Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 19 and the other amendments in my name in this group. These amendments cover two topics, and I will try to deal with them fairly briefly, but they are very important. Even if the speech is short, the resonance and consequence of the amendments is long. There will be a cost to the revenue certainty mechanism that will be distributed to airline passengers through their air fares. How much is it going to be? We are not in the dark on that subject, because the cost-benefit analysis produced by the department makes a stab at this. Paragraph 4.23 says: “Overall, the Revenue Certainty Mechanism, when covering a limited but reasonable amount of non-HEFA SAF volumes, is likely to result in a small impact on ticket prices. Depending on non-HEFA SAF prices and whether the levy costs are offset by fuel cost savings, the likely impact on ticket prices is between -£1.5 and £1.5, on average, per year”. The only things of absolute fixity in that sentence are the numbers and the phrase “per year”. Almost everything else consists of a caveat, although I accept that a forecast of this type will have to be caveated to some extent. I want to explore some of the caveats in the next group as well, not merely here. What are we talking about when we refer to non-HEFA SAF? I have an amendment in the last group to explore that. However, at this stage, I want to know how far the Government are willing to go to commit themselves on the £1.50 cost—let us take the upside—per ticket. Bear in mind that this £1.50 per ticket is the cost not of SAF but of non-HEFA SAF produced using the revenue certainty mechanism in this Bill. SAF is already in use. It is being paid for by airlines and it is painfully expensive —much more than it was expected to be. It is already having a significant impact on airlines’ fuel bills. That is not included in the £1.50, which is purely for the mechanism that sits in the Bill. How firm are the Government willing to be on this? This is of crucial significance to the public at large, who would like to see more sustainable aviation fuel. I accept that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who is no longer in her place, regards that as a chimera. The public are happy to see it, but they want to know what it will cost them. If we are going to hold out a prospect, as the Government are, of a maximum cost of £1.50 per ticket for this—that is a significant sum for a family of four going on holiday—they would like to know that the Government stand behind it. Airlines that I have spoken to suggest that the cost will be much closer to £10 a ticket, so the Government need to give some justification for the £1.50. That is one of the two topics these amendments cover. Moving on to the second, I have to apologise in a sense to noble Lords because it is of a more general character. In some ways, it would have been nice if it could have been contrived to come at the beginning of our debate this evening, but the rigidities of our system of numbering and marshalling amendments means that it appears at this late stage. I appreciate that not everybody is interested in it, but I assure noble Lords that, outside this Committee, there is a large audience that is very interested in this question—an audience of people who still believe, to some extent, in capitalism, the principles of Adam Smith and the notion of comparative advantage. This is asking that the Government make some stab at assessing our comparative advantage in wishing to be a leader in this field. This is, after all, a measure designed to make us a domestic producer, rather than an importer, and a globally leading producer of non-HEFA SAF, compared to the rest of the world. It is, as I said at Second Reading, an industrial policy Bill rather than a net-zero Bill. The SAF mandate was a net-zero measure; this is an industrial policy measure. It is a decision by government that this stuff has to be produced here and not imported—a decision by government that we should be a leader in this field. The question is: what on earth do we have by way of comparative advantage that means the Government should have alighted upon this particular economic activity as one in which we are to be—or in which we can be, or it is suitable that we should be—a leader in the field? Do we have access to particularly rich streams of feedstock, for example? If non-HEFA SAF—some of it at least—is to be produced from old cabbages collected from people’s kitchens, are our cabbages better than somebody else’s cabbages? Do our wood cuttings and so forth have a particular advantage or a greater richness of oil-bearing quality that puts us ahead of the field? I suspect that the answer to that is no. Is our refining capacity cutting edge and world leading for turning these things into a usable fuel? I do not know a great deal about that—I see that there are noble Lords in the Committee who, I suspect, know a great deal more about it—but what I do see, as an ordinary reader of the newspapers, is that we are closing down our refining capacity as fast as we can. Far from being a leader, we are falling behind. Of course, this process will be very heavy on electricity usage; I think nobody denies that. Yet we have contrived, no doubt in the interest of saving the planet—I will not go into that further at the moment—to have the most expensive electricity in the civilised world. Do we have skills particularly, or an existing workforce? None of these things are apparent. So what I am asking—I do not think it an unreasonable request—is that, before the Government launch us, and taxpayers’ and airline passengers’ money, into this reckless scheme of being a world leader in something in which we have no apparent comparative advantage, they set out the economic case for doing so. The contrivance here is that the amendment would be inserted as a commencement blocker, so that the Bill could not commence until this has been done, but I am not wedded to that; it is merely a way of inserting it into the debate. But the Government owe it to the public to have a better case and a better argument for why they should do this. After all, this is not our first attempt to produce SAF. In the last few years, we have had schemes such as the advanced fuel funds, the Green Fuels, Green Skies fund, the Future Fuels for Flight and Freight competition, and others. But despite those, around 90% of the SAF used in this country is still imported. Why has this not taken off domestically already, with that level of support, if we have the sort of advantage that we should be able to bring to bear, and that will make a success of it this time? I, at least, would like to know. I beg to move.