Energy Bill

My right hon. Friend brings me to the point that I wanted to make about the new clause. By introducing it, the Minister has tried to provide the industry with complete clarity about what it will have to pay in order to contribute a fair share of the cost of decommissioning, cleaning up and storing the new capacity that is generated. He has even made it clear that a risk premium will be imposed on the industry, so it will be clear about that. My concern, which I have expressed in a couple of interventions, is that to ensure that he is 100 per cent. confident that the public sector will not face a new liability in the future, he will have to be cautious in estimating the future costs. He will probably also have to be cautious in estimating the number of nuclear power stations that will be built. As the need to build more nuclear power stations to provide us with energy security and to attack our carbon emissions in the decades to come becomes clearer and clearer, I suspect we will end up building more nuclear power stations than we initially estimated and the Minister's initial estimates of the costs involved will turn out to have been far too high. I am concerned that we should be able to reassure potential investors that, if it becomes clear in five, 10 or 20 years that they have been charged too much, there will be some process for reducing their costs. If we can provide such reassurance, it will encourage people to come forward early, even though they are bound to be cautious about potential investments, especially if they hear irresponsible comments such as those made by the Liberal Democrats today threatening to overturn a policy that will have been instituted. Investors are bound to be cautious, but we could tell them that we will do the best we can to estimate the costs and, if it turns out that we have completely overestimated them—although there will be a risk premium—we would consider reducing the cost to the investors of storage and decommissioning in the future.