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Energy Bill

My Lords, I speak briefly in my capacity as chairman of the Delegated Powers Committee. The amendments before your Lordships’ House today contain a number of important delegated powers that did not appear at earlier stages of the Bill. Amendment No. 47, in particular, contains some important powers, as do a number of amendments in other groups. There is, unfortunately, no report from the Delegated Powers Committee on the amendments because of the short time between their publication and Third Reading. To obtain a report from the committee, it would therefore have been necessary to call an emergency meeting to consider them. After consultation with the legal adviser and the Clerk to the committee, I concluded that it was unlikely that the committee would have objected to any of these powers had it met, and it was therefore not essential to call such a meeting. However, it is undesirable that that should have happened. Had the committee had the time to do so, it would certainly have considered these amendments. Therefore, while I understand the special circumstances applying to them, I make it clear that the committee regards this as neither desirable in principle, nor an appropriate precedent.