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Energy Bill [HL]

My Lords, as always, there have been some valuable contributions for which I am extremely grateful. To deal first with the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, it is clearly fundamental that there is transparency and independence, that the reputation of assessors is impeccable, and that we avoid the cowboy culture that could exist, and in certain parts of industry has existed, in the assessment work. That is fundamental to the confidence that consumers must have in the Green Deal. Therefore, we will set out in secondary legislation more detail of the standardised methodology, which will protect the consumer from the cowboy culture and any further abuse. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, whose thoughts on energy efficiency are extremely well known. We are extremely sympathetic to them. Unless we educate people to use less electricity, we will end up using more, and the quickest way to reduce consumption is by using less energy. A lot of the work that we are doing on smart meters in homes will give people an everyday assessment of what electricity they use in their homes. At times, they will find it quite frightening, as I do with my children, whom I have referenced before, when I point to the excellent device we have that is also extremely frightening. The noble Lord, and the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, rightly referred to the work that ACE has done, which we applaud and listen to in detail. It is fundamental that we develop a pattern of education so that energy use is reduced. We can readily identify that with the levers that we have available. In October of this year, we will produce our fourth carbon budget report, which will provide evidence of the cost-effectiveness of economy-wide packages under consideration. That report will continue. The costs and benefits to society of particular technologies are assessed through extensive consultation within industry, so a lot of information is provided to us from industry groups. In addition, we provide publications on carbon budgets, energy market reform, feed-in tariffs, CERTs and green deals, so a huge amount of information is provided, which helps us readily to assess the extent to which carbon production and energy use are being reduced.