Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, I support these amendments. I have certain reservations about my noble friend Lady Bloomfield’s Amendment 78, because it assumes these investments will make money. I have a bit of a problem with that. The real difficulty, as we have discussed, is that all the low-hanging fruit when it comes to investment in renewable energy has already been picked by the private sector. It does this quite simply by calculating a return on guaranteed income. Therefore, what worries me is that Great British Energy will be left picking up the bits that other people do not want to touch. The chances of it making money are probably quite small. Of course, it will have to count off the losses against the profits, so you need to have something at the end of the day. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has achieved something little short of miraculous by investing other people’s money and actually making money, but that is an exception rather than the rule. The chances of Great British Energy squandering billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are rather higher than it making any profits for anybody. Clearly, accountability is very important when it comes to these sorts of sums. We should do everything we can to ensure that taxpayers’ money is looked after in the best way possible. Everybody should have great reservations about believing—to come back to the point I made earlier—that politicians are able to pick winners. The record on this has been absolutely abysmal. The chances of more money being lost than made are, I am afraid, very great indeed.