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Energy Bill

I still come back to the point that I made earlier: noble Lords may have been lobbied, but they should ask the people doing the lobbying how they want to do things. We no longer live in a state capitalist society where the Government lay down doctrines. They may lay down doctrines about safety and supply, but not about detailed issues of the kind suggested. At the moment, as far as I understand it, the Energy Retail Association is at sixes and sevens on this, not because the Government have not told it what to do, but because the individual utilities cannot decide on the priorities or the kit, and at this stage they cannot make a unified expression of opinion to the Government about what they recognise as the best kit. I have been extremely inadequately lobbied by some of these people. The Government may well have to grab them by the scruff of the neck, but plucking figures out of the air at this stage is very dangerous. Equally, we have to have an idea of whether we are doing gas and electricity and whether people want workmen traipsing through their homes to do both at one time, which will have to be the case in a number of houses. If we are enjoying the benefits and discounts of dual billing, I imagine people would like to have both meters smart simultaneously, but I am not sure whether gas is as easy to be smart with as electricity. This subject is a lot more complicated than this rather simplistic amendment suggests, particularly when neither opposition party has taken the trouble to try to give us any quantification of the scale of the exercise. We have been told that 7,000 may be possible a day. That is fine, but it is incumbent on them to deal with the quantum of this problem in a rather better organised way than they did in support of an amendment of this kind. In itself, it may be desirable, but in its present form it is not nearly well enough argued and does not have the specifics that we require.