Lord Whitehead (Lab)

The Government are of course very well aware of the whole question of how energy prices should be kept within reasonable bounds. By the way, the noble Lord went on a bit about gas a moment ago. He should remember his own period in government, when the Government spent something like £70 billion trying to bring prices back down when they had got completely out of control with the spikes in the price of shipped gas coming into the UK, which rose to 600p per therm at one stage in the mid-2020s. You could say that, because the Government at that time did not control international gas prices in the way that the noble Lord seems to think can be done— I very much doubt that the various measures he is proposing to regulate international shipped gas prices would have the effect on volatility that he thinks they would have—we are still open to that enormous volatility in gas across the world. Indeed, just recently the price spiked quite substantially—probably not to the extent that happened in the early 2020s, but that is a spectre that continues to haunt us with reliance on international gas and not going to a low-carbon economy. I am on the side of insulating the UK economy from those enormous global changes in gas prices, particularly by moving, broadly speaking, not to a no-gas economy but to a low-gas economy as far as the future is concerned. That will be of tremendous benefit to UK industry and exports, and jobs and industry in general, because we will have a stable energy economy for the future, which will allow us to plan ahead properly without the spikes, volatility and panics that we have seen over the last few years. I think the noble Lord wants me to give way again.