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Energy Bill [HL]

My Lords, first, I declare an interest because, in the course of advising people on corporate responsibility, that can hardly be done without talking to quite a number of businesses that at some stage may be involved in this process—and not only the businesses, but the people. That enables one to ask the Minister to be extremely careful about a long list of appropriately ticked-off equipment. This is an area of fast-moving innovation. I have to tell the Minister that, in the work which I do professionally, one of the most difficult things is to keep up in this particular area, so rapid is the development. One of the problems that any of us who work in this kind of area face is the way that government legislation can hold up the market, stop development, and make it more difficult for new things to come forth. I understand that we have to have a balance, and to stop people installing the wrong thing, the bad thing, the thing that does not do what it says. However, I beg her to look extremely carefully at the mechanism, so that it encourages innovation and makes it possible for new products to come onto the market rapidly, some of which will be cheaper and better able to meet the needs of the Green Deal. We need to have a system which does not inhibit the very necessary innovation which in part will be driven by the Green Deal. We do not want to have a situation in which the Green Deal is driving that innovation, and then find that people cannot meet the requirements because it takes six months to get it on the list, or because there is some technical reason why you cannot get it on the list. There are so many examples today of things which would do very well if we had not passed some regulation, when nobody knew how to do this, so that the new product cannot actually be recommended. There is a second thing that I hope the Minister will think of, though this is not the appropriate place for her to put it. I am always worried when we talk about products without talking about people. You can have the best products in the world, but a cack-handed involvement in them will result in a worse position than the one you started off with. I discovered this from my professional work, in this case, when we did some work with plumbers. The fact is that there are no regulations ensuring that plumbers can be competent. You could have a product under this legislation which would be perfectly well ticked off, but a plumber doing the work could make it absolutely impossible to operate it as the rules and the certification would suggest. This is an appropriate moment to say to the Minister that I hope very much that, in considering the products and making sure that they are suitable, we remember that products need installation. The installers must in fact be capable of installing them properly, or all the regulations on products in the world will not deliver the goods. I hope that the Minister will ensure that, when her civil servants are looking at this, they will see these two things together. They have to be part and parcel of the same mechanism, and that mechanism must not in any way inhibit the innovation which I very much hope will be the result of this legislation.