Baroness Noakes (Con)

My Lords, I tabled the Clause 2 stand part notice to probe the reasons why Clause 2 rules out Crown status for Great British Energy, but I also tabled it to explore further one of the topics we have already discussed: the relationship between Great British Energy and the National Wealth Fund. As we debated at Second Reading, the Bill is a partial cut-and-paste job on the UK Infrastructure Bank Act. The main difference is that some important chunks did not get all the way over to the paste bit of the instruction. One way in which this Bill and that Act differ is that Clause 2, which deals with Crown status, has no counterpart in the 2023 Act. I do not know why the 2023 Act was silent on this, and I do not think we debated it when we went through the UK Infrastructure Bank Bill, as it then was. But, since the National Wealth Fund is fairly closely controlled by the Treasury, it may well have Crown status. As we have discussed, the precise relationship between Great British Energy and the National Wealth Fund is something of a mystery, and I have to say that it remains so after the Minister’s letter to noble Lords after Second Reading. The Minister told us in that letter that the Government will set out the relationship in detail “as Great British Energy scales up”— I think that is code for saying, “We will make it up as we go along”. The Minister said, as has been referred to, that in the early days Great British Energy investments will be made by the National Wealth Fund. This is another plea for him to explain how the interaction between the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy will work in the context of one possibly having Crown status and the other very definitely not.