Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)

My Lords, in moving Amendment 51, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, for their support on this. In many ways, this group addresses the key problem with this Bill: namely, that it includes no detail at all as to what GBE will do. There are no objectives of any sort in the Bill. We have discussed previously the difference between objectives, of which there are none, and the objects in Clause 3, which simply restrict the company’s activities. There is absolutely nothing in this Bill against which success can be measured or the use of public money measured and scrutinised. The last group was about what the statement of strategic priorities required under Clause 5 should include. That debate demonstrated clearly how much better it would be if we had the statement of strategic priorities before the Bill finishes its process through this House. The Minister said clearly on the last group that that is not going to happen, which makes this group much more important. This group is about the process by which the statement should be published and scrutinised. In response to some of the concerns that have been raised in this respect, the Minister said at Second Reading: “On the structure of the Bill, noble Lords will know that this was laid in the Commons very soon after the election as an early priority of the Government. Because of that, we have focused, inevitably, on the provisions that are fundamental to the establishment of Great British Energy. Clearly, we are still working through some of the policy issues on which we need to come to a view”.—[Official Report, 18/11/24; col. 98.] Others have described that as meaning, “We will make it up as we go along”. It is quite hard to disagree. The Minister referred earlier to having found the right balance. I find that a difficult concept, given that there is no balance. There is nothing at all about the strategic objectives of Great British Energy in this Bill—that is not a balance. However we look at it, we are being asked to scrutinise a Bill when we have no information as to what the Government are planning and no meaningful impact assessment on those plans. This Bill looks rather like a skeleton Bill: a Bill where most of the detail is added by the Government at a later date. This Government, when in opposition, were rightly critical of the use of skeleton Bills by the last Government. I agreed with them then and I agree with them now. However, there is an important distinction between this skeleton Bill and the more usual skeleton Bills that we have seen in the past. In a typical skeleton Bill, the Government give themselves the ability to add the missing detail by means of statutory instruments. We all recognise that the scrutiny of statutory instruments is not that strong, but parliamentary scrutiny does take place and there is at least the theoretical ability for Parliament to decline them. In this Bill, no such scrutiny of the strategic priorities is available. The Government will simply publish the statement of strategic priorities at some unknown future date, and there will be no opportunity at all for Parliament to debate it, and certainly no opportunity for Parliament to amend or decline it. That is clearly unsatisfactory, and your Lordships’ Constitution Committee said so in its report dated 28 November, in which it pointed out that, “in the light of the centrality of Great British Energy to the delivery of a significant policy initiative, we are concerned that clauses 5 and 6 amount to ‘disguised legislation’”. It went on to say: “We are concerned that clauses 5 and 6 do not offer an adequate degree of parliamentary oversight”. I cannot disagree with any of that.