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Energy Bill

I do not propose to take lessons from the noble Lord on how to win elections. I listened with fascination to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. I remember the exchanges we had at Question Time in 2007 to which he referred. I continue to get, through various blogs, all sorts of information about what is going on out there on the underground gasification of coal. Like him, I am astonished that there seems to be so little official interest in this. One of the things I remember from our earlier exchanges is that his miners do not want to go underground again. Underground gasification of coal is the way to exploit those energy resources, without the kind of problems which faced miners going underground. A Second Reading debate is a temptation to embark on a tour d’horizon of energy policy across the board. After all, we have now had three hard-hitting reports, all of which have claimed, with some justification and much force, that the Government’s energy policy is failing. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Minister’s favourite regulator, Ofgem, have all demanded that there has to be a much more structured and clear policy for energy in this country. The House will be relieved to know that I shall resist the temptation, partly because we were engaged in nearly 12 hours of debate in Grand Committee on the national policy statements, but mainly because it would not be appropriate at this hour. All I will say is that the Bill makes precious little progress towards that kind of reform of energy policy which this country so desperately needs. Unlike most of the other speakers in this debate so far, I am going to talk about the Bill, which contains two issues that need to be examined. The first is carbon capture and storage. Again, we discussed this at some length on 11 March in Grand Committee. The Bill creates the mechanism by which the demonstration projects—I believe that they are still called that—will be financed. However, it is a sad story of dither and delay. As my noble friend on the Front Bench said, we do not know about these schemes of assistance. Everything will be set out in regulations, of which we have not yet seen any drafts, and there is no estimate of cost. What we have got in the past few days—indeed, since the last time the Minister addressed us in Grand Committee—is an indication of some of the companies that may well be taking part in this competition. From the press release issued by the department on 17 March, we know that Scottish Power, with its project at Longannet, is certainly one of them and that Scottish and Southern at Ferrybridge in Yorkshire may be another. Then there is the E.ON project at Kingsnorth in Kent. Some of these are described as having got to the stage of front end engineering studies. I am not quite sure what that means, but it does not sound very well advanced. The most alarming statement I have seen recently was in a very well informed article in the Guardian. It said that there was a competition for contenders and that, ""no winner will be announced until next year"." Has the Guardian journalist got it right? Is it true that we will not know anything until next year, 2011? Perhaps the Minister will be able to give us an answer. Part 2 of the Bill covers schemes for reducing fuel poverty. I, too, agree with every other speaker that this is a very important part of the Bill. However, I have some questions and have given the Minister notice that I wish to raise them. The House will remember the background; under the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, as the Minister mentioned, 11 million households would be helped with loft and cavity wall insulation. Right from the beginning, it troubled me how the companies were to know who they were supposed to help. I remember an exchange across the Floor of the House with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who was quite unable to tell us. The companies had to go on a fishing expedition, knocking at doors, trying to find out who had not had the work done and who was entitled under programmes such as Warm Front. It was extraordinary. We started with the Pensions Act 2008 and its regulations, which we debated in Grand Committee last January, where there was a tiny first step of data sharing between the Government and the energy companies relating to people who were entitled to the guaranteed element of pension credit. The noble Lord has no doubt studied it: it is a very small part of the 11 million households that are supposed to be benefiting from those programmes. Of course the problem has always been the data protection legislation and the fact that people do not like to think that somebody will knock on their door saying, "You’re poor and we’re here to help you". That I can totally understand. However, when I raised this in debate on 26 January, I asked why these new regulations were okay so far as data protection was concerned whereas everything that went before was not okay. What was the difference? It is very relevant to Part 2 of this Bill, because here again we are going to have data sharing. Why is that all right under the data protection legislation, while the earlier, more ambitious schemes clearly fell foul? Clause 9(5) spells out: ""A support scheme may in particular provide for scheme customers to be determined in any of the following ways—""by reference to membership of, or to family or other relationship to a member of, a fuel poverty risk group;""(b) by scheme suppliers;""(c) by, or by reference to evidence provided by, the Secretary of State"." It is that third one where one comes back again to this issue of data sharing. I have had a couple of letters from the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton—I will not quote them at this hour of the night—who took those regulations through Grand Committee. He has made the point that, if you are having an automatic benefit such as the rebate provided for under this Bill, then you can perfectly safely exchange the information, or share the data, across. If you are merely asking people whether they want something—whether they want their house fitted with roof insulation, for example—then you cannot. I totally fail to understand why that makes a difference. The Minister also said that the Information Commissioner was broadly satisfied. I am not sure what that means. I asked to see the correspondence; I should have put in a Freedom of Information request, but I did not. Why? What change has he made? How can it possibly be right to share data freely with energy supplying companies for the purposes of the rebates under this Bill when it clearly was not right to share data for the benefit of the CERT scheme under the previous legislation. I hope that the Minister will be able to answer that question. Finally, when one turns to Part 3 of the Bill, with the amendments on the duties of Ofgem, my initial reaction was to say that both major parties are now committed to substantial changes in the role and remit of Ofgem. We may hear something about this in the Budget tomorrow—I do not know. We certainly have the statement in the Times by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, spelling out very clearly that it needed to be substantially changed. As our policy statement says, the Conservative Party agrees with that. We are arguing for a substantial change there. Therefore my first reaction was to say, "Do we really want to go fiddling around with these details now, when we are going to have legislation in any event, whoever becomes the Government, which is going to make major changes to the remit of Ofgem?" However, having studied the details of the Bill and talked about it, I think there are things in Part 3 which do seem sensible. It is right to give Ofgem these new powers, even if they may shortly be overtaken by others. In particular, I would mention the new power to modify the market power licence conditions spelled out in Clauses 18 to 23 and, perhaps even more important, the power to adjust charges to help disadvantaged groups of customers. It is quite complicated; explanations can be found on pages 27 to 28 of the Explanatory Memorandum. I certainly will not take up the time of the House reading all that out. We are not going to have a Committee stage on this Bill other than in the wash-up. That seems to be inevitable, which is why I said to the Minister earlier today that it was going to be a pretty funny Second Reading. I have some amendments to Part 3 that I would have liked to have moved; whether we shall have a chance, I do not know. On balance, I think that Part 3 should go through to the wash-up and that the Bill should eventually become law, albeit in a very short timescale. It has been properly debated in the other place—there is no question about that. They had a good go at it, and if we do not have a go at it, I think there will be opportunities in future energy legislation very soon after the election. I have asked two straightforward questions. First, is it right that we are not going to see a winner to the CCS competitions until next year? Secondly, why is it that the data protection is okay for some purposes and not for others? I simply do not understand it.