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Energy Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to those who spoke in the debate and for the Minister’s reply, which was not wholly unhelpful. We have to debate this while being uncertain how this flexibility, which the Minister has mentioned several times, will actually work. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, asked for a bit more detail and was promptly chased off the patch altogether, albeit in polite parliamentary language. That is what makes this difficult. The Minister’s paper, which he kindly circulated a day or two ago, says that, "““if the evidence points to a lower limit, we will have the necessary powers to set a lower limit for onshore wind””—" but where and for whom, and how will people know what it is? There is bound to be a period of consultation and therefore a period of considerable uncertainty. My fear is that, at a juncture where great efforts are being made through the planning system to overcome planning obstacles such as the grid-link systems—I have had the same paper from Ofgem that was quoted from earlier in the debate, and one does of course hope that some of the larger schemes in the pipeline will come forward—this level will create a grey area of overlap between the operation of the RO and the feed-in tariff, thereby encouraging gaming, as it is called, where people try to juggle between the two. They may wait until a feed-in tariff becomes operative so that they get the benefit of it and in the mean time delay their investment. We shall simply have to wait and see. I hope that we have sufficiently aired the problems that the Government face. I am grateful for the Minister’s earlier offer to keep in touch with those who have spoken on this matter so that we may take part in the consultation, which I am sure will be helpful, but I am genuinely anxious, as I have said. The purpose of the amendment was to flush out a bit more of the Government’s thinking, which the Minister was good enough to provide. Therefore, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment No.44, as an amendment to Amendment No. 29, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 45, as an amendment to Amendment No. 29, not moved.]