Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Offord in his amendment but, funnily enough, not for the same reasons that he does. He says that Great British Energy should become a subsidiary of the National Wealth Fund. I am very worried—I do not know whether anybody else is—about the enormous powers that Great British Energy will give to the Secretary of State. It strikes me that we are right back to Ministers choosing winners, when on the whole the role of government in choosing winners has been pretty abysmal. I am old enough—I am reluctant to admit how old I am in case somebody suggests I should retire—to remember Ted Heath, who started out as being the “Selsdon Man”, supposed to believe in free trade and free enterprise, and then bailed out Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. I do not think he did that because he thought he was choosing a winner—I think he knew he was choosing a loser—but he was, of course, faced by critical political embarrassment at the fact that this shipbuilding company was going bust, and he had the thought that he would use taxpayers’ money to try to bail it out. I have been reading that the fund will be have £8.5 billion of taxpayers’ money put into it and it will be sitting there and there will be the temptation for Government Ministers to say, “Oh well, we’ll bail out this or that company, or we’ll take a punt on the fact that we do not have a battery maker” and perhaps the reason for that is that the market will not support that; or, with electric cars, for instance, we are having great difficulty making enough of them. So we will see taxpayers’ money being put into ventures which the private sector would never support. But it will be done for good political reasons. No doubt, rather like DeLorean, we will find that the enterprise will be pitched in some part of the country where there is high unemployment and not enough activity and the Government might think that they will be able to buy themselves a few votes in those areas or whatever. But, for all the wrong commercial reasons, we will end up using taxpayers’ money on ventures that will never succeed and would have been picked up by the private sector if they were profitable. This is what worries me about energy generally. We rather fancy that people who put up wind turbines are really concerned with renewable energy. I have to tell your Lordships that they are not; they are financiers. What they do, long before they put up any wind turbine, is put up an experimental one to find out how much wind is blowing over a long period, and then they work the feed-in tariffs and, by the time they have done all that, they then have a cash flow on which they can then borrow money and put up the wind turbines. So it is a financial venture which is basically controlled by government in terms of all the criteria that matter and I do not really see that venture capital using taxpayers’ money has any great role to play in this. So I support my noble friend’s amendment and hope that he puts it to a vote.