Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)

My Lords, I start by thanking everyone for their contributions, and for the fact that the report has had a generally very good reception. The debate has been quite wide-ranging, and we have gone into very granular detail on some occasions, but we have not lost sight of the big picture, which is extremely important. The electricity grid is of fundamental importance to so much of what the Government want to achieve in future, and to so much of what this country actually needs. As the Minister said, there have been decades of underinvestment, and we need to give urgent attention to this, partly for the resilience of what we have at the moment, because we know we could be vulnerable to outages. We need to meet our net-zero target, and we know that the growth agenda is very much dependent on getting this right, so far as the grid and energy supply is concerned. The grid, the connections and the investment that is needed really have to go right before we can meet all the objectives of resilience, net zero and growth. Part of that, as we have touched on today, is giving confidence to the industry and investors that they can have clarity and stability in the guidance that is coming out from government. That is one reason why we pressed for the Government to be clear about the guidance that they are giving to Ofgem. I think we are all agreed that the direction of travel is the correct one. I know that the Minister welcomed much that was in our report, apart from zonal pricing. I understand why the Government are reluctant to have change upon change, because there are many moving factors here, all at work at the same time. But we will have to look forward to what Ministers are going to say on pricing and reforming the system, because that is going to be quite important. Mention was made of the Statement yesterday, and I think it is important that we get a comprehensive approach, rather than one where the Government come along every so often and bail out industries that have particular problems with energy. I know that my noble friend Lady Anderson very much appreciates what was done for the Potteries, but I do not think we can go from one lurch of bailing people out to another: we need a comprehensive change. We have talked about big changes, but actually there have been some small changes that have been very significant, such as having deemed consent when a substation wants to increase capacity. There are many minor things like that, which could be done to help the situation. In fact, we are saying that all these things—connections, planning, skills—are important, but we have to maintain the pace of this change and we have to make sure that we keep industry consulted and on board to have everybody working in the same direction and at the necessary speed. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions and commend the report.