Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their comments and questions. It has been useful to hear what they have to say, and I am pleased that all sides agree with what we intend to do with this SI. Two things come to mind: the first is that this is just an enabling power—it does not mean that it is going to happen—and the second is about value for money. If we do this, will it be value for money for the taxpayer and the consumer? These factors have to be considered. This enables us to look at this, if we intend to do it sometime in the future. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, asked whether this would take money away from renewables. Firm low-carbon power is vital as part of reaching our net-zero goals. Nuclear is therefore compatible with a system dominated by renewables and complements it—it is not either/or but both. Turning to consumers, this is obviously close to everybody’s heart, because we are all consumers. We have to pay credence to those people on lower incomes. I want to re-emphasise that, as I said my opening speech, if we had this in place and if, for example, Hinkley Point C had been online during the energy crisis in 2022-23, consumers would have saved around £5 billion. The reason why this is in an SI and not primary legislation is that it expands the existing powers that CfDs already have available for nuclear new builds, and the Secretary of State has statutory powers to make regulations about who is an eligible generator under the Energy Act 2013. Why are we not doing bespoke CfDs? I think it is fair to say that the Government have done bespoke CfDs for Hinkley Point C. This is an enabling power, and the revoiced value-for-money issues will be taken into consideration. They will be based on extensive due diligence of project costs—I emphasise the value-for-money part of this—including benchmarking against other comparable assets. The Government place large importance on bringing down costs for households—it is imperative. Lifetime extensions of existing nuclear power are more cost effective than alternative capacity—having to build a new station. If you can extend the life of one that is already there, then you will obviously bring down prices. This is an enabling SI. We will look very closely at value for money. We think that this is covering all bases for our energy supply going forward.