---

Energy Bill

I should like to add my tributes to those that have already been made. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson)—my good friend, whose roof turbines will no doubt be spinning tonight—and to the Secretary of State, who has shown a real willingness to engage in the argument and see off some of the lobbying from vested interests. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South said, it is clear that some of that lobbying has sought to keep other people out of this gravy train. That is reprehensible. I also pay tribute to the Opposition, whose opinion poll lead has dropped to a mere three points in the past few days. Even now, however, they are urging us on to get a vote-winning formula ready by 2010. The subtitle of our manifesto might be ““Power to the people””, and we should be grateful to the Opposition for urging us to have the measures in place in time for the next general election. I am sure that it will be a great vote winner. I want to be brief, but I should make a couple of small declarations of interest. I am a very small investor in the Westmill wind farm co-operative in Oxfordshire, and I am a customer of Good Energy Group plc. Thinking of small businesses and small concerns makes me ask about the specified maximum capacity. We should use the correct language. It is not really a threshold; it might be one for the renewables obligation, but it is not the threshold for the feed-in tariff, which is probably half a kilowatt. The specified maximum capacity is an issue. I support the fact that we have travelled a great distance; before the summer recess, we were considering one hundredth of the generating capacity as a maximum, but now the figure has multiplied by 100, which is a great step forward. My question relates to small businesses that may want to generate renewable electricity, but find a glass ceiling. What do they do when they get to 5 MW? Will they have to split off into separate entities to avoid the bureaucracy, which would be an additional—not a separate or replacement—burden? When they get to that maximum capacity, they will have to consider seriously what they do with their business, and that could mean a limit on their expansion. That will happen in the early stages, because we are just starting out on this process. I support having no specified maximum capacity for a feed-in tariff, but since we are having one, we need to consider what happens to businesses as a result.