---

Security of Supply

I am certainly a beacon of something, but I am not sure of what. I look forward to reading that report when it is published in due course. That brings me conveniently to my second point, which is that the Government could have done more to secure our existing energy sources. Given our heavy and increasing reliance on gas, surely alarm bells should have rung more loudly in Government when we became a net importer of gas in 2004. The UK continental shelf used to act as a strategic reserve for gas. That was a crucial national resource. The immediate supplies are no longer there. I should be fascinated to hear from the Minister what estimates his Department has made of the extra oil and gas there would have been from the North sea had they not been so heavily taxed, especially by a windfall tax. That means that our import capacity and storage facilities are now perilously inadequate. [Interruption.] I hear protests from Labour Members, but it is an elementary economic principle that if one thumps something with a tax, one gets less out of it. The representations that we have heard give clear calculations that there would be much more oil and gas coming out of the North sea if they were not so punitively taxed by the Chancellor. Paradoxically, we are highly dependent on gas, whose market structures are full of imperfections, and yet oil, so often labelled as a commodity controlled by a cartel, is in fact much more freely and flexibly traded in a much more free and transparent market. I caution the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Joan Walley) against railing against speculators as she did, and urge her to study the workings of energy markets the better to understand how prices are set. The thing about the free market is that that is not the case for gas, and that is our key electricity-generating fuel. The persistence of oil index pricing in the European market imposes costs to the tune of £10 billion a year on British consumers. The recent large increase in the price of gas on the continent has little to do with broad supply and demand issues for gas as a commodity, but rather derives from the more general problems in the European gas market. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) said earlier, the Government did nothing about that when they held the presidency of the Union. Moving on to my third point, we can improve our energy security position—