Contribution
My Lords, Amendment 86 in my name is, as noble Lords will realise, very similar to Amendment 56 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which was spoken to last month by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. The point is that we all have concerns about the overwhelming statutory powers of the Secretary of State to control, and give random formal directions to, GBE. As I said at Second Reading, we are worried that modern politicians are no longer likely to have had experience of running a business, particularly an investment business, which is what this is. On the whole, the same applies to civil servants who might be advising the Secretary of State. They also usually have little experience of the nitty-gritty of day-to-day private sector business and its associated hour-by-hour assessment of risk and, more to the point, when to take that risk. In other words, you cannot always be totally safety conscious.
Probably the key person with whom the Secretary of State should be consulting is a private sector investment analyst, or even a team of private sector investment analysts, as the noble Lord, Lord Petitgas, was saying early on in the previous discussions. That might be hard to spell out on the face of the Bill, so I will leave that one hanging. As noble Lords can sense, however, I am not at all happy that a politics-orientated—maybe even a party- politics-orientated—Secretary of State of either party should be able to give any direction at all on the issue of practical investment to a hopefully business-orientated board of GBE. I support Amendment 68 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Russell.
The next thing to say is that Clause 6(3)(b) is superfluous. It states that the Secretary of State should consult
“such other persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate”.
It is legally meaningless. The Secretary of State could take it or leave it. If he consults with no one, he can claim he did not consider anyone appropriate, so he is under no obligation to consult anyone, apart from Great British Energy, as it stands in Clause 6(3)(a). We therefore need some more specific recommendations.
It is of course right that the Secretary of State should have to consult GBE—after all, it will implement whatever direction he or she gives it—but the Secretary of State should also consult NESO. After all, it is responsible for driving the delivery of our power through the national grid and other transmission companies—we discussed this on another group—so, clearly, it needs to be consulted.
Then there is the Climate Change Committee, which is in very close touch with the state of play of the progress to net zero. It is also in touch with the latest science and knows the priorities of what is most needed to get us to net zero. It will have a view on what could or should be the essential focus of GBE, so it should also be consulted.
Then of course there is Ofgem, which represents the consumers and is their voice, so it seems only right that it should also be consulted on any formal direction from the Secretary of State to GBE. There may be others, and I take the point from the noble Earl, Lord Russell, about the fact that my list is of consultants, rather than Parliament, which might be able to influence the direction of the Secretary of State in a more formal way—although I hope that a consultation exercise would also influence his decision-making process.
In his response to Amendment 56 last month, the Minister seemed to say that the amendment was unnecessary because the Secretary of State would be in permanent consultation with all the organisations involved anyway, but he was at that time talking about the consultation on the strategic priorities in Clause 5 and here we are talking about later specific directions given by the Secretary of State to GBE. After all, the Government themselves put Clause 6(3) in the Bill, so they must have thought that highlighting the importance of consultation, and whom it is with, was important and necessary. In my view, they did not make it specific enough, or possibly wide enough, so I hope they can accept that they should enlarge their constituency of consultees.