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As amended in the Standing Committee, further considered.

I absolutely agree, Madam Deputy Speaker, but you will have noticed that subsection (3) of Government amendment No. 52 says that maximum capacity in relation to the generation of electricity is 50kW; in other words, the equivalent of a windmill 50 times the size of the one that the Minister is going to have on his house or of 50 windmills of that size in the Minister’s garden. The Minister laughs, but in doing so he is probably trying to ridicule the notion that that amount of generating power in a domestic garden could be regarded as microgeneration, and that, of course, is exactly my point. Why are we allowing the definition of microgeneration to include units that generate up to 50kW of electricity—more than 50 times what is needed for the Minister’s house and more than 100 times, indeed 125 times, what is needed for the house of my right hon. Friend? When we start talking about microgeneration of up to 50kW, we are talking about very big developments—enormous windmills or whole series of windmills. Why should microgeneration be deemed to include electricity generation 50 times or more what an individual household needs? I cannot understand that. I support the principle of microgeneration and the idea of reducing the need for the national grid to operate and allowing more energy production to be, I think the expression is, decentralised. I cannot for the life of me see that if a household chooses to put up to 50kW of electricity-generating capacity in the garden or on the house that should be described as microgeneration. I am disappointed that the Minister, when he came to look at the contents of the Energy Act 2004 and redrafted its provisions in the amendments that we now see before us, stuck to the figure of 50kW. I hope that he will explain how 50kW can genuinely be called, in popular parlance, microgeneration. I hope that my Front-Bench colleagues will think about this subject because if we are to get public support for decentralised power production, surely we need to gain the confidence of the general public. If somebody living, for example, in a seafront bungalow in Bexhill in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), could put up 50 windmills in their garden on the basis that it would be microgeneration and then sell almost all that surplus electricity into the national grid, and their neighbours could do the same thing, my hon. Friend would find that Bexhill, far from being a very attractive retirement area with south-facing views over the channel, would basically become an industrial landscape.