Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)

My Lords, as the Minister says, no one quite knows yet the impact, particularly on the oil and gas sector. I declare an interest as a co-author of the original 1979 plan for sharing oil reserves in the event of a crisis. The crisis then was, of course, far bigger—not smaller, as the IEA says—than anything we are facing now. Can I offer the Minister one piece of advice on the Government’s response? I know it is part of a much bigger jigsaw. The short-term impact of an oil shock, small or large, in any region, may be to push prices up, but they always come down very quickly, and the oil price is nearly always lower after these kinds of upsets than it was before. There is plenty of oil on the high seas, and plenty of oil can be added into the world’s supplies. And I gather that, if you have a big enough yacht and know the right people, you can get through the Strait of Hormuz without much difficulty. I suggest to the Minister that the greatest danger of using the oil price situation as an excuse for a lot more controls, caps on prices and so on, is that that will cause more danger and suffering than any possible shortage or temporary disruption in refined oil, imported or exported. Please could the Minister tell his colleagues to go very carefully in that area? There are all sorts of other, bigger issues, but the current oil crisis is small beer compared with what we have had in the past. The economy can handle it pretty well without too much direction and involvement of a complicated kind, which could make things much worse and increase suffering.