---

Energy Bill [Lords]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I want to assure the Minister and all hon. Members present that I have no intention of talking the measures down. What I want is realism about their likelihood of success. Polls are polls—they are what people say about their future action, but I am not trying to present such evidence. I am simply asking hon. Members to look at what people are doing at the moment. They have the opportunity now to take out money on their mortgages and do exactly what the green deal is offering but at a lower rate of interest, and very few people are doing that. I do not want to talk this down, but I do want realism. One has to look at this issue in the context of the Government's overall policies. Of course, it is right that we should look at efficiency savings and energy reduction, but look at the cuts to the Carbon Trust: they do not sit easily with a Government policy of rigid focus on energy reduction. One of the premier schemes, which has been in place for a long time, is being cut. Look at the carbon reduction commitment—a very good scheme that was initiated a couple of years ago to incentivise businesses to lower their carbon emissions, which was welcomed by the CBI and the Institute of Directors. A billion-pound saving was going to be made and then recycled into those businesses. It was revenue neutral. What did the Government do? They came in and said, ““Thanks very much. We'll have that billion pounds. We won't recycle it into business.”” They did two things: they destroyed the incentives that the businesses had in the first place to reduce their carbon footprint, and they also destroyed the trust that business had in the Government not changing the goalposts. One of fundamentals that we have heard throughout our debate today is the importance of maintaining a stable investment framework going forward. I appeal to the Government to think about everything they said in opposition about stable fiscal regimes and the need for certainty for business. Their actions in government have gone against that. The hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo), the Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, made the point forcefully when he talked about the changes to the solar PV scheme. The important thing is not the changes themselves. It is understandable why those changes were made. The Government did not wish to see businesses profiting from the scheme that was intended primarily to be a domestic or small-scale scheme. That is not the issue. The issue is that they changed the goalposts and destroyed the confidence that business investors had in that area. That is what the Government are doing. The Bill calls itself an Energy Bill. I am afraid that does not sit well with a coherent energy policy. If this were an Energy Bill, it would address energy much more in terms of electricity market reforms—again, those were referred to by the Chairman of the Select Committee. We should be looking at what sort of structure there is to the energy market in this country. We have a vertical integration of generator and supplier that is destroying the attempts to bring renewables into the mix, yet the four pillars of the Government's proposals leave that market intact. It is not a reform of the electricity market; it is tinkering around the edges. What is needed is a genuine reform of that market. That is what the Government are not doing. What is needed is a move to a pooled supply where it can be seen that companies are selling in a transparent and liquid market. At present it is an illiquid market which lacks transparency. That is why the big six are able to rip people off. The Government must do much more to claim that the Bill is an Energy Bill. They must have an energy policy, and the Bill shows that they do not. They are tinkering. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The Government are fiddling while the planet does.