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Energy Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising the issue of taxation. That is a matter for the Treasury; it is a matter of fiscal policy, not a matter for tonight. My noble friend Lord Puttnam spoke about the public interest test. I welcome his contribution. He gave his apologies as he had to leave to attend an awards ceremony. I would welcome a meeting with him and my officials to see if we can achieve resolution of his justifiable concerns. The Government have recently examined existing powers for dealing with unattractive takeover situations of UK energy assets. We take the view that at the moment the powers in the Enterprise Act 2002 are sufficient. My noble friends Lord Hunt of Chesterton and Lord Birt asked what the Government are doing to roll out CCS internationally. We are very keen to support the EU’s ambition to have up to 12 demonstration projects operational across Europe by 2015. We intend our demonstration to be operational by 2014. We are the only country in the European Union right now to have one at all—the other two are in Norway and America. But we are working with our G8 counterparts to achieve the ambitious agreement arising from the G8 summit on CCS. We continue to drive that forward. We have created a North Sea basin task force in order to work closely with Norway to remove barriers to the deployment of CCS. We are looking particularly at storage in the North Sea. My noble friend Lord Hunt also asked who will be monitoring the leaks from any carbon dioxide stores. The operators will be monitoring while they are licensees; they will have the responsibility to monitor as they perform their obligations as licensees. But when the store is delicensed, the state will take it over and carry out any monitoring required. My noble friend also asked whether there should be an appeals procedure for the approval of any funded decommissioning programmes in nuclear. Our position is that judicial review is the best place to hear an appeal. People who sit on tribunals are used to hearing complex and technical cases. My noble friend Lord Whitty and the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, both spoke about microgeneration. There are about 100,000 microgeneration installations in the United Kingdom. We are committed to microgeneration: we published the microgeneration strategy in 2006; we have simplified RO for microgeneration; and we have introduced CERT to encourage energy suppliers to support microgeneration technologies. It has been announced that we will look at alternative support mechanisms to ensure that they can continue. I assure noble Lords that we will continue to put government money and initiative behind microgeneration. We have made £86 million available in capital grants in the low-carbon buildings programme to reduce the cost of buying and installing equipment; that is putting taxpayers’ money exactly where our mouth is. The noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, asked whether the Government have been approached by companies to demonstrate pre-combustion technologies for CCS, as opposed to post-combustion. There has been huge interest from companies for all sorts of CCS technologies. I have been particularly pleased in my job at UKTI to see so many companies from other countries wanting to come here, invest their money and bring their technology so that we can see both pre and post-combustion technology for CCS proceed. It has been pleasing to see what interest there is. While the Government are showing global leadership in supporting the demonstration of post-combustion on CCS technology, we hope that we can encourage more countries and companies to move on with pre-combustion as well. The noble Duke specifically asked whether the legislative consent Motion has been passed. The answer is no, but it is being considered later this month. In the interests of ensuring that noble Lords can at least catch the second half, I will undertake personally to get back to all other noble Lords who raised points. I will either have meetings with each of the interested parties or get my officials to come and meet people. This is an incredibly important issue. I have been going on about it for years. The business community has wanted leadership from politicians of all parties on this for a long time. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, ended her remarks at the start of the debate by saying that the lights are going out all over Britain. I assure her that they are not going out all over Britain. But they will go out if the politicians of all parties of this nation—and I include members of the Scottish National Party; the people of Scotland deserve better leadership than they are getting—do not pull together as one country. Our grandchildren would rue the day that we wasted the opportunity. I look forward to further detailed debate in Committee, and ask the House to give the Bill a Second Reading. On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Grand Committee.