My Lords, my amendment uses nice, simple words. As I said earlier, I am not a lawyer and not very good at this. I discovered that in Schedule 14, page 200, line 43, there is a rather more flowery way of putting it:
“publishing the statement in such manner as the Authority considers appropriate for the purpose of bringing the statement to the attention of those consumers”.
I found that after I had made up my simple amendment, which, luckily, was accepted. It is quite interesting that my noble friend Lord Caithness made exactly this point in his intervention in the previous series of amendments.
Like my noble friend, I am interested here simply because of the bills that I, my friends and my 94 year-old mother have had. You look at them. We have sometimes changed our supplier, and when we got a condensing boiler for the first time—we are on to our second as the first one burnt out—I tried to work out how much gas we were saving. That was difficult. I am an A-level mathematician and I still could not work out with ease whether we had saved. I worked it out in the end but it was very complicated. Gas is the most complicated because they use therms and things that make it much more difficult.
It is from that standpoint that I am concerned. If we really want people to get the best tariff, to understand what they are doing and how much energy they are using and to use less energy, we need better bills and better formats. As the noble Earl said, bills can run to five pages. Sometimes I have had four pages. You also sometimes find that you have something on the first page and then on the third page it is something quite different.
The other thing that concerns me is something that I mentioned at Second Reading. As someone who has produced political leaflets for years, I was told by people who had carried out research what to do if you want to get your message across: where it is on the page, what sort of type you use and the colours that do not work. If there is yellow print on top of something, older people cannot read it at all. There are all sorts of things that surprise me about the way in which companies, the big six particularly, produce their bills. I remember British Gas coming to me and showing me a bill saying, “Isn’t this good?”. I said, “Well, actually, no. The thing you want is not in the place where people look first on a page”. This is quite important. It is difficult to prescribe—you cannot prescribe in that much detail to the energy companies—but it is important that we try to ensure that it is simple so that people can understand it and really compare. They, particularly elderly people, must be able to read it.
Quite a lot of us are older now. We cannot read tiny print in the wrong colour. That is why I put down the amendment. It may not be appropriate at this point in the Bill, I do not know, but it seemed to fit in with what was going on. These might not be the right words but I think that everyone will understand the sentiments. It is quite clear that other noble Lords share those sentiments. I hope that the Minister can give a reasonably positive reply to my amendment. I beg to move.