Energy Bill

My Lords, I find the explanation on the five-year period extraordinary. I think it was my noble friend Lady Liddell who mentioned that the notorious recent Scottish and Southern case had gone on for four years. It would not have needed to go on for more than another six months for it to fall foul of this restriction. There may be something in the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, that you need some restriction. Indeed, that is why I proposed a 15-year period rather than delete the provision entirely. I do not accept that there should be a shorter jurisdiction for energy than there is for financial services, nor do I accept the argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, that it is a bad thing for people to be entitled to redress for the mis-selling of, for example, PPI and pensions in the financial services sector which happened a long time ago, albeit that continued until relatively recently. As for confidence, there is no consumer confidence in the energy sector. It is all very well saying there will be no business confidence if companies think they are going to be fined for something which happened 15 years ago, but at the moment there is almost nil consumer confidence. The energy sector has the worst record among the allegedly competitive markets in terms of consumer confidence. That is partly because over time consumers have had difficulty understanding whether or not they have been misled or mis-sold products and have faced grave hurdles in trying to remedy that. Sometimes they have—