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Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind the right hon. Gentleman of the amendment on which he is winding up the debate. It is amendment No. 7.
Mr. Forth: Indeed, and I am eager to get on to the very important debates that are coming up. I just wanted to warm myself and the House up and get people's minds thinking along the right lines. I wanted also to see if I could persuade the Minister to clarify his position on the regional-national balance, but he does not look as though he wishes to try to do so. That matter will remain unresolved and their lordships may have to look at it again, along with other aspects of the Bill.
9.45 am
I am disappointed by the Minister's response. It is not always good enough for a Minister, even one as good and decent as this one, to say, "Trust me. I have said the words so that is what will happen." I hope that he will forgive me if I would prefer to see the words on the face
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of the Bill. I do not seem to have persuaded him on this occasion, and therefore we can move on. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendments made: No. 36, in page 3, line 7, leave out third 'the' and insert 'a'.
No. 37, in page 3, line 13, leave out 'the' and insert 'a'.
No. 38, in page 3, line 13, at end insert
'(in place of the target which has been revised)'.—[Malcolm Wicks.]
The Minister for Energy (Malcolm Wicks): I beg to move amendment No. 39, in page 5, line 14, leave out from ' "plant" ' to end of line 16 and insert
'includes any equipment, apparatus or appliance;'.
Madam Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following Government amendments: Nos. 40 and 41, No. 33, Nos. 42 to 44, No. 34, Nos. 45 and 46, No. 80 and Nos. 51 and 52.
Malcolm Wicks: Good morning, Madam Deputy Speaker. I suspect that this will be one of the shorter speeches of the day. Amendments Nos. 33 and 34 ensure that an order made under clauses 12 or 13 cannot cover matters that fall within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament. All the other amendments in this group are drafting amendments.
Gregory Barker (Bexhill and Battle) (Con): As the Minister said, these are drafting amendments. The Bill has our full support and we wish to make good progress this morning in getting it on to the statute book, so I do not intend to delay the House.
Chris Huhne (Eastleigh) (LD): The Liberal Democrats also regard the amendments as drafting measures. The Bill has our full support, and I shall leave it at that.
Mr. Forth: This is a very important group of amendments that deserves thorough scrutiny, although sadly there does not seem much stomach in the House for scrutiny so far. Someone has to do it, so it falls to me. The amendments will get some jolly thorough scrutiny, starting now.
Let us look first at the Government amendments. In passing, it is interesting to note that the Government now seek to amend the Bill substantially. If there is any lengthening of the process, it seems substantially to be due to the Government amendments. I have tabled some modest amendments, but this pretty substantial set of Government amendments deserves our attention. Those who have made some mild complaints about the fact that someone has dared to seek to amend such a
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wonderful Bill as this should concentrate on this group as much as on any other and perhaps take it up with the Minister.
Mr. Chope (Christchurch): Does my right hon. Friend realise that one of the amendments in this group— No. 80—has been produced by the Government since we adjourned last Friday?
Mr. Forth: I am glad my hon. Friend picked that point up, because I was going to mention it later on. It is significant that if we had rushed through the Bill last week, we would not have had the benefit of the Government amendment that has since been tabled. The Bill might therefore have been defective in some way. The world should be grateful for the fact that the House lingered over the Bill last week to enable the Government to come forward with their later thoughts in the form of amendment No. 80, to which I will come shortly.
The Minister seemed to want to nod through amendments Nos. 33 and 34 as though they were of little or no consequence, but I believe that we should ask at least some questions about them. I shall read out amendment No. 33 so that we know where we are:
"An order under this section shall not include provision made by virtue of subsection (2)(b) which would be within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament if it were contained in an Act of that Parliament".
Here we are touching, importantly and properly, on the relationship between what happens here at Westminster and the devolved powers of the Scottish Parliament. I always thought that environmental matters were without boundaries. I have been told over and again by Euro enthusiasts that one of the great strengths of the European Union is that it deals with cross-boundary—[Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) want to intervene?
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD): No.
Mr. Forth: I am glad the hon. Gentleman is enjoying the debate. I hope that he will stay for the whole five hours.
One of the alleged benefits of our membership of the European Union, or, indeed, of the Union itself is that it deals with cross-border environmental matters. Yet, here we are, as I read this amendment, seemingly acknowledging that the approaches taken to these important environmental matters could be different, even within this tiny country of the United Kingdom or within the British Isles, and that the Scottish Parliament might well take a different view. That surely cuts right across all the arguments that I have ever heard about how it is vital that environmental matters are dealt with at not just a national but a trans-national level.
It would appear that we might have a problem here. If we take the amendment literally—and we can do only that because the Minister did not bother to explain it—we envisage that the Scottish Parliament could digress from this Parliament in its approach to climate change and microgeneration. That is doubly unfortunate, since I would have thought that one of the environmental benefits of having Scotland as part of the United Kingdom is that it is almost certainly much richer in the
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renewable resources to which we all aspire. Therefore, the idea that the Scots might head off in a different direction, courtesy of devolution and the Scottish Parliament, seems unfortunate. For that reason alone, I would have thought that it might be better not to have this amendment in order that we could maintain integrity.
Mr. Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP): Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that the Scottish Parliament has already taken a different view? Its environmental targets are far superior to those set in this place.
Mr. Forth: That may well be the case; I do not dispute that. However, it illustrates the potential difficulty. What would happen if the Scottish Parliament set lower targets, for example, and we felt that that was a most unfortunate thing to do?
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh, North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op): I refer to the declaration of interest that I made last week.
I remind the right hon. Gentleman that the provision applies to a particular clause only. He can be reassured that where matters fall within the scope of a UK or GB-wide competence, they are not affected by the Bill, but where a matter is currently within the competence of the Scottish Parliament, it stays there. We are not changing the fundamental relationship in any way. I hope that he will be reassured by my understanding of the effect of the amendment.
Mr. Forth: I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I shall accept his explanation and move on as a small reward for his participating in the debate. I hope that we will hear a lot more from him as time goes on.
That brings us on to the string of amendments that the Minister sought to dismiss as somehow trivial or technical—Nos. 40, 42, 43, 44, 45 and 46—in which we are beginning to tackle, really for the first time, the definition of microgeneration and the relationship between the Energy Act 2004 and the Bill. This was touched on at col. 1088 of the Official Report for 10 March 2006, when there was an interesting exchange between my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) and the Minister. We—that is the House, because I do not think we were being properly guided on that occasion—got a little confused about whether we were talking about microgeneration being solely concerned with renewables or whether it went beyond that. That subject will come up in a moment when we look at the relationship between the Energy Act and the Bill, but at that stage we were talking about targets and the Minister was helping to clarify matters. He said:
"The target of 10 per cent. is for renewables . . . . It is not a target for microgeneration"—[Official Report, 10 March 2006; Vol. 443, c. 1088.]
That set the scene for what I want to explore in some of these amendments, which is how far microgeneration, as we now want to define it, is involved with renewables only or whether it can involve any other source of energy.
The Energy Act, to which the clause refers, comprehensively sets out an approach to microgeneration. That is one of the reasons why I have
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hesitated so far to give my wholehearted support to the Bill. Section 82 of the Act, to which the amendments refer, places a duty on the Secretary of State
We should have had sight of that strategy by now. Perhaps when the Minister responds on this group, which he airily dismissed as being merely technical, he will tell us where we stand on that.
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