture needs the involvement of Her Majesty’s Government. We need a strategy across government and industry; it is a small-scale industry, but it has such potential. Therefore, I make this plea to my noble friend—I believe it falls on productive soil—to look at horticulture, see what it needs, recognise its role of import substitution and get cracking to reinvigorate the industry, which was three, four or five times bigger in past decades than it is today.