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Energy Bill

I am grateful for the Minister’s offer to write a letter. He said that there would be nothing to add, but I it would be very helpful to have a proper statement from the Government setting out why they cannot give the same kind of support to the coal bed methane industry in this country as the German Government have for some years given to the industry in Germany. With regard to the link between the consumer’s bill and the source of the energy, I have never understood—I have never gone for it myself because I think that it has always been slightly bogus—how people can opt to buy electricity from a green source by paying a bit more. I do not know how it works, but if gas is going to enter a gas grid, it should be perfectly possible to deal with it in exactly the same way as electricity being fed into the electricity grid. I have to say that I feel that the noble Lord has not so much scraped the barrel as he has scraped what in polite society I should not repeat. The arguments simply do not add up. It is the same old story that we have seen in Bill after Bill, of desperately trying to protect the narrow field of activity that qualifies for the ROC. In an earlier Bill I described that as losing sight of the objective and concentrating on the means. The means and the objective are being confused. The objective is to reduce carbon and to supply energy, it is not to protect an artificial concept like ROCs. This is where the Government really have gone quite sadly wrong.