Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to the two amendments in this group regarding the appointments of the chairman and board of Great British Energy. These amendments, in the names of my noble friends Lord Frost, Lady Noakes and Lord Trenchard, attempt to fix a glaring omission from the Bill as it stands. As drafted, there is no mechanism to govern the appointments process of the chairman and the board, and this is a concern as we have heard on many occasions that GB Energy will be responsible for £8.3 billion of taxpayers’ money. Those at the top of the company will have enormous responsibility and therefore it is paramount that adequate scrutiny is given to these appointments. My noble friend Lord Frost has attempted to address these concerns with his amendments in this group. Amendment 98 requires the chairman of GBE to undergo pre-appointment scrutiny in front of the Treasury Committee. This amendment has not come out of the blue: it is exactly the same process as the appointment of the chairman of the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, otherwise known as Ofgem, which is the regulatory authority for the energy sector. Once the Secretary of State appoints the chair, they must appear before the House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee. This is also the case for the chairs of the Climate Change Committee and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The Commissioner for Public Appointments keeps a list of significant appointments, which details the public bodies of which the chairs must undergo pre-appointment scrutiny by Parliament. There are no fewer than 40 current chairmanships of public bodies for which this appointments procedure applies. There is clearly precedent for the chairmen of significant public bodies with responsibility for large sums of public money to be subject to pre-appointment parliamentary scrutiny. If this is the case for these three other public bodies with responsibilities in the energy sector, why should the chair of GBE not also be subject to the same pre-appointment parliamentary scrutiny process? The Bill also fails to detail the procedure for the appointments and tenure of the directors of Great British Energy. As drafted, there are no requirements for the composition of the board, no limits on the number of directors that may be appointed and for how long a director may serve on the board, and no statutory duties to be conveyed on the board. The amendment from my noble friend Lord Frost plugs this gap. Once again, there is precedent for having this level of detail regarding appointments to the board of a major public body. The Utilities Act 2000, which created Ofgem and which—we must not forget—was passed by the last Labour Government, did exactly that. Schedule 1 to that Act lays out, for example, that: “An appointment of a person to hold office as chairman or other member must be for a term of not less than 5 years and not more than 7 years”. So that Act includes details of the tenure and the appointments of the chairman and the board, yet the Bill does not. I ask the Minister why Labour thought it pertinent to specify the executive composition of Ofgem but does not believe it necessary to do the same for Great British Energy.