My noble friend has missed the point. The danger of targets such as the one proposed now is that they distort investment decisions. It is not that they prevent all kinds of investment but that they distort investment decisions through their urgency and through their aim at a particular target, in ways that lead to counterproductive results. The results now before us are a growing hostility among the public to the higher prices that they have to
pay, a feeling that there is redistribution from the poor to the rich, which is not at all welcome, and difficulties about deciding what strike price to give for our replacement fleet of nuclear power stations.
My experience in the 1970s and 1980s was that the investment decisions were all askew. They were not clear at all. The long-term determination, backed by the then Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, to support an entire nuclear replacement fleet was undermined by all kinds of alternative views and distortions. The same distortions will result from this target. That is all I am saying.