I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. He has merely convinced me more that this will be a hot topic of debate. However, I can confirm to him and the House that one of the purposes of the Bill is to decarbonise our electricity supply. That is a critical purpose. We need to move from coal to gas, from fossil fuels to low carbon. We need a more diversified energy mix, with renewables, carbon capture and storage, and new nuclear all playing their part in enhancing the security of our electricity supplies. Low-carbon energy security will help to insulate consumers from fossil-fuel price spikes and will help us to meet our climate obligations, including our emissions and renewables target.
The key challenge that prompted the Bill was the need to attract tens of billions of pounds of investment, including investment in low carbon, while keeping energy bills affordable. Given that global gas prices had almost doubled since 2007, which was already putting huge upward pressure on bills, the need to stimulate that essential energy investment as cheaply as possible became a central consideration. Whatever the many debates in which we will rightly engage today and during the Bill’s passage, let no one lose sight of the three core challenges that it was designed to meet: attracting more than £100 billion of investment, creating the world’s first ever market in low-carbon energy, and helping people and businesses around our country who were struggling in the face of rising world energy prices. I think that those aims are widely shared across the House.