Lord Frost (Con)

My Lords, in moving Amendment 98 I will also speak to Amendment 99 in my name. As it is the first time I have spoken in Committee, I take this opportunity to declare an interest as the director of the company Net Zero Watch. I have a couple of preliminary remarks before turning to the text of the amendments. These two amendments very much echo themes that we have been debating at length over the last day or two. They are amendments to make up for the lack of detail in the Bill and to ensure, as my noble friend Lady Noakes pointed out the other day, that this company is subject to the same degree of scrutiny that large public companies would expect to face. With the Bill, we are creating a company with precious little oversight or scrutiny as normally understood in company law, and with an idiosyncratic version of the normal governance and accountability arrangements that go with a normal company. Of course, this fact is why nationalised public companies are typically so badly run. The only detail we have had on the ground covered by these two amendments is in the founding statement, which says: “Led by its own CEO, Great British Energy will be overseen by an independent fiduciary Board, rather than ministers, benefitting from industry-leading expertise and experience across its remit. Trade unions will also have a voice and representation within Great British Energy”. Although Ministers both here and in the Commons have commented on that, they have not gone beyond what that statement says, and we are still left rather unclear about how these arrangements are to work, other than to say that normal company law will apply. As I say, that is not quite enough, and these amendments are designed to fill the gap here. I turn to the text of the amendments. Amendment 98 is designed to set out a few minimum requirements for the themes that we have been talking about: transparency and accountability. Amendment 98 would make clear that there must be a chair and, more importantly, that the appointment of the chair would require a degree of parliamentary scrutiny, in this case by the Treasury Committee. As has been noted, we have already trespassed slightly on this ground, and the Minister noted that this degree of scrutiny would be going beyond precedent. He read out the Cabinet Office guidance on this subject, which is interesting but not decisive for this House and the legislators. Certainly, the degree of parliamentary scrutiny is dictated by the very political nature of this job, and quite a political figure has been appointed to it as the current chair. He has not been shy in giving us his ambitions for the company. He told the Guardian on 17 October that he thought it should become a “national champion” and “a longer-term operator in … areas, such as floating offshore wind”. I do not know whether that is the Government’s view of the development of GB Energy—it might or might not be—but they are statements by the chair and, by making them, he is coming into the arena of political debate about the company. Therefore, some sort of political process in his appointment seems logical. I cannot help noting that he has made broader reflections on politics, populism and progressivism, and he has been a quite a critic of Brexit in the past. Of course, he is entitled to have these opinions but, once you get into the political field, you must expect to face a degree of political scrutiny of your appointment. That is why this amendment would require such public scrutiny. Similar thoughts are behind the other part of this amendment: the requirement for a publicly available review of performance against the purposes of GBE, and that this should be done independently. Once again, we come back to the point that has been touched on at length: that this is an unusual company and that normal accountability mechanisms are not there. There is only one shareholder, the content of the board is uncertain and, as it stands, there is no requirement in the Bill for directors of any kind at all—although I will come on to Amendment 99. This is a public company, fulfilling absolutely classical public goals, so there must be accountability to the public in how it is run. Proposed new subsection (2) would require the chair to be based full time at the headquarters of the company, which has been said to be Aberdeen. The Government have made a virtue of that fact, at some length, when talking about GBE. They also confirmed, in October, that the new chair would be based in Manchester. It is not unusual for a non-executive chair to be based somewhere else, but the current chair role is not exactly a non-executive one; it is quite hands on. I struggle to see how one can run the company in quite that way. The Government say that he will “regularly spend time in Aberdeen”. That is good and important, obviously—but this is a new company. It needs leadership as it is built up. If the taxpayer is going to get value for money out of the chair, his salary and the process, he should be where the company is when he is working. I wish to record that Amendment 99 is a copy of an amendment tabled by Andrew Bowie MP and debated in the Commons—although perhaps it was not fully debated. Again, this comes back to the fact that we are dealing with an unusual company. What is being created is, in many ways, more like an executive arm of HMG than a genuinely independent company. The description that the Minister just gave about the role of the CEO rather confirmed that. It sounded much more like the role of the Permanent Secretary of a department, responsible to Parliament as accounting officer, than the role of a genuine CEO of a company. The Bill is literally silent on appointment processes, content of the board and so on. The amendment is designed to fill that gap, to give clarity on numbers, and to make it clear that there must be non-executives as well as executives, that there must be a CEO as well the chair, that there can be no repeated appointment beyond defined limits and so on. That is a bare minimum. There already are some provisions in the Bill connected with the articles of association, so the line of principle about what is right to include in the Bill and what is not has already been passed. I hope that, with that in mind, the Minister will consider that these are serious amendments designed to deal with potential weaknesses in the corporate governance and accountability of GB Energy. I look forward to hearing his response.