---

Energy Bill

Purely to help the Minister—and I am certain that this will come back—I am afraid that he puts up a poor argument. The notion that you can somehow conveniently subdivide the political, economic and social concerns of a regulator has been blown away in the past few years. I ask the Minister and his officials to look carefully at the legislation under which Ofcom was formed. It was fought over extremely bitterly in both Houses. As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, will remember, it was forced upon the Government. It has been an enormous success. It was held that we were creating an impossible problem for Ofcom by bringing citizen and consumer interests together. It has worked perfectly well. The noble Lord spoke of tensions; any self-respecting regulator in the 21st century must look at the inevitable tensions between the social, the economic and the political. To describe that as an inappropriate job for a regulator would be quite wrong. Sooner or later, it will happen. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, is correct: something like this will find its way in on Report. The Government will be forced to deal with it in a Division, and do themselves no favours by hiding behind the notion that, somehow, a banner saying ““Invest with confidence”” is sufficient to blow every other consideration and every debate we have had in Grand Committee out of the water. There are enormous considerations, and the regulator should be apprised and made responsible for, at least, advising the Government on getting through some difficult times. Finally, Members of the Committee have spoken about regulatory and investor uncertainty. Nothing can create more investor uncertainty than the possibility of a new Government coming in with a new energy policy. The notion of an empowered regulator with a settled set of views would promote investor confidence far more than anything else I can think of.