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Energy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I rise to support the principle behind the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall. I am not sure that the wording is easy to follow because it starts with the term ““fiscal instruments””. The noble Lord went on to talk about a lot of the things that are leading to increased energy prices. He referred to the document put out by the department last summer showing the impact of policies on prices. Most things that have an impact on prices are not fiscal instruments in the way that you would customarily describe them in the sense of specific moneys going in or out of the Treasury. They are items that are borne by the energy companies and passed on to consumers. At the heart of what the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, was talking about is an important issue: there is a complete lack of transparency on the impact of the Government’s various energy policies and the way in which they impose costs on the energy sector, which are in consequence passed on to consumers. It is important that we have greater transparency. In our previous day in Committee, I was trying to do the impossible thing of being in two places at the same time. While I was in the Chamber for the Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill, I missed being able to speak to my Amendment 30A in Committee. I will not go into it in detail, but that amendment was about transparency in how the costs of the energy company obligation will fall on consumers via tariffs. That is just one part of the whole picture that the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, has tried to describe. I believe that it is important that we find a way of communicating how these various costs flow through to consumers and especially, as the noble Lord said, to particular categories of consumers. That is not easy to do. The figures produced by the Department of Energy and Climate Change make some heroic assumptions about energy consumption, which tend to disguise what is happening. However, there is a case for regularly producing a comprehensive statement on how these costs are flowing through to consumers and their impact on different types of consumers. We also need some way of getting the debate into the public domain. While the former is complicated, the latter is very difficult, because it is hard to mount conversations based on complex economic interactions. However, I think that that is worth trying. An important gap in all the policies that have come forward to date is the lack of transparency about this one important fact, which is that it is consumers who are paying for the vast majority of the policies that have been pursued around energy, renewables and so on. That subject is seriously underdebated in our society. I support the principle behind the amendments, but I am not sure that I can quite sign up to them.