Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, I too support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Vaux. It strikes me that the real problem with the Bill is that if nothing happens with GB Energy, the Secretary of State intervenes. On the whole, politicians intervening in investment decisions does not have a very good history, and an awful lot of taxpayers’ money has been wasted. Therefore, it would be a very good idea if there was a system of reporting back to Parliament. The real problem with the whole energy scene in this country is that the private sector is well in there already. I am not sure how committed these people are to energy, but they are certainly very good at crunching the numbers. Of course, with any project, they establish that the supply of, say, wind, is reasonably constant in a certain area. Then, the key thing is the feed-in tariff that they negotiate. That gives them a guaranteed cashflow. Among other things, with wind turbines they even managed to negotiate that they get paid when the wind is blowing and nobody wants the energy. So, if you can do that, it seems to be relatively easy to make money on these things. If you want to put up wind turbines, there is no problem getting private finance. It is the more vexed areas of energy where you will find people with DeLoreans appearing, saying, “I’ve got a wonderful scheme all organised for carbon capture”, or something that is incredibly difficult in technological terms—or indeed nuclear fusion, come to that, which is another very hard nut to crack. It would be wonderful if we could have nuclear fusion power stations pumping out energy, but we are still a very long way from getting there. What guarantees do we have that taxpayers’ money will not be ploughed into these things and an awful lot of money completely wasted? I would like to pick up some remarks from my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering. She was concerned that GB Energy would have great problems raising finance. That is not quite the way it works. You actually get tiered finance when it comes to some of these projects, and I can tell noble Lords what the tiers will be: a whole lot of outside investors will get their money back almost whatever happens, and all the high-risk capital will be produced by GB Energy. GB Energy will be the one that will lose absolutely everything if it goes wrong and make a minimal amount of money if it goes right. We need to be very wary about all this, which is why I support these amendments. It is important that Parliament has some check on all this and is able to say whether it thinks it is a good idea or a bad one. That discipline on the Secretary of State will be very important. Otherwise, I see politicians wheeling off, backing all sorts of incredibly speculative ventures and losing taxpayers’ money as a result. I am not sure that anybody in this House wants to see that happen.