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UK Government's Energy Policy

I am pleased that I allowed the Secretary of State to intervene—I always am—because she has said something interesting. She appears to be saying that, if a private consortium—I have met a number of them and it sounds as though she has, too—approaches the Government and says, ““We can build this with the private funds we have already accumulated,”” they will back it, but what I hear from those investors is that they will not be able to get absolute certainty unless they have the Government’s backing in principle. Far from backing in principle, all the Government have given us is obfuscation and all sorts of excuses and reasons why we cannot proceed. If the Secretaries of State for Wales and for Energy and Climate Change had said last year, ““We can’t put any public money into this, but we will give it backing to get through the planning process,”” rather than kicking the issue into the long grass and effectively destroying its prospects, I think that investors would have been queuing up to build. The Government did not say that. Is the Welsh Secretary now changing her position, with a nod and a wink from the Energy Minister, and saying that the Government want the Severn barrage to be built and are giving it all the backing they can?