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Energy Bill [Lords]

[Interruption.] I was not anticipating such a rapid end to that important contribution. I am grateful to hon. Members for participating in the debate. I was surprised by how many people paid tribute to the Government for listening so hard and making changes—I almost started to wonder whether we had done too much of it. Nevertheless, we remain firmly of the view that the Bill is better as a result of the changes made. I give particular credit to the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) for his work with the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies), and I thank them both for their constructive engagement in getting us to where we are, which, as I said, is better than where we started. It is perhaps an early birthday present for the hon. Member for Southampton, Test—I believe that his birthday is tomorrow—and the House can celebrate by recognising his contribution. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Cathy Jamieson) for her comments about the changes that we have made to HECA. Listening to the discussions on the Opposition Benches about how best to address these matters in Scotland, I felt like we were intruding on family grief. However, I have no intention of doing that because they are matters that will properly be resolved by the Scottish Government. Nevertheless, we have to accept that the legislative consent motion is essentially an on/off switch. One either has to have HECA or get rid of it; one cannot have a little bit of HECA or have a different element within it. My understanding from our discussions with the Scottish Government is that they want to address these issues differently and using different mechanisms. We absolutely respect their right to make those decisions, and the changes in the Bill will simply make that possible. The bulk of this debate inevitably focused on the nuclear clauses. The hon. Members for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), for Angus (Mr Weir) and I will never agree on the principles of nuclear, but we all want to make sure that if nuclear power stations are built in the United Kingdom in the future, that should be genuinely without subsidy and we should have extremely strict controls on decommissioning, safety and a range of other issues. There is also a fundamental disagreement between us. We recognise that if investors are to have confidence in the decommissioning programmes, they must feel certain that those programmes cannot be changed at will or on a whim by the Secretary of State at some subsequent date. That was the flaw in the earlier legislation, which we are trying to address. It gave a power at any time for the then Secretary of State to say, ““We're going to change these rules,”” and there would have been no right for a company which thought it had a commitment and an agreed programme to resist that. What we sought to do, and what I hope we have achieved, is to agree the right balance between the powers of the Secretary of State and the guarantees and undertakings necessary for the companies involved.