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Energy Bill

I also convey my best wishes to the noble Lord, Lord Jones of Birmingham, and hope that he can join us fairly soon. I shall touch on the last topic—the question of capacity payments, forecasts and so on. I remember a few years ago, even when we still had 100 per cent North Sea gas supplies, which were clearly running out, one of our energy reviews under Brian Wilson was very dismissive of the need for storage and intervention. That is not that many years ago. I agree with my noble friend Lord O'Neill that government forecasts of demand have never been right. The very first conference that I attended as a young economist was one forecasting the demand on the supply of coal. The amount of coal that the UK was forecast to need to produce turned out to be massively wrong—and it did every time that the coal industry was reviewed. However, the issue of capacity payment is a real one, and the value of these coal amendments is that they enable us to discuss important questions, rather than the particular wording itself. Are the Government of the view that the marketplace and the market mechanism will be adequate to provide enough storage or do they, given the experience of recent years, feel that some kind of non-market mechanism, such as a capacity payment, might be needed? Is that at all under consideration or review? That would be helpful to know.