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Energy Bill

I welcome the amendment, partly because of some of the other aspects that it could represent. From these Benches, we entirely agree with transparency and with taxpayers paying their taxes indirectly, for whatever reason, being a good principle. Almost going back to an amendment tabled previously by the noble Baroness, I say that, if this amendment is accepted, we should clearly have until at least 2012 a declaration on the bill of how much consumers are charged extra for the windfall profits made from the free allocation of their EU ETS carbon units. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s present estimate of the windfall profit rate for energy companies under the EU ETS. Once we move towards a full auctioning process for them, the need would clearly disappear, but there needs to be transparency both ways in the area. We look forward to the list also including the feed-in tariff that we fully hope will be a part of the Bill when it becomes an Act. The only thing that slightly worries me here is that, when there is a differentiation between actual cost and the taxes above and when one is looking at comparative tables, one could always be in the Ryanair position of companies declaring their costs and taxes separately and switching to the other figure in their marketing. Maybe that is just a malaise of the cheap airline industry. In general, we welcome this, but windfall profits by energy companies need to be part of this equation.