My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 55, 56 and 57 to Clause 66, which are in my name. As has been eloquently expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, we absolutely need to put at the forefront of our attention the need to minimise adding costs to consumers at this time. Please excuse my coarse language, but it feels to me that the Government are in danger of moving from “cutting the green crap” to forcing us to take on crap green. That is essentially what we are doing here.
It is an adding of potentially unlimited expense for a commodity which will play a role—I am not completely against the use of hydrogen for certain applications—but the idea that it will be used at scale for homes is completely ludicrous. It is therefore absolutely right that we limit the levy to the people who will benefit from its use. That will not be consumers and certainly not electricity bills. What we want is cheaper electricity. I am confident that electricity will soften as we get off fossil fuels and rely more on more predictable and stable forms of electricity generation, such as nuclear, offshore wind and a whole panoply of ways of making electricity that we can control more easily than relying on imported gas. Those costs will soften, and we want to keep them cheap because that will enable us to electrify whole other segments of the economy.
So I absolutely support limiting this levy to gas, whether that is by saying it should be gas shippers or removing the reference to electricity, as my Amendment 55 does—I am completely agnostic on that, but the issue is fundamental. I will quote from a briefing that some of us may have received from E.ON, a big provider of energy which quite cleverly split itself into a clean electricity part and a not-so-clean one. The clean part says clearly that “recovering the costs of these new technologies through electricity bills is regressive and difficult to justify considering the soaring cost of living and the potential benefits of these technologies to individual consumers are uncertain. It is damaging that the Bill allows the Government to recover the costs of hydrogen revenue through electricity suppliers and, therefore, electricity consumers.” I fully support that and I have to say that my amendment was tabled before I read the briefing.
I considered striking out the whole levy with a clause stand part debate, but I thought that might be more the approach of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, so in Amendment 56 I am simply saying that there should be a sunrise to delay us rushing into adding more costs. The amendment proposes that the regulations should not be brought in until 6 April 2026. Amendment 57 simply states that a financial impact assessment must be made available if and when this levy starts to be added to bills.
My guess is that the use of hydrogen will be limited. It will be very expensive and it is very inefficient, so the costs should not and will not be borne in time. But I am worried that in this Bill we seem to be diverting towards a distraction and risking an illogical transition which will slow us down and add costs unnecessarily. That is damaging to the net-zero cause and to people’s confidence in this transition. We should therefore be very circumspect on this levy provision; we should be narrowing its application and slowing it down. I hope
that the Government will consider this, because I am sure they have read the science and understand the physics as well as everybody else. It really ought to be limited.