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Energy Bill

I want to make a few brief remarks on this subject. I have had many struggles with Ofgem over the years on the question of transmission charges. I genuinely welcome the amendments, which move things forward a little, particularly on up-front charges and the ridiculous situation with people having to wait years for connections. I continue to have concerns, particularly about Ofgem's state of mind on locational charging and economic theory. That was always frustrating when discussing transmission charges and connection charges with it. Earlier I mentioned the possible development of the Pentland firth and the need to strengthen the grid overall. I am not sure that Ofgem, even with this proposal, has the mindset to do that. I say that because I well remember the last Energy Bill, during whose passage there was a lot of discussion about capping charges for access to the grid. At the end of the day, a clause was inserted into the Bill to allow one area to have capped charges. It was widely assumed at that time we were talking about the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. However, it was only the islands of Scotland on which the price cap was placed; it did not really work, and Ofgem continued on its own merry way. I am not clear from the amendments the basis on which the Secretary of State will intervene to deal with this point, or what advice he will take before doing so. Ofgem has tended to be the organisation that advised the Secretary of State of the actions he should take, so we seem to be getting into a slightly circular difficulty with that. The measure will also last for only two years. This is the same argument with the sunset clause on the capping charges, which allowed five years, if I remember correctly, for the first development that was capped, as it was very quickly on a sliding scale. I am not convinced that this proposal will get to the root of the problem. Having said that, I recognise that there are slight signs of change in Ofgem in recent months. I was slightly encouraged by its recent report on the energy companies, which was far from perfect but did finally show that it intended to take action on the scandal of prepayment meters. That suggests that Ofgem's mindset is beginning to change a little, but I would have liked to see something stronger to ensure that the grid was strengthened and our wide capacity for renewables would be able to connect to the grid quickly. I fear that that will be the bottleneck that will prevent the uptake of many renewable resources.