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Energy Bill [Lords]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), who has made a thoughtful contribution to the debate. He has underlined a number of the issues that I want to raise in connection with the Bill and the green deal. It is extremely important that the green deal should work well, so it must be as good as it possibly can be when the Bill completes its passage through Parliament. That is important because of the ambition that we must have for energy efficiency, whether through ““negawatt”” arrangements or other forms of energy management and energy saving. We must have the best and most energy-efficient housing stock that we can bring about. That is an essential part of our climate change action, and our action on energy management and the achievement of the CO2 emissions targets set out by the Committee on Climate Change. Achieving that will involve an ambitious programme, and as a mechanism, the green deal is certainly ambitious. Indeed, the Minister himself said last summer that by 2050, as a result of the green deal, houses would not have to be visited more than once to assess their energy efficiency. That is the kind of ambition that we need for the green deal; we need to make it work as well as it can. My worry is that as matters stand, many things are missing from that ambition. That is what we need to concentrate on in Committee, so that when the Bill is enacted, the import of the 50-odd pieces of secondary legislation that have yet to be written, let alone enacted, will be much clearer. We shall also need to ensure that that secondary legislation provides the mechanisms to make the green deal work well. I was pleased to hear this afternoon that among other things, the Government are not now intending to proceed with clause 105, which at the moment proposes the repeal of the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 in its entirety. I would welcome an intervention from the Minister to confirm that that entire clause will now disappear and not go forward into Committee or beyond. Is that right?