Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. I thought the intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, was very interesting. I very much take his point about the precautionary principle. A degree of proportionality is required by our regulators in the way they operate. One of the concerns that I and a number of noble Lords have is whether the current regulators are up for the kind of dynamic change we need in the way they perform, and that is really why there are concerns around Part 3. There are concerns from people very concerned about nature protection, which I well understand. Equally, my concern is that we are putting a hell of a lot of responsibility on Natural England in relation to EDPs. The way I read it, this Bill is largely written around housing requirements, and I can see how EDPs can apply to housing, particularly if you have a number of housing developments within a particular area. A pretty unknown quantity is how this is going to apply to major infrastructure projects as well—but I take the noble Lord’s point. The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, is absolutely right. We are taking a punt on CCUS. I am confident about it. His Government continued the work in this area. I think we see in Norway enough to suggest that we can pull this off. The potential for the UK here is enormous, in terms of both our approach to climate change and decarbonisation and the huge export potential. On the wording of the Bill, I have checked the Planning Act, and in Section 14 there is an order-making power for the Secretary of State that I think can deal with the flexibilities around the length of the pipeline. I should say, as I took the energy bits of that Act through your Lordships’ House, that I feel a particular affinity towards that perfectly formed legislation. I am grateful to the Minister, because clearly he and his officials are having a look at this. I noted that he did not think much of my Amendment 91, so I will have to go away and reflect on that. I think his main argument was “We don’t really think this is a problem, but we will have a look at it”. My intelligence is that CCUS developers think it could be a problem. If we can iron out some of these things, which are really not mega-principal, that would be very helpful. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.