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Energy Bill

It is an interesting question whether correspondence between a department and the Information Commissioner is releasable, but I will certainly do everything I can. One can always appeal to the Information Commissioner, I suppose. I will certainly get as much information as I can to the noble Lord. I assume that when someone is broadly content it means that they are happy with the principle but probably want reassurance on some of the detail, but I will confirm that with him. Moving on to the joyous question of Ofgem, I hope my remarks about Ofgem are always considered to be uncontroversial. I thought the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, put it right. Clearly, there is a major debate to be had about where we need to go in terms of regulation and the kind of market that we need to see in operation over the next two or three decades. It is clear that the political parties have views on this and I suspect that whoever is in the Department of Energy and Climate Change post-election will possibly be seeking a first-session Energy Bill in which these issues may well be discussed. I appreciated the comments of my noble friend Lord O’Neill about the regulatory mechanism and I should like to make two points. First, the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said, has some sensible measures in relation to Ofgem which I believe we should accept. Secondly, the work that we are doing with the energy market assessment, looking at future market arrangements, will provide the basis for coming to a view about the regulatory arrangements we need to have in future. I will make one point to the party opposite in view of its own paper. There is always going to be a price to intervention. We have to be careful not to inhibit investment by the companies in this sector because, one way or another, we need billions of pounds of investment to take place now and to increase steadily over the next few years. We come to the two final areas. First, my noble friend Lord Judd has persuasively put the case for environmental issues to be considered alongside energy issues. I do not disagree with him at all. In essence my department, in accepting the responsibility for climate change and energy, understands those goals and the tensions that sometimes arise between them. However, as for protecting consumers as the grid infrastructure is developed—the noble Lord mentioned the national parks and so on—what I would say to him goes back to our debates on the national policy statements. It is clear that many of these proposals will go for consent to the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which will have to take local impacts into consideration. I am sure that the commission will pay close attention to my noble friend.