Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)

My Lords, I am sure the Minister has noted that the Statement he has given us has a certain flavour of the 1960s about it, with the talk of harnessing the “white heat” of revolution, and all that, but from the point of view of those of us who went through that period, it might be helpful to know one or two of the things that went wrong, because it did not end terribly happily the last time we had this revolution of white heat. The problem then was that the Government’s PR people became a little too enthusiastic, and the Minister might discourage them today from phrases about seizing the future, embracing this, that and the other, and other generalities, of which there were plenty last time, but none of them led to the results that people wanted. There is a repeat of the old fallacy that the Government deliver growth. It does not. We know that the Government can facilitate growth and can stop growth, and certainly that has happened in the past, but the idea that the Government alone are somehow going to lead, rather than develop entirely new relationships with the private sector as the digital age demands, is one that needs to be examined carefully before the Government rush into more mistakes. There is another problem, which the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, reminded me of—it was not quite so intense then but it is intense now. This whole revolution and the data centres demand enormous amounts of electricity—far more than seems to be planned by the energy department. It talks about 200 gigawatts, moving up from 65 gigawatts, but data centres can drink whole communities’ electricity, just like that. The Statement mentioned 500 megawatts, but we are really talking about gigawatts of a kind for which no planning is in place at the moment. Can we be assured that the SMR side of the Government’s energy transition gets a push? Will the Minister talk to the energy people and tell them that, unless they bring forward the SMR revolution, which is going on in many other countries, and go slow on the white elephant technologies such as Sizewell C—