Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response and to the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, although I am sorry to hear that she will not be able to support the amendment. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that I do not agree with her. While I agree with the noble Baroness’s assessment of the documents that were published by the Minister—it was helpful to see the memorandum of understanding, the draft framework and the business case—that is not really the point, because they do not go far enough. Those documents can be amended by this or any future Government. As the Minister referred to, and as I tried to explain in my opening remarks, this is the original business case, but there is no business case that currently sets out what the relationship with GB Energy looks like and what it will do to borrowing. GB Energy is going to invest billions of pounds. How much of that is going to come from GB Energy and how much from the Crown Estate? No one knows. It is important that we make sure that it is impossible for the Crown Estate to ramp up borrowing without at least some oversight from Parliament. The Minister said, “It’s okay—the maximum is 25%”, but of course this Government or any future Government can change that unilaterally. The Minister mentioned that competitors somehow do not have any caps on borrowing. Of course they do; they are commercial businesses, so the caps on their borrowing will be set by their banks. If the Minister looks at the original business case that he shared with us, he will see that all the competitors sit around the same sort of level of loan to value. To go back to the original point, this is a sensible, simple and reasonable amendment. It would put in place just two checks: first, whether the Crown Estate should be borrowing now, and up to 25%, with the assessment done on a new business case, including GB Energy; and, secondly, another check, at some point long in the future, if ever, should the Crown Estate ever want to go above 25%. I think our nation’s assets need that sort of protection, and I therefore wish to test the opinion of the House.