---

Energy Bill

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: After Clause 3, insert the following new Clause— ““Annual gas storage report The Secretary of State shall make an annual report to Parliament giving an assessment of the appropriate volume of onshore gas storage to ensure long-term energy security and to set out the progress that has been made towards reaching that target.”” The noble Baroness said: I am happy to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Davies, to the arena. I understand that he was involved in the Energy Bill the previous time round and therefore brings great experience to our discussion today and throughout the days that we are without the noble Lord, Lord Jones, who is not well. We wish him well and hope to see him soon but, for the mean time, it is very nice to have such a heavyweight team to give in to all our amendments today. Much of the Second Reading was spent discussing many crucial clauses that are not in the Bill. We seek to address that at the appropriate time. Meanwhile, we must not lose necessary additions or take our eye off what is in the Bill. What is in the Bill is, by and large, welcome and essential. We assure noble Lords that we do not intend to prevent the Bill proceeding through this House in a timely fashion. In order for it to do so we hope that noble Lords will join their open-minded scrutiny efforts with those of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition to improve what is in the Bill. No single piece of legislation explicitly provides a framework for offshore gas supplies. We welcome an attempt by the Government to redress this issue. Gas storage is of crucial importance and was not debated comprehensively enough in another place. The UK is the third largest consumer of gas behind the United States and Russia. Recently we have become a net importer of gas and what we import seems likely to constitute half our supply by 2010. This has a substantial impact on our security of supply. As our dependence on foreign supply increases, so does our inability to meet our own demand. With any interruption to the flow in the interconnector, combined with a spike in demand in, say, a particularly cold winter, there is an increasing risk that there will be interruptions in supply. Gas storage is the obvious way to combat this problem. Thus, it is welcome that the Bill provides for it. Yet what remains unclear is precisely how much is necessary. This amendment does what it says on the tin. It would place a duty on the Secretary of State annually to assess how much gas will need to be stored in order to avert such interruptions and make certain that we can provide long-term energy security. This is as self-explanatory as it is necessary. After assessing the appropriate need for storage, this report would outline what is being done to meet the appropriate volume or storage and what still needs to be done to ensure that we have energy security. The amendment hits right at the heart of what many of the Bill's provisions are trying to address: the future of the United Kingdom's energy supply. If we are to understand how we can keep Britain warm and illuminated, we must start with an assessment of the required effort. I beg to move.