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Electricity Market Reform

We have been clear in the White Paper on electricity market reform published today that we want to encourage demand-side response. My hon. Friend makes the good point that, in an ideal world, we would move beyond the temporary switching off of demand in order to close the gap between demand and supply and adopt the practice of paying people to reduce overall demand at all times. We are working on that, and we show awareness of that matter in the White Paper. This is a holy grail, however, and we have not yet found a way of doing that without opening up the possibility of wholesale fraud and other problems, but it is a good, interesting idea and we would like to look at it further.