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Energy Bill [HL]

My Lords, whether or not the Minister accepts the amendment, it is clearly an issue because there are curmudgeonly tenants and curmudgeonly landlords. The Minister’s understanding of the amendment in Committee and the way in which my noble friend Lord Davies has explained it today will arise. Whether or not she accepts that this provision should be in the Bill, the reality is that the basic concept of the Green Deal is that you pay back through the energy bill, yet the person actually making the improvements, or paying for the improvements in the first place in the normal sense of the word, might do so as part of a general improvement plan. It might be the landlord when the tenant pays the bill, or it might well be the tenant who wants to see these improvements and the landlord pays the bill, whether or not that bill is then re-charged to the tenant. So you have some complicated arrangements here. One of the reasons why this matter is important is that the private rented sector has the least energy-efficient building structurally and has the highest incidence of fuel poverty proportionately. Therefore—I go back to my earlier point—before we launch this we need to have these things sorted out. I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, says: that in a sense we do not want to appear to be holding a dagger to the throat of whoever is taking these decisions, or whoever is being curmudgeonly in his terms, but we need a way around this problem. I am not sure I have heard from the Minister yet that we have a way around this problem. Hopefully by the time she produces regulations, we will at least have the outline of a way around this problem, and, as I say, if it is not solved in the private rented sector, then a whole part of the potential benefits of this Bill will be lost.